Out In The Be-Bop 1950s Crime Noir Night- When Stanley Kubrick Learned His Trade

DVD Review

Killer’s Kiss, directed by (and just about everything else except maybe janitor) Stanley Kubrick, United Artists, 1955

A while back in a feverish dream I started thinking, thinking in black and white thinking, about many of the crime noirfilms, some good, some bad, some with sweet femme fatales, others with very dangerous, watch out femme fatales, and you really better take my advice on that latter point, I had seen when I was kid growing up in the 1950s and was addicted to Saturday matinee double- features. That double-feature idea explains why when you pick up DVDs from this period they are all in the hour and one half range- you had to be home for supper, or else, and Ma glad to have you in some other place than underfoot on that afternoon to get a moment’ s breather drew the line, a line in the sand , at being late for supper and hence Hollywood took note, or that was how it was explained to me one time when I asked about the length of films from that period.

If you can believe this in that feverish dream I honed in on one of Stanley Kubrick’s early noir films, Killer’s Kiss, one that featured just an ordinary woman (although here with a somewhat exotic past) that I was too young to understand about back then, the why part of why femmes or just ordinarys drove guys crazy with their antics (I eventually figured it out, okay, let’s be honest, half figured it out). And the young woman (played by Irene Kane), a dime-a-dance worker in a shady Times Square seen better days walk-up dance hall run by a very, very shady gangster-ish older guy (played by Frank Silvera), was central to the plot-line. See what I mean by ordinary, ordinary just a working-class girl (not necessarily a working girl, what would a young kid know of working girls, in New York, or Adamsville back then), down on her uppers, trying in the hard-edged city to breathe a little without falling down further.

Seems that said gangster was smitten, very smitten by this blonde fluff, although for my money I would just let her go. (Of course that Solomonic judgment is based on a recent re-view of the film not back then, then I might have had a different feverish take on the matter). There are a million others around, especially in New Jack City and especially women down on their uppers, although not always blonde if that was that randy old gangster’s preferred hair color. Here is the ‘skinny’ though such are the effects that some women have on guys, even tough gangster guys. But see she had turned cold on him, especially when one been-on-the-ring-floor-just-one-too-many-times boxer (and convenient next door neighbor in their walk-up cold- water flat New York tenement world, played by Jamie Smith), paid some attention to her after a rough night of being pawed at by the gangster. Needless to say the world was not big enough for a small-time gangster, a small-time smitten very possessive gangster, and an ex-pug with eyes on the same woman.

That “tension” drove the plot unto the final battles on the lonely warehouse back streets of black and white 1950s New York.

Yeah, I know, not much of a plot, not something to throw in the crime noir classics archives. Agreed. Not like fall guy Robert Mitchum and gangster Kirk Douglas fighting it out over Jane Greer, who has them both looking over their shoulders worried about whether her love was worth a slug or two in the back , in the classic Out Of The Past. But hear me out. This is an early Stanley Kubrick film, almost a cinema school effort in fact, where he does all the heavy conceptual lifting (writer, director, editor, etc. and just maybe the janitor too). What is missing in plot line, dialogue, and that kind of thing that makes other films noir classics is made up for here by the feel of it.

The feel of 1950s black and white New York with its all-night eateries like something out of Edward Hopper’s Nighthawk (although the denizens of the places lack either the benign quality of that painting or the romantic Runyonesque New York wise guy style), its trashy back alleys (literally , although no reflection on that city’s rubbish collectors who have a massive job picking up after the nightfall of those eight million stories wedged into that lighted city), its seedy apartment buildings populated by the losers in the great post-World War II American dream night and by run-down back alley offices populated by assorted repo men, low-rent insurance adjusters, and failed dentists.

This was not jazz-etched, smoked-filled, coffee mug café Ginsberg/Kerouac mad poets and writers screaming out the new word in be-bop Greenwich Village/Soho New York, this was not Big Apple fixed-up, up-scale million/billion dollar New York, but the heart of white tee-shirt, cigarette pack rolled up a sleeve, jeans hitched up with a handy belt buckle just in case, engineer boots, holding some store front corner- boy New York, where things flared up just like that. Flared up and flooded the flowing Hudson and East Rivers with faces down. And that is how Stanley Kubrick learned his craft, used to great effect later in his film career-on the mean streets of New York.