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Rating: What would you be willing to risk for someone who has changed your life in just five minutes? What is the strange mechanism that binds the caged heart of a man to the fate of a stranger? How heavy is the anguish if everything turns out (perhaps) to be just an illusion? The failed boxer Davy Gordon knows this and feels an unbearable sense of disorientation as he waits for his beloved Gloria at the station, waiting for the train to Seattle. There is fear in Davy, fear that this sudden love might be another missed opportunity, the negative frame of a dream (a nightmare?), the umpteenth defeat in the eternal loser's ring. And in the chaotic hustle and bustle of people and luggage by the tracks, his narrative-self crosses in different spatial/temporal planes with the lost souls of an incredible story, dangerously lived by the protagonist a few hours before.
"The Killer's Kiss" ("Killer's Kiss") marks in 1955 the official big-screen debut of a talented ex-photographer, Stanley Kubrick. Excluding the raw and disowned feature film "Fear And Desire" from '53, Kubrick had until then a background as a respected photo-reporter for the magazine "Look", which published his first photo in 1942 (a line of cars queued at a gas station during the war). Photography, along with jazz, was a fascination that the New York director experienced very young, at just thirteen, when his father, a doctor, gave him a camera. Having graduated, Stanley found employment at seventeen at the "Look" editorial, producing brilliant reportages (one of which would inspire his first short film, "Day Of The Fight", which would prove useful during "Killer's Kiss"). He later directed small documentaries such as "Flying Padre" ("The Flying Father", 1951) and "The Seafarers" ("The Seamen", 1953), where his experience in photography flowed into his old passion for cinema.
"The Killer's Kiss" is a thriller-noir shot on a tight budget with little-known actors, a pulp tale of only 64 minutes that contains the key elements of the fairy tales so loved by Kubrick in his childhood (the prince-savior, the damsel in distress, the evil ogre). An oneiric and metropolitan odyssey in b\n. Within a hectic day, the disillusioned and battered boxer Gordon does not hesitate for a moment to put himself on the line to free the blonde hostess Gloria (whom he observes every evening from the window of the opposite apartment) from the grim owner Vincent, the manager of the dance hall where the girl works. Sexually rejected by Gloria, the vengeful boss decides without much scruple to kidnap her with some henchmen and kill Davy, the man she loves. The showdown will take place under the most cinema-realistic roofs that New York remembers from that era, inside an attic full of mannequins (cult scene). A fierce fight, with fire-axe blows and deadly clubbing: the boxer emerges victorious. Then, at the station, will come the time to depart and leave the past behind..
In young Stanley Kubrick, the formal and scenic refinement, the expressionism of the shots (the stairway to the gaming hall), the camera's eye lingering on details (the deformed gaze in the fishbowl, the doll on Gloria’s bed, the shop windows), and the baroque and hyperrealist aestheticism that accentuates the traits of the genre film (the abstract flashback of the sister-ballerina contaminates the classic noir) impress. Furthermore, the insistent use of light in a somber and hallucinated environment (the neon and signs illuminating the dreary neighborhoods at dusk) and the virtuosity of the shots in the boxing match (from below, in and out of the ring ropes) will exert a not-marginal influence on Scorsese or Friedkin, authors in the seventies of a violent almost documentary-like urban poetic. Kubrick is just at the start of a long journey within the cinema-machine, but he demonstrates remarkable clarity of thought and confidence in the expressive medium (of "Killer's Kiss" he will handle direction, subject, screenplay, photography, and editing): "A frivolous and banal attempt, made with a bit more skill.", the posthumous comment of the filmmaker. Costing about 75 thousand dollars, thanks to loans from relatives and friends, he will eventually manage to sell it to the distributor United Artists. The rest of the story is cinematic history. The ending of the movie, however? I would prefer not to spoil the surprise. But it definitively answers that question at the beginning. A hug can be worth more than a thousand insignificant words. So ask yourself: what would I be prepared to risk for the woman who changed my life?
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