Not only can Kubrick do no wrong in my eyes, he’s incapable of creating anything less than a masterpiece. If it wasn’t evident then, it’s more than evident now-- I’m a slobbering Kubrick fan boy. As with 1960‘s Spartacus, the film is proof that Stanley Kubrick is God even when he‘s not Stanley Kubrick. Killer’s Kiss is a truly great film, I know this because I got the same feeling that I do whenever I watch a truly great film. It’s the feeling of, “watching anything other than this would be a waste of my time”. Am I actually claiming that it’s in the same league as 2001: A Space Odyssey or A Clockwork Orange? Yeah, as a matter of fact, I think that I am. Certainly there are a lot of ways in which those films are better than Killer’s Kiss, but there are a few ways in which they’re worse. Kubrick lost something when he conquered the studio system. I guess we could look at it optimistically and say that he simply “traded it in”, but it has been lost all the same. Watching the film, I had ideations of what would happen if he pursued the skid row path and just kept on making noir pictures on the fly. Would we still know his name? Would his cult be less academic and more hedonistic?

Let’s talk turkey. Killer’s Kiss was Kubrick’s second film, after Fear and Desire which he would latter suppress out of embarrassment and has been unseen by me at this point. (I might as well track it down when completing this long-running Kubrick Korner feature). This was also the very last time that he would work using original material. Starting with 1956’s The Killing all of his subsequent films would be adaptations of pre-existing material. Kubrick would later admit (to Michael Herr I believe, I think that I read this in the 200+ page eulogy he wrote) that he did not have the ability to come up with a story on his own and had envy and wonder for those who did. Kubrick did however have a talent for photography. He was interested it in it too and was constantly studying and experimenting with the art form.

These three pieces of information tidily explain Killer’s Kiss. This is unquestionably a patched together barely lucid piece of work, successful neither as narrative nor as a character piece. But it is great to look at. Make that really great to look at. If Kubrick had decided to become a documentary filmmaker he may have gone down in history as the most talented visual artist in non-fiction cinema since Leni Riefenstahl. Pauline Kael famously criticized Kubrick’s 1975’s Barry Lyndon by saying “He’s not interested in taking photographs to make movies, but in making movies to take photographs”. That is a particularly pungent criticism of Killer’s Kiss as well. Kubrick seems to have an insatiable need to simply photograph his environment. At this stage in his career, at least, taking pictures is the only thing that gets his dick hard. Killer’s Kiss sees the master as an idiot savant. It’s almost as though he can’t understand why people would watch movies if it’s not to look at the photography.

Is it enough that the film looks great? Is that enough to keep us warm and alive out in the wilderness? In this case, I believe that it is. Again, Killer’s Kiss passes that litmus test of “Could I be spending my time better if I were to watch something else”. Simply on the basis of the cinematography (and when it comes down to it, the cinematography is the only thing the film has going for it), I would place Killer’s Kiss in the top ten percent of all the films I have ever seen. I definitely appear to be in the minority about this. The general consensus seems to be that this was one of Kubrick’s rough sketches before he started making his masterpieces and that “we all have to start somewhere”. The website “Appreciating Great Trash” writes, “What it (and his real debut, Fear and Desire, which he found so embarrassing he destroyed all the prints) really shows is that, as naturally brilliant as he was with visual constructions, Kubrick had to learn how to write through painful practice” and gives it a “D-”. I agree with the observation, but not with the conclusion which infers that competence without brilliance is a preferable combination to brilliance without competence.

My very first attempt at criticism of any kind was in junior high for an extra credit assignment. I had to watch a variety of television shows and review them. I came up with a grading system similar to ones that were used on me where I evaluated the shows in five distinct areas and gave them a score from zero to two in each one ending with a final score of zero to ten. Somehow, my conclusions were ones that I could live with to this day. I remember claiming that “ER” was one of the best shows on TV and “Living Single” was one of the worst. The black kids I went to school with complained that I hated “Living Single” and gave “Roseanne” a good mark, but hey I also liked “Martin” and hated “The Nanny” and that ought to be evidence enough that I’m color blind (or at least that I have the capacity to appreciate blackness and dislike whiteness). But I digress. What I was doing wasn’t film criticism, but film appraisal. I guess it’s only natural for the amateur critic to disguise their personal reaction as quantifiable data; but it makes for tedious reading and perhaps even more importantly, it isn’t very useful. If we were to use this score sheet approach, a film like Killer’s Kiss, which is certainly visually brilliant and incompetently written, would likely score the same or worse than a film solidly mediocre in all aspects. This is insanity.

Still, I doubt that I would be so protective of this film if it contained a great performance or terrific writing but was visually ugly. I never tire of using Neil LaBute’s In The Company of Men and Phil Morrison’s Junebug as examples of intelligent, well-written and well-acted films that I nevertheless strongly disliked simply because they had no filmmaking excitement, no “Schoonmacher juice” as we’ve come to call it. If nothing else, my utter adoration of Killer’s Kiss has proven to me that visceral impact isn’t just the most important thing it may very well be the only thing.

