Killer’s Kiss

Dir. Stanley Kubrick. 1955. 67 mins. 35mm. With Frank Silvera, Jamie Smith, Irene Kane (aka Chris Chase), Ruth Sobotka. Years before the flowering of the American independent film movement, Kubrick wrote, directed, photographed, and edited this self-financed New York thriller about a down-on-his-luck boxer’s relationship with a nightclub dancer. Killer’s Kiss reveals the young filmmaker’s heavy debt to film noir: attentive to spatial atmospherics, Kubrick plumbs the depths of darkness in several seedy urban locales, including the long-gone, original Penn Station. The frequently spectacular results anticipate the ingenuity of his later work, as in a climactic sequence of fisticuffs nightmarishly staged in a room full of dismembered mannequins. Preceded by Kubrick’s 1951 documentary shorts Day of the Fight and Flying Padre.