(1955)
3
Bruce Eder
Stanley Kubrick revealed himself a master of visual storytelling in Killer's Kiss, his second film (and his first to get a fairly wide release, through United Artists). The pictorial aspect of the movie is beyond reproach, whether he is shooting in a squalid rooming house in Times Square or the old Penn Station, or in some of the darkest, most forbidding alleyways and rooftops that he seemingly could find. And he is also very good at moving his actors around in front of the camera. What he had a lot to learn about -- as is evident throughout Killer's Kiss -- was working with dialogue; the two leads are very stiff and unconvincing whenever they open their mouths; to be fair, their inadequacies as actors here, and Kubrick's difficulty in dealing with dialogue convincingly (which he would overcome in his next movie, The Killing), may be accentuated as a result of how brilliantly he handles the visuals; if he weren't so good at the latter, the dialogue might not seem so awkward at times. Had this movie been shot as a silent (or without dialogue, in the manner of Russell Rouse's The Thief), it might have fared far better critically. As it is, the photography by Kubrick (who handled his own camera here) is so striking that the movie holds up on that basis alone, even 50 years later, and demands to be seen. Further, the movie's most famous scene, in which hero Davey Gordon (Jamie Smith) and villain Vincent Rapallo (Frank Silvera) battle almost to the death in a warehouse filled with mannequins, is still extremely effective and notably eerie, which is another tribute to the director's visual sense across a half-century. The movie's full impact, however, as with most of Kubrick's work, can only really be appreciated on the big screen, although -- at the risk of belaboring a point -- the drawback in that setting is that the stiffness of the dialogue (especially between Smith and Irene Kane) also comes through in larger-than-life fashion.
releases for Killer's Kiss on AllMovie
Killer's Kiss (1955)
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Title/Studio |
Release Date |
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The Killer's Kiss
MGM
More
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July 15, 2002 |
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Killer's Kiss
MGM
More
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June 29, 1999 |
