Looking back at Stanley Kubrick’s filmography, his 1955 noir Killer’s Kiss is often regarded as a lesser effort, a warm-up for his first highly acclaimed film, the heist thriller The Killing, the following year. But Killer’s Kiss, which was released 70 years ago this week, captures Kubrick’s artistic vision already in full bloom, even in the context of a 67-minute low-budget crime movie with a studio-mandated happy ending. It’s a moody cry of existential despair amid the grimy streets of New York City.
In typical noir fashion, Killer’s Kiss opens with hard-boiled narration from protagonist Davey Gordon (Jamie Smith), a once-promising boxer whose latest in-ring loss has effectively ended his career. Davey is standing in Penn Station, reflecting back on where everything went wrong for him. As usual, there’s a dame involved, but Davey’s neighbor Gloria Price (Irene Kane) isn’t a manipulative seductress — she’s a scared young woman who’s just as emotionally vulnerable as Davey.
Just three days earlier, Davey and Gloria are simply solitary figures passing each other by. Kubrick cross-cuts between them as they descend the stairs on opposite sides of their apartment building, Davey headed to his doomed fight, Gloria headed to the taxi-dance hall where she works. It seems like they’re building inexorably to a momentous meeting, but they merely nod at each other in the courtyard before going their separate ways.
Still, Gloria is always lurking in the background of Davey’s life, often literally. Her window faces his, and the movie’s first glimpse of her is almost subliminal, as she goes about her business while the camera focuses on Davey in the foreground. Later, after Davey has lost his fight, he sits alone in the dark brooding over his failure, then receives a call from his uncle, inviting him to return home to the family farm outside Seattle. As Davey demurs on the request, the only source of light comes from Gloria’s apartment across the way, reflected in the mirror behind Davey’s head. He watches her undress, seeing a beacon of hope in his bleak world.
That multilayered shot composition is a hallmark of later Kubrick films, and he uses it elegantly in Killer’s Kiss, on which he also serves as cinematographer and editor. As the angst-ridden Davey walks the streets of New York City, past the lights of Times Square into rundown warehouse districts, he resembles another Kubrick protagonist, decades later, wandering through a meticulously reconstructed version of New York City rather than the real thing. Davey never encounters the kind of all-powerful secret society that Tom Cruise’s Dr. William Harford infiltrates in Eyes Wide Shut, but he’s also an insecure man whose masculinity has been threatened, grabbing onto anything that can affirm his fragile sense of self. Call it Eyes Wide Punched.
That desperation means that Davey tells Gloria “I love you” the day after their first direct interaction, and it means that he takes on the man who’s destroying her life, dance-hall owner Vinnie Rapallo (Frank Silvera). Vinnie wants Gloria all to himself, and when she refuses, letting out a piercing scream as he tightens his grip on her arm, Davey comes rushing over from the other side of the building. He’s woken from a nightmare not by his own screams, but by Gloria’s, marking her as the key to his salvation. He’s her salvation, too, offering her a lifeline away from the abusive gangster who took advantage of her at her lowest point.
Kubrick turns Gloria’s story of that low point into an impressionistic dance piece starring his then-wife, Ruth Sobotka, as Gloria’s ballet-dancer sister Iris. A traditional noir might present some heightened dramatization of Gloria’s tragic home life, but Kubrick instead sticks with Iris, dancing solo on a darkened stage in an empty auditorium, as Gloria talks about the hardships she and her family endured. It’s the movie’s most notable departure from the noir formula, as Kubrick deliberately denies his audience the expected melodrama, giving them the haunted beauty of Gloria’s late, troubled sister instead.
There’s nothing else quite that experimental in Killer’s Kiss, which mostly returns to the business of Davey and Gloria trying to escape Vinnie and his goons. The final confrontation between Davey and Vinnie takes place in a warehouse full of female mannequins, like abstracted versions of Gloria surrounding the men who are fighting over her. The action goes on a little too long, as both Davey and Vinnie revert to primal versions of themselves, Davey drawing on that visceral masculine energy that was always out of reach for William Harford.
“I guess the whole thing was pretty silly,” Davey says in his closing narration, as the story circles back to where it started. Kubrick’s foray into stock noir could have been silly, especially given the rushed resolution that follows Davey’s final words. Before that moment, though, Kubrick makes Killer’s Kiss a striking, ambitious harbinger of even greater things to come.
“Killer’s Kiss” is streaming on Kanopy and Hoopla.