Well, make that visceral impact uncompromised by irony. In terms of what it means for the art of cinema, one of the most disturbing films for me in recent years was Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle. Have you seen the trailer? It’s fucking fantastic, perhaps one of the greatest movie trailers ever made. Have you seen the film? It’s fucking awful, and would probably go down in the annals of history as one of the worst films ever made if it hadn’t been used to create one of the greatest movie trailers ever made. The director, who calls himself “McG”, is the consummate four year old with a shotgun. He’s a virtuoso filmmaker able to exploit the resources of the cinema to their fullest extent, but also a resolute anti-intellectual who is completely uninterested in making a film of any artistic merit at all. The film is essentially saying that movies are stupid, which means that culture is stupid, which means that religion is stupid, which means that the only reason we exist is to earn enough money providing goods and services for the rest of society so we can enter the movie theater and get sedated with colorful sounds and images. Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle is stupid and proud of it, which is a scary combination. The film is saying that art and cinema are completely different animals and in the cruel world of natural selection, the latter is alive and well and the former is pretty much extinct.

Killer’s Kiss is every bit the exercise in style over substance that Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle is. Where the two films differ and where Killer’s Kiss becomes a great film while Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle remains a bad film, is in Kubrick’s crudeness. Every if you didn’t know that Kubrick was inexperienced while McG was an established music video director; you would be able to surmise that Killer’s Kiss is a beginning whereas Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle has already reached a destination. In Killer’s Kiss the superficiality is preliminary. Off-screen, you get the feeling that there are mysteries about the universe that Kubrick just hasn’t gotten around to discovering yet and so he can only show us the surface of things. In Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle, the superficiality is a moral and aesthetic choice. There is no mystery to the film, nothing that we intuitively know is there but just has yet to be discovered. All we have is the surface of things. McG denies that there ever was or ever will be anything else.

I love Killer’s Kiss not in spite of the incompetence, but because of it. If the incompetence were really an issue I’m unsure the film would have worked. Kubrick’s expertise in the art of cinematography, this single aspect of the filmmaking process, makes his amateurishness in everything else nothing short of poetic. The beauty isn’t compensating for the amateurishness, it’s legitimizing it. The film expunges everything that is uniquely wonderful about amateur filmmaking. Kubrick doesn’t seem to have a clue about what he wants to say or where he is taking us. He has no idea how to make a movie, just that he has to make one. And that’s kind of wonderful. When I watch Killer’s Kiss, I catch myself dreaming a little. Freed from any narrative drive, Killer’s Kiss becomes (or perhaps simply remains) a mood piece. Something you could watch on a loop. (And no, you could never say this about Charlie‘s Angels: Full Throttle. The storyline is convoluted enough to keep you from ever drifting off into the atmosphere while simultaneously satirizing the importance of storylines).

Killer’s Kiss is a crude film, by which I mean an unformed film, by which I mean a searching film. The amateurishness is part and parcel to the film’s aesthetic and appeal. The very fact that Kubrick can only photograph and cannot tell a story stems from his youthfulness. I was reminded of Canadian developmental psychologist James Marcia’s theory of identity formation where the adolescent enters a period of crisis in which old values and crises are re-examined leading to commitment toward a certain set of values or role. When the adolescent has entered crisis but is unable to commit to a role, he or she is said to be in moratorium. Not being able to tell a story is a product of Kubrick’s moratorium. Kubrick’s talent with photography is going to ennoble anything and everything it touches; but he can’t decide what kind of material he wants to ennoble. Riefenstahl is probably a good comparison, she said that there is not a single staged shot in Triumph of the Will but certainly it’s the greatest work of propaganda ever made because Leni Riefenstahl is fucking Queen Midas and everything she touches turns to gold. Kubrick doesn’t want to make the same mistake and so he wanders, unable to decide what he’s going to do. And so in the meantime, he ennobles the very process of not being able to decide.

I think that the last time I brought up moratorium was in discussing Trey Parker and Matt Stone’s South Park: Bigger, Longer, and Uncut. To give you the short version, I found them obnoxious. Career satirists, they piss on everyone and everything content on knowing that they are true independent voices, non-subservient to any social group or moral philosophy. I like to say that they are iconoclastic for the sake of being iconoclastic. This doesn’t really explain Kubrick. I think the difference is that Kubrick, after re-examining all previous values and roles, is actually searching for answers. With Parker and Stone, all values and all roles must be constantly re-examined and rejected. You have to challenge the status quo simply because it’s the status quo. Reflect that Parker and Stone have taken on the role of professional iconoclast and as thus must be against themselves and you will get caught on a tautological mobius strip so maddening it could prompt you to end the misery by shoving sharp pencils up your nose. Perhaps then, it would be more accurate to say that while Kubrick is definitely in moratorium Parker and Stone are more in a state of perpetual crisis.

