Review: Killer’s Kiss (1955)

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09, February 2012Approved By NP, Kubrick, Spotlight

Cast: Frank Silvera, Jamie Smith
Director: Stanley Kubrick
Country: USA
Genre: Crime | Drama | Film-Noir | Thriller
Official Trailer: Here

Part of Matthew’s ongoing Kubrick retrospective. See the rest of the entries Here.

When the budding auteur does a genre film, it is not done with the same earnestness it would be had it been directed by a B-movie director. The auteur filters the most important elements of the genre film to condense it in to a self-aware entity that is quite different than a typical B-movie. When art meets pulp, that’s when the magic happens. It becomes self-referential and post-modern, becoming more of an artfully crafted homage piece than an earnest genre thriller. Such is the case with Stanley Kubrick’s Killer’s Kiss. Kubrick had already established himself as a master of the lens through his career as a photographer before moving on to film, and this mastery is evident in Killer’s Kiss as it transcends its genre roots to create something vibrant, original, fluid, and masterfully shot.

Kubrick also shows us his sense of humor as he secretly warns the participants in this dark tale with a sign that says “Watch Your Step” that looms over the characters’ heads. Such warnings are useless in a film-noir, as if they were to watch their step we wouldn’t have anything to watch.

A genre film in the hands of an auteur becomes a carefully considered and masterfully crafted exercise in form and style. Narrative is secondary to the real power that lies in the imagery of the film. The “style versus substance” debate when it comes to film is a curious one. As film is a visual art, it is allowed to be an exercise in aesthetics and tone. It need not follow strict rules of conventional storytelling, nor need it bring something original to the table in terms of narrative content. Killer’s Kiss is not original or groundbreaking in its standard noir pulp story. We’ve seen the down and out boxer, femme fatale, bad guys and their secret plans stories before, but this time it is given new vibrancy through Kubrick’s mastery of style and form. Kubrick employs full frame compositions that breathe with life, and are rich with the artifacts of a bygone era of bad coffee and lousy diner food. Words are secondary to creating a living and breathing world and some of the most important parts of the film are merely background elements that assist in the creation of tone. In its short 67 minute runtime, Kubrick manages to deliver what needs to be delivered while stopping to consider the reflections on metallic surfaces or the way a fish bowl can distort our protagonist’s face and show the innocent nature that lay beneath the hardened punch-drunk surface.

Kubrick employs a rich myriad of cinematic techniques to fill out the edges of this dark world. Slow and meticulous tracking shots and dense framing pay homage to Max Opuls one minute, only to give way to handheld cinema verite shots that concentrate on the emotional weight of the characters in the very next scene. Locker room shots before a fight get in close with our protagonist, simultaneously showing his pre-fight anxiety and granting us a behind the scenes view of places we would otherwise not be able to see. That is the power of cinema, it preserves time and space to allow us to see realities that are long dead so that we may satisfy our boundless curiosity and voyeuristic tendencies while documenting environments that will one day vanish.

Our boxer protagonist watches his neighbor undressing, but we are allowed to see what he sees from the mirror over his shoulder. We see what he sees through multiple layers of perverse joy and Kubrick’s self-reflexive commentary. We are coconspirators in his voyeurism as he cannot help but stare at what knows he shouldn’t be watching, but we join him in his transgressions through reflections as we steal visages from his environment.

Kubrick is playful with his use of shadows, framing, and environmental objects to create visual humor and to add layers to the sparse and trope-filled narrative. Our boxer protagonist watches his neighbor undressing, but we are allowed to see what he sees from the mirror over his shoulder. We see what he sees through multiple layers of perverse joy and Kubrick’s self-reflexive commentary. We are coconspirators in his voyeurism as he cannot help but stare at what knows he shouldn’t be watching, but we join him in his transgressions through reflections as we steal visages from his environment. It is a succinct exercise in cinematic language that illustrates our true nature and makes us complacent in the questionable morality of someone who watches his neighbor as she gets undressed. We later find out that she is also in on this charade and she, like all of us, is complacent in a world of broken morality. Kubrick also shows us his sense of humor as he secretly warns the participants in this dark tale with a sign that says “Watch Your Step” that looms over the characters’ heads. Such warnings are useless in a film-noir, as if they were to watch their step we wouldn’t have anything to watch. These clever insertions aren’t extraneous to the plot; they are essentially the stuff that make up the most important parts of the film. They are not essential components to the unfolding of the narrative, but they sit at the center of the frame as rewards for those attentive enough to notice their presence.

Kubrick financed this film with the money of his friends and family, and shot and edited it himself with little in the way of financial or technical resources. It shows what a budding master can do with little more than the world that surrounds him, a camera to point at it, and a few characters to fill in the rest and tell the seedy tale. He shows the cracks on the streets, the shadows as they cast bars across the walls warning our prisoners of the dangers of their reckless nighttime lifestyles, neon lights as they show us the advertisements and preoccupations of citizens in a bygone era, and the grandiosity of lonely urban nights as beastly metallic automobiles bounce the neon of the streets to create a sense of the untouchable and pristine in the wild and untamed darkness of city nights. Killer’s Kiss is a labor of love that pays homage to B cinema and serves as an example of how an artist creates because he must, and not because he can afford to.

86/100 ~ GREAT. Killer’s Kiss is a labor of love that pays homage to B cinema and serves as an example of how an artist creates because he must, and not because he can afford to.

Matthew Blevins
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Senior Editor & Film Critic. Behind me you see the empty bookshelves that my obsession with film has caused. Film teaches me most of the important concepts of life, such as cynicism, beauty, ugliness, subversion of societal norms, and what it is to be a tortured member of humanity. My passion for the medium is an important part of who I am as I stumble through existence in a desperate and frantic search for objective truths.
  • http://madman731.blogspot.com/ Andrew Madsen

    83/100. My short thoughts were:

    “This movie suffers a bit from its low budget style and trappings, but at
    the same time it also offers up a rather glorious black and white
    framing of New York City at night. The plot is fairly standard, but here
    Stanley Kubrick showed his ability to film suspense and create a rather
    engaging movie.”

    Great review, btw. I liked the comments on the “Watch Your Step” sign moment in the film.

  • http://www.facebook.com/blevo Matthew Blevins

    Thanks for the feedback, I really appreciate it.  I generally approach these types of films with little regard for plot and a great appreciation for the artistry and craftsmanship that go in to the complete audiovisual experience.  It has given me great freedom, and I usually occupy the subtext for the entire runtime of the film.