Stanley Kubrick: "Killer's Kiss" (1955)

                           After the failure of Fear and Desire, Killer's Kiss marks an impressive step forward for Stanley Kubrick.
                         The story is a New York-based noir tale about Davey (played by Jamie Smith), a young lonely palooka boxer who falls in love with his next door neighbor, Gloria (played by Irene Kane), a taxi dancer. The two plan to move from New York to Seattle, but their plans are interfered by Gloria's possessive mobster-like boss, Vincent Rapallo (played by Frank Silvera).
                    Fear and Desire was not a particularly good film (for a lot of reasons), partly because the film was a little too ambitious for it own good. A war film shot on a shoestring budget isn't going to impress any muckety-mucks in Hollywood. Kubrick compared Fear and Desire to a midget baseball player who doesn't take the base-on-balls but rather swings despite his limitations (James Thurber's "You Could Look It Up"). Killer's Kiss feels like the logical next step after Fear and Desire's failure because it has a derivative and familiar noir premise (Killer's Kiss is just the pulpy kind of title you would expect from the genre). It's simple and not overly ambitious. It knows it's limits. And because of this, Kubrick is able to hone his skills more carefully as a filmmaker and add his own stamp to the genre.
                    That being said, Killer's Kiss is an impressive and underrated little film. It's punchy, efficient, and cleanly told. You can feel its influence on other films. There are strains of Martin Scorsese's Raging Bull with the stark black-and-white cinematography, the intense boxing sequences, and the grungy New York of the 40's and 50's. Even Vincent Rapallo's dance hall has that Italian-American faux elegance that you could see in some of the gentlemen clubs Jake La Motta frequents. There's even a bit of Coen-esque boneheadedness in some of the brawl sequences, which are depicted as sloppy and raw and unchoreographed (the mannequin fight scene between Davey and Vincent best illustrates this).
                    I'm not a fan of the classic film noir genre. They've always had a phony poseur cynicism. Everyone's too cool, everyone's too good-looking. Killer's Kiss, on the other hand, is refreshingly grubby, with rundown locations and unremarkable actors, giving it a more low-key realism. What the story lacks in complexity, it more than makes up for in visual economy. New York City is a character in its own right (this is easily the most "New York" movie Kubrick ever made) and lends the film a bleak, rundown atmosphere. During the chase sequence between Davey and Vincent, there's this beautiful wide shot of Davey running across a warehouse rooftop with the Manhattan Bridge spanning across the frame. It's a vastness that makes Davey seem all the more punier and defenseless against a large, indifferent cityscape. Even the cramped, austere apartment that Davey lives in is indicative of how trapped he is. There's also an impressively artful sequence when Gloria tells the story of her fallen sister, a former ballerina. As she tells the story, we are shown a lone ballerina on stage doing a dance. It's an early example of Kubrickian irony. As we listen to Gloria's tragic story, we are seeing her sister in a idealized state of grace.
                    Of course, the film is not perfect. The story is fairly derivative and since this is a little over an hour long, there's more telling than showing (Davey narrates at times to sum up certain plot points, like the progression of his relationship with Gloria).

                 Though Kubrick considered it an amateur film (albeit a step above Fear and Desire), Killer's Kiss should deservedly be considered Kubrick's official debut which also paved the way toward Kubrick's first great film, The Killing.