But still, I find Killer’s Kiss problematic in a similar way as Team America: World Police or South Park: Bigger, Longer, and Uncut in that, by canonizing it, we are claiming that it is desirable or even possible to be perpetually undefined. If you never plan on finding anything, the whole idea of searching loses all utility and becomes rather silly. Of course, Kubrick would find some kind of direction for his talent, developing a hard-nosed humanism which he would then outgrow in favor of post-humanistic Nietzschean polemics. But from 2001 onward, there is a sense in which he painted himself into a corner intellectually. I recently read this fascinating quote regarding rapist Alex DeLarge’s (of A Clockwork Orange) love for Beethoven: “[It] suggests the failure of culture to have any morally refining effect on society. Hitler loved good music and many top Nazis were cultured and sophisticated men, but it didn‘t do them, or anybody else, much good.” What does that say about culture? Or if you prefer, what does that say about morality?

As much as I love Kubrick’s later films, I’ll be the first to admit that they’re difficult ones to live by. The naivety of Killer’s Kiss is incredibly refreshing then. It’s like a philosophical reset button, capturing this intellectually virginal worldview in amber. It has a sense of wonder that Kubrick’s subsequent films, as great as they may be, don’t. I’m not sure if I can explain it any better than that, but after seeing the film there was a moment where it seemed to be greater than most any other film I’ve ever seen. Because most any other film would be more sophisticated and less curious.

As usual, I’m almost done with the review and I haven’t really talked about the movie! The film is about Davy Gordon a washed up boxer who rescues his beautiful neighbor Gloria Price from getting beat up by her gangster boyfriend Vincent Raphello. She falls in love with Davy. Vincent won’t be cuckolded however and so he sends some hitmen out to snuff Davy out and gets his friend instead. Now the two must escape before Vincent gets them both. I think I would have liked this film even if it were told competently but without the Kubrick eye. (Probably couldn’t say this about any other Kubrick film, but anybody who would like to remake Killer’s Kiss is welcome to it). The romance between Davy and Gloria is poignant. I could believe that a girl like her would fall for a lug like him because essentially they’re both pieces of meat, used up and tossed out, and so they are the only ones who can empathize with one another. But Kubrick is incapable of thinking in those kinds of sentiments and the desperation that powers their relationship is never expunged. He rather naively obscures everything with flashbacks within flashbacks and gratuitous narration. The killing of the Davy’s friend isn’t shown but explained in dialogue, Kubrick’s big weakness, and the storyline comes off as a lot more convoluted than it really is.

But again, that terrific cinematography when combined with the sloppy storytelling goes a long way. I’ve said that this quality makes the film youthful, naïve, and curious. But it also makes it romantic. It’s beautiful, awesome, jittery, and dumb and that’s kind of what it feels like to fall in love. Kubrick may not understand his characters or how to keep their relationship unfettered by extraneous excesses; but the gist of what is happening with them is nevertheless conveyed through pure cinema. We pick up on it regardless.

While Kubrick was very much unformed at this point, one can readily pick up on the stirrings of an auteur in his selection of this material. I’m sure he didn’t choose to make his protagonist a washed up boxer because he was thinking of how this would relate to the gangster’s moll and the theme of used people finding validation with one another. He made the guy a boxer, just because he likes to photograph boxers and it allowed him to put a boxing match in his movie! Remember, his first short film was Day of the Fight afterall. There’s an infamous scene in the film where Gloria tells a rambling story about her sister who was a ballerina. I’ve seen this scene justifiably criticized for padding the film to the 67-minute mark. But I also think, Kubrick was simply being indulgent here. He likes photographing ballerinas almost as much as he likes photographing boxers!

Killer’s Kiss is essentially an extension of Kubrick‘s still photography. There’s a startling sequence where Gloria walks across Time Square during the night, surrounded by the noise and light of the city. Kubrick never secured a permit to shoot there and nobody else in the shot knew that they were in a movie. He stole the shot from a nearby car. Certainly, this was likely done out of necessity but as a photographer Kubrick conducted experiments where he photographed people on the subway using a hidden camera activated relatively remotely. This suggests that he had an interest in naturalism, believing that his human subject would act differently if they knew they were being photographed. The effect is startling somehow. This simple shot is something you’ll want to rewind just to make sure that you saw it right.

Watching the film, I had the same silly observation I did when looking at his work for Look magazine. I thought to myself, “Wow, this is what it must have really been like in 1950s New York”. From the very beginning, Kubrick was able to take beautiful photographs divorced from sentimentality. I guess he’s correct in inferring that it’s sentimentality, and not as much aesthetic perfection, that differentiates the cinema from real life. The men in Killer’s Kiss wear hats and the women wear dresses. But you somehow sense that they shit, curse, have sex, and do all the stuff that you just naturally assume people don’t do in black and white movies shot in the fifties (even inthe documentaries). And it’s not this sensational thing either, it’s just real life. Unapologetically unglamorous, but romantic all the same. Killer’s Kiss, one of the earliest of Kubrick films, is true to that dictum he offered to Gene Siskel while promoting Full Metal Jacket: “You don’t need to make movies like Frank Capra in order to like people”.