TCM celebrated its 30th anniversary back in April, and one of their spotlights that month was to bring in some of the people who work(ed) behind the scenes at TCM to present a movie or two each. One of the production designers selected an early Stanley Kubrick movie, Killer's Kiss, although to be honest I recorded it more for the synopsis than realizing it was an early Kubrick film.
The opening credits are superimposed over a man in New York City's old Penn Station. After the credits, that man, Davey Gordon (Jamie Smith) delivers an opening monologue about how one can get oneself into a mess, just as he did starting a few days earlier.... Once again, this is a cue that makes it seem likely we're going to get another flashback, and sure enough we do. It also sounds as though Davey is on the run, although that turns out not to be quite true.
Davey is a boxer, as the monologue makes clear, since the flashback starts just before his latest fight, against an up-and-coming young man named Kid Rodriguez. Davey is down-and-going, to the point that his uncle out in Washington State has been suggesting that he go back west for a visit. Davey gets knocked out by Rodriguez and that just might be the impetus for him to go west to see his uncle and aunt again.
Meanwhile, Davey lives in one of those apartment buildings with a courtyard. In the apartment directly opposite his lives a taxi dancer, Gloria Price (Irene Kane). As Burt Lancaster had a tendency to do with Susan Sarandon in Atlantic City, Davey looks across from time to time at Gloria, without knowing anything more about her. Tonight, however, he has a bad dream (cleverly portrayed by the use of negative photography), from which he wakes up to discover that Gloria is having a bad time of it in her apartment with a man, who turns out to be Vinnie (Frank Silvera), her boss at the dance hall (Frank Silvera).
Davey goes over there to save Gloria, and over breakfast, she tells him her sad life story. Davey by this time has planned on going back to Washington, and has also fallen in love with Gloria, so the plan will be to bring her along. But each of them will need to pick up their final paychecks, which presents the big dramatic conflict of the movie. Gloria needs to get it from that nasty boss, with Davey waiting at the entrance to the dance hall. Vinnie is extremely jealous, and sends some goons out to rough up Gloria's companion. But in the meantime, Davey gets waylaid by somebody stealing his scarf, and his manager shows up with Davey's check from the last bout. So the henchmen rough up and kill the manager, with Davey being an obvious suspect. Worse, Gloria witnessed it, and Vinnie can't have her as a witness.
Killer's Kiss being a very early film for Kubrick, it was done on an extremely limited budget. Hence the no-name cast and a running time of only 67 minutes. And, in fact, it does have the feel of the sort of thing that might have worked better as one of those episodes in a live play of the week type anthology show that were the rage in the 1950s. That having been said, Kubrick shows that he has a great deal of talent, and also comes up with a lot of nice vintage photography of midtown Manhattan as it really would have been in the mid-1950s, the sort of stark black-and-white photography that can't be recreated by any of today's doe-eyed nostalgic looks back at the Boomer era.
Killer's Kiss certainly isn't the world's greatest movie by any means. But it's a decidedly interesting movie.
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