Killer’s Kiss
Stanley Kubrick (1955)
Past-his-best prizefighter rescues New York dance hall hostess from lubricious boss with underworld connections. The scenario and running time (67 minutes) suggest a B-movie but the result is something else – and not just because distinctions in quality between main versus supporting pictures were getting blurred by the mid-1950s, when Killer’s Kiss arrived. In his second feature – two years after Fear and Desire and a year before The Killing – Stanley Kubrick gives the pulp material remarkable atmosphere. Perhaps more surprising in view of his later style, he also gives it emotive force – thanks in no small part to the insistent, yearning melody of Gerald Fried’s score[1].
The chugging noise on the soundtrack that opens the film is disturbing, not least because it’s hard to identify. Then the screen shows a man standing on the concourse at Grand Central Station; we assume the noise was trains and think no more of it, for a good while anyway. The man is welterweight boxer Davey Gordon (Jamie Smith), who looks both edgy and depressed. He starts to tell his story in voiceover. The tone is one of noir-ish regret with hardboiled, laconic locutions to match. So far, so familiar but the filmmaking, much of it on location, soon elevates the story. Kubrick, who has sole cinematography and editing credits, may be demonstrating either precocious technique or a special feel for his home city – probably a bit of both. He makes the New York locale consistently exciting, whether crosscutting between the boxing venue and the dance hall, shooting noisy streets at night or exploring nearly deserted warehouses, alleys and rooftops in the cold light of day.
The screenplay, from a story devised by Kubrick, was the work of Howard Sackler, who would become much better known in years to come as the author of a very different piece about a professional fighter – the stage play (and subsequent film) The Great White Hope. Kubrick gives such scrupulous attention to the boxing part of the story that Killer’s Kiss seems for a while to be turning into a fight movie. The description of Davey’s preparations and of the action in the ring is detailed and convincing – so too are the comments of the television boxing pundits (the fight, against a promising youngster, is screened on national TV). For such a short, essentially formulaic and plot-driven piece, it’s striking that Kubrick devotes as much time as he does to what amount to digressions concentrating on a single principal character. This works well in the case of Davey’s fight and his reaction to losing it. An overlong sequence in which the taxi-dancer heroine Gloria (Irene Kane) tells him about her unhappy family background is another matter. Her ill-fated ballerina sister Iris whirls about the screen throughout Gloria’s voiceover account. The dancer is actually Ruth Sobotka, who was Kubrick’s girlfriend at the time. That could explain Iris’s undue prominence but the sequence is incongruously and rather crassly precious.
The actors, including several non-professionals, are limited but effective. Jamie Smith is very right as the boxer in competitive decline but still good physical shape. He’s plausible too as a cultural outsider in New York: Davey is at the station to catch a train back to Seattle, close to the ranch where he was raised by the kindly uncle and aunt he’s returning to. As Gloria, Irene Kane (better known as a model and journalist and under the name Chris Chase) has a lovely fragility. Her movement is particularly expressive when she moves up or down stairs, repeatedly at the dance hall entrance and, in the final scene, on arrival at Grand Central. The best-known name in the cast is Frank Silvera (who also appeared in Fear and Desire). He does well to make the clammy dance-hall owner Vincent Rapallo (good name) needy as well as nasty.
The film includes a series of images of dolls and mannequins, culminating in an almost surreal showdown between Davey and Rapallo in a storeroom full of tailor’s dummies. On the subject of dreams, Davey has a couple and they’re unusually credible as screen dreams go: Kubrick shows the dreamer’s point of view rather than the dreamer in the frame. Budget and time pressures necessitated post-syncing of the dialogue and the sound of voices sometimes stands out as a technical weakness. But not that chugging sound, which eventually returns. It turns out to be the noise made by a lift on its journey up to a warehouse loft, where Rapallo and his hood sidekicks (Mike Dana, Felice Orlandi) are holding Gloria prisoner.
Killer’s Kiss was screened at BFI, as part of their Stanley Kubrick retrospective, with The Seafarers (1953), a half-hour promotional documentary directed by Kubrick for the Seafarers International Union. Introduced and narrated by the journalist Don Hollenbeck[2], the film includes reportage that’s particularly satisfying because the people on screen – union members eating in a canteen, playing pool, and so on – rarely seem aware of the camera recording their lives.
2 April 2019
[1] An instrumental arrangement of ‘Once’, a song by Norman Gimbel and Arden Clar.
[2] Hollenbeck died the following year and the death was ruled a suicide. As well as experiencing marital and health problems, he’d been accused by parts of the press of Communist leanings. Played by Ray Wise, he features as a character in George Clooney’s Good Night, and Good Luck (2005).