Killer's Kiss [4K Ultra HD Blu-ray]

Director: Stanley Kubrick

Overview

Stanley Kubrick's second film, Killer's Kiss was summed up by one influential critic as an experiment in esoterica. Filmed on a budget of $40,000 (raised by Kubrick's relatives), the 65-minute, black-and-white drama is a true "noir" film, shot mostly at night in a variety of seedy Manhattan locations. The plot concerns the efforts of boxer Jamie Smith (who also narrates the film) to rescue nightclub dancer Irene Kane from the lecherous maneuvers of club owner Frank Silvera. The much-admired climax finds Smith, Silvera, and the villain's henchmen pursuing each other in a warehouse filled with grotesque-looking store mannequins. Director-writer-photographer-editor Kubrick didn't like the happy ending imposed on the film by its distributor (United Artists), but it was a lot more logical and satisfying than the filmmaker's own planned denouement. The imperiled leading lady Irene Kane later became famous as TV commentator and journalist Chris Chase; also appearing in the film is Kubrick's then-wife Ruth Sobotka.

Product Details

Release Date:	06/28/2022
UPC:	0738329259211
Original Release:	1955
Rating:	NR
Source:	Kino Video
Language:	English
Time:	1:07:00
Format:	Blu-ray
Sales rank:	453

Cast & Crew

Performance Credits

Jamie Smith	Davey Gordon
Irene Kane	Gloria Price
Frank Silvera	Vincent Rapallo
Jerry Jarret	Albert the manager
Mike Dana	Gangster,Hoodlum
Felice Orlandi	Gangster
Ralph Roberts	Gangster
Phil Stevenson	Gangster
Julius Adelman	Owner of the Mannequin Factory
David Vaughan	Conventioneer
Alec Rubin	Conventioneer
Ruth Sobotka	Iris, a Dancer
Gerald Fried	Composer

Technical Credits

Stanley Kubrick

Howard Sackler

Stanley Kubrick	Screenwriter,Producer
Morris Bousel	Producer
Howard Sackler	Screenwriter,Screenwriter

Editorial Reviews

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.