If technically Stanley Kubrick’s second feature film, the director almost entirely disowned his first (1952’s Fear and Desire) and considered Killer’s Kiss to be the start of his filmmaking career. Made when he was just 27-years-old, the noir thriller is clearly a formative work, unpolished and lacking either the intellectual or technical rigor Kubrick would soon become known for. However, even at this early stage, the movie shows signs of his potential.

With a very short running time of just 67 minutes, Killer’s Kiss has been described as almost a student film. (See the video essay in the Blu-ray bonus features.*) Although Stanley Kubrick never actually went to college, much less to film school, the extremely low-budget production feels very much like the testing ground for a burgeoning talent to work with new tools, develop his craft, and try to find his voice.

Title:	Killer’s Kiss
Year of Release:	1955
Director:	Stanley Kubrick
Watched On:	Blu-ray
Also Available On:	4K Ultra HD Blu-ray Mubi Pluto TV TCM Tubi Various VOD rental and purchase platforms

Kubrick came from a background in still photography, a skill of great use when transitioning to motion pictures. Even working with next to no money, the director’s striking compositions and lovely black-and-white photography could grab a viewer’s attention on their own. That’s especially helpful considering that this first (or second) effort also has very little story and no stars of note to prop up its box office prospects.

The formulaic noir plot opens on a washed-up, down-on-his-luck boxer named Davey Gordon (Jamie Smith). As he waits for a train to get him the hell out of New York, Davey’s internal voiceover narration fills us in on the tumultuous events of the last few days, of course transitioning into an extended flashback. After losing a title fight that might have been his only shot at a career comeback, Davey returns to his tenement apartment and pines for a gorgeous blonde named Gloria (Irene Kane), who lives across from him. He can see her through his window, and she could probably do the same if she ever looked his way. Has she really never noticed him staring at her, or is she just playing coy? (That this movie was released just a year after Hitchcock’s Rear Window may or may not be a coincidence.)

Gloria is a dancer at a downtown dance hall. Given that the film was made during the Hays Code era, she’s an actual dancer, not a stripper, and everything that happens at her job is completely chaste, aside from the fact that she’s dating the club owner. Vinnie (Frank Silvera) is an obviously seedy character that a nice girl like Gloria should know better than to get involved with, but good sense is an elusive quality for women in movies like this.

One fateful night, Davey witnesses Vinnie roughing up Gloria through their apartment windows and races over to help. Despite his getting there too late, Gloria is grateful and the two begin an expedited love affair that results in Gloria trying to leave Vinnie and run off with the boxer. Vinnie doesn’t take this too well. Nor does Davey appreciate it much when Vinnie kidnaps his girlfriend and tries to bump him off. All this set-up leads to a prolonged chase, a fight, and… well, you’ve read the movie’s title, right? Somebody’s not gonna make it to the end of the picture.

To say that the story is thin barely conveys just how much time the characters spend doing or saying very little. Long stretches go by with hardly any dialogue, and the brief 67-minute length feels at least half an hour longer than that. To be fair, that’s not entirely a complaint. Kubrick had a great eye for photography, and the movie frequently offers up interesting things to look at even when the plot doesn’t amount to anything. The early boxing match is shot mostly in tight close-ups to convey the brutality of the sport and the physical toll it takes on its players. The punches really don’t look fake, nor do the bruises.

Decidedly in its favor, the film builds a strong sense of atmosphere in the New York City locations. Because he had no budget, Kubrick had to film on real city streets and in real buildings, which is something he’d grow very averse to doing later once he had enough resources to build elaborate sets on studio soundstages and backlots. Footage shot in Times Square feels like a time capsule from an era long gone.

While the plot mechanics are entirely predictable, the last act is reasonably suspenseful as characters chase each other across building rooftops. The big climax set in a creepy mannequin storage room is quite novel and inventive. Blake Edwards must have taken some inspiration from this a decade later, but he certainly didn’t have the audacity to stage a battle with combatants wielding an axe and a mannequin leg, respectively, as weapons. Who else would even think of something like that?

In many ways, Killer’s Kiss is a routine film noir with a flimsy plot and cardboard characters. Yet it’s not boring, at least not to a Kubrick fan watching it closely for traces of the director’s signature. The movie doesn’t necessarily feel like a Stanley Kubrick film in the sense that he’d later make famous, but the building blocks are here. If little else, it’s an interesting step in the career arc of a filmmaker who’d go on to greater things.

The Blu-ray

The Criterion Collection brought Killer’s Kiss to Blu-ray in 2011, but only as a bonus feature encoded onto the same disc as the label’s release of Stanley Kubrick’s 1956 crime thriller The Killing, which takes precedence and is the only of the two promoted on the front cover artwork. That’s the copy I own and watched for this viewing.

More recently, Kino Lorber licensed both films and released them individually on the 4K Ultra HD Blu-ray format. As I write this, Criterion has reclaimed the license and announced a massive 4K box set called The Complete Kubrick, encompassing all the director’s feature film work, for release in October 2026.

I opted not to wait on that big box set for a few reasons: 1) I already own several of the movies in 4K format and don’t see much point in duplicating them, 2) the cost of the box set is out of my price range at the moment, and 3) I felt some skepticism about how much Killer’s Kiss would really need or benefit from the extra resolution.

While I still wonder about that last one, the 2011 bonus feature version on the Blu-ray for The Killing has some issues that I can only hope will be fixed in the upcoming box set, if they weren’t already resolved on the Kino Lorber edition.

The booklet in Criterion’s 2011 Blu-ray only offers transfer notes for The Killing, none for Killer’s Kiss. In its favorable qualities, the pillarboxed 4:3 transfer is decently sharp and detailed, enough that I wouldn’t feel any great need for an upgrade on that front. The black-and-white image is also presented with very nice grayscale. Contrast may not hit true inky blacks, but the way it shows off the shadowy noir photography is visually pleasing.

The source elements have a few scratches that couldn’t be (or simply weren’t) digitally cleaned up, but nothing too detrimental. The bigger problem is that the feature is encoded very poorly, with grain that looks noisy as hell and several instances of serious posterization artifacts during transitions from light to dark.

My assumption is that because Killer’s Kiss was relegated to being a bonus feature crammed onto the disc with another film, it was likely compressed more heavily than it should have been, and the encoding wasn’t given much care. Nevertheless, even though I assume that subsequent standalone releases must look better, this copy is still watchable enough overall to tide me over. Honestly, I don’t think I care enough about Killer’s Kiss to go out of my way for an upgrade right now.

Judged on presumed fidelity, the PCM mono soundtrack may well get the most out of the original audio source as possible. Unfortunately, almost all of the movie’s dialogue was recorded separately from filming, on an ADR dub stage later. It sounds very canned and unnatural, not at all convincing that the words could be coming out of the mouths of the actors on screen. Erratic lip sync doesn’t help any in that regard. Likewise, the sound effects were quite obviously foleyed on a soundstage. Music is the best part of this track, and it sounds fine, though a little thin.

Supplements related specifically to Killer’s Kiss are limited to a 9-minute video appreciation by critic Geoffrey O’Brien* (who’s fond of the movie but calls it a “student film”) and a trailer.