Killer's Kiss (Minotaur Productions, United Artists, 1955)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Saturday, December 13) I watched four films in a row – three features and a short – on Turner Classic Movies. The first two, Stanley Kubrick’s Killer’s Kiss (1955) and Mark Robson’s The Harder They Fall (1956), were presented as one of the channel’s double bills co-introduced by regular host Ben Mankiewicz and Rosie Perez, actress and dancer who was invited because she frequents boxing matches so often she’s been referred to as the “Queen of Boxing” and both movies were about boxers. Killer’s Kiss was Kubrick’s second film, and like his first, Fear and Desire (1952), was produced on the proverbial shoestring. Most of the money came from Bronx pharmacist Morris Bousel, who gets co-producer credit with Kubrick, and it was largely shot on location in New York City. It’s definitely a film noir and its romantic leads are Davey Gordon (Jamie Smith), a burned-out boxer whose best days in the ring are behind him even though he’s just 29 years old, and dance-hall hostess Gloria Price (Irene Kane). Ironically, the actor who receives top billing is Frank Silvera, playing gangster Vince Rapallo, who owns the dance hall where Gloria works and is infatuated with her. The story is a simple one: Davey has just lost his latest bout with a fighter named Kid Rodriguez when he returns to his ratty Manhattan apartment and sees Gloria from her window in the building next door. (One wonders if Kubrick and his co-writer, Howard Sackler, were influenced by Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window, released just one year before Killer’s Kiss was shot.) Davey has already accepted his fate and plans to move back to Seattle, where his aunt and uncle raised him, and work on their horse ranch. (This evokes John Huston’s The Asphalt Jungle, in which the character played by Sterling Hayden desperately wants to return home to the horse ranch where he grew up, and just barely makes it before he dies of the wounds he got in a shoot-out. Later Hayden would work for Kubrick in The Killing, in a role strongly similar to the one he played in The Asphalt Jungle, and in Dr. Strangelove.)

Alas, when he hears Gloria scream from her window, he spies Rapallo attempting to rape her, and Rapallo is angry and vows revenge. Rapallo has two of his henchmen kill Davey’s manager and frame him for the crime, distracting Davey with two other men, disguised as Shriners, who steal Davey’s scarf and force him to chase after them to retrieve it. There’s a chase scene across New York rooftops during which both Rapallo and Davey injure themselves (apparently Frank Silvera and Jamie Smith both hurt themselves for real) before the two men finally confront each other in a mannequin factory, where they attempt to beat each other to death with the mannequins. Ultimately the police arrive and decide that Davey killed Rapallo in self-defense, exonerate him for the murder of his manager, and send him on his way to Seattle. In a happy ending the distributors, United Artists (who gave Kubrick $10,000 in completion money), insisted on, Gloria meets him at the Pennsylvania Station (the fabled locale mentioned in the song “Chattanooga Choo Choo” which was demolished in 1963) and goes to Seattle with him just after Davey, in a typical voice-over film noir narration, laments over what a fool he was to let a woman he’d known for only two days so totally upend his life. There’s also an odd scene in which ballerina Ruth Sobotka, then Mrs. Stanley Kubrick, dances a quite elaborate scene while Gloria narrates a dialogue flashback. Sobotka is playing Iris, Gloria’s late older sister, who turned her back on a promising ballet career to marry a rich man who demanded she retire. She did so because their father had become catastrophically ill and needed expensive medical care, and when dad finally died two years later, Iris, lamenting the loss of her career, committed suicide. What’s most interesting about Killer’s Kiss is the intimations of later Kubrick films: there’s a long dream sequence of Davey careening through the streets of New York, shot in negative film, that evokes the long traveling shot of Jack Nicholson on his way to the New England hotel that opens The Shining, while the final scene in the mannequin factory couldn’t help but remind me of the scene in A Clockwork Orange in which Alex (Malcolm McDowell) kills the woman he’s just raped by beating her with a phallic statue in her home.

The film was well received enough that United Artists continued working with Kubrick on his next film, The Killing, also a film noir but with, if not A-list, at least A-minus-list actors (Sterling Hayden, Marie Windsor, Elisha Cook, Jr.). Variety gave it a mixed but generally positive review at or around the time of the original release (there’s an intimation that the anonymous reviewer had seen at least The Killing by this time, for s/he refers to Killer’s Kiss as “a warmup for Kubrick’s talents”): “Ex-Look photographer Stanley Kubrick turned out Killer's Kiss on the proverbial shoestring. Kiss was more than a warm-up for Kubrick's talents, for not only did he co-produce but he directed, photographed and edited the venture from his own screenplay and original story [originally written by Howard Sackler]. … Kubrick's low-key lensing occasionally catches the flavor of the seamy side of Gotham life. His scenes of tawdry Broadway, gloomy tenements and grotesque brick-and-stone structures that make up Manhattan's downtown eastside loft district help offset the script's deficiencies.” Kubrick was his own cinematographer, and some of the striking noir images he got have become familiar through TCM’s recycling of them on their introductions. Alas, Killer’s Kiss is not terribly well acted; Frank Silvera is convincing in his villain’s role but both Jamie Smith and Irene Kane (who later reverted to her original name, Chris Chase, and became a writer) deliver their lines in monotones that suggest they’ve just started acting classes. Part of the nervous delivery may be due to Kubrick’s decision to have all the dialogue post-recorded, as he had on Fear and Desire, Originally he was going to do conventional live on-the-set recording, but he decided the mikes were getting in the way of his visuals, so he banished them and shot the whole thing silent with sound added later. (Kubrick was never a big one for extended dialogue scenes. On his greatest film, 2001: A Space Odyssey, he used dialogue for only 42 minutes of the 127-minute running time.)