KILLER'S KISS

New Zealand Listener, Volume 35, Issue 897, 12 October 1956, Page 15

KILLER'S KISS

(Stanley Kubrick-United Artists) A Cert. \WRITING from London just before Killer's Kiss opened in Wellington, a friend told me I must not miss a new film by a brilliant new American director, Stanley Kubrick. Killer’s Kiss is an earlier piece written, directed, shot and cut by the same hand. A modest thriller with a quite ordinary story and a conventional ending, it stands apart for a distinctive atmosphere, real people, real places. A _ prize-fighter (Jamie Smith) and a dance hall hostess (Irene Kane) live in a couple of shabby rooms whose windows look in on one another across a narrow way. Lonely and tired, they’re thrown together and fall foul of the girl’s boss (Frank Silvera), who is infatuated with her. There’s a murder, a kidnapping, a chase. Mr. Kubrick has a cunning but compassionate eye for the detail or incident: that will add a dimension to a person or a place, and he has a sound ear for dialogue. Credible and ordinary people (the girl, for example, curiously attractive yet not conventionally glamorous), his boy and girl communicate their loneliness and stay vividly in the mind; and even the boss has at times an odd overtone of pathetic despair. There are some wonderfully atmospheric scenes in -the shabby rooms, the streets (the two revellers are quite superb), the subway, and a boxing sequence is among the best I have seen. Here and elsewhere camera angles and cutting are often brilliant. The score also (by Gerald Fried), with its recurring dance theme and pulsating, disturbing rhythms is highly expressive. I can get somewhere near a summingup if I say that at its best Killer’s Kiss has the haunting poignancy of a New Yorker story, by John Cheever, say, or Hortense Calisher.