The Watch List For 4/3/13

ANOTHER KUBRICK KILLING KISS --- This goes among category of updates. I've been intrigued by theatre reception to Killer's Kiss and The Killing since covering both in October, 2011. Greenbriar at that time indicated that Killer's Kiss had 3,130 bookings, which was very low for a United Artists release. I knew KK played the Liberty during 1956, having found battered stills for it in theatre storage circa mid-70's, but no ads revealed themselves among newspaper pages and scrapbooks gone through since. Here, finally, was a Killer's Kiss engagement I came across in Steubenville, Ohio, playing on the lower half of a dual bill, as predicted by Variety, the trade having foreseen that KK might find it challenging to eke out some bookings. Interesting then to see the Capitol Theatre singling out Killer's Kiss as an "Off Beat" FILM of the PRIZEFIGHT and Dance Hall WORLDS." Someone on staff had obviously checked out Kubrick's thriller, and liked it enough to boost outside a pressbook-supplied ad. It didn't hurt either to play Killer's Kiss with another bare-knuckler, Robert Aldrich's The Big Knife. Those two would make a persuasive combo today.

There was already info added to Greenbriar's The Killing post after I came across data on a Pittsburgh art house success, and now here is a 2/14/57 engagement in Cincinnati wherein The Killing is referred to specifically as The One Surprise Art Film In Years. This was sure in opposition to the straightforward way United Artists had sold the film since a May 1956 open at the Mayfair Theatre in New York. An exploitation dud had morphed into an art success, an eventuality I'd guess no one in UA sales saw coming. Did "Popular Demand" really lead to the Guild's booking? Too bad a good handful of art house weeks, spread out as they were, couldn't lift The Killing off a slow track and maybe get, dare UA hope, Oscar consideration. They'd try to position it for nominations, from November 1956 into a following January. The trade ad below was from 1/23/57, after The Killing had been placed among Ten Best of 1956 by the London Sunday Times. Kubrick's pic was back in LA at the El Rey art theatre to shore up votes, admission being free to Academy members.

The Killing's post-mortem came almost a year later (12/57) from United Artists vice-president Max E. Youngstein, speaking to reporters only on condition that it be made clear he was expressing his own personal sentiments and not those of his company. Youngstein complained of difficulty building new stars when exhibitors only wanted films with established names. He mentioned Sterling Hayden as having been in many "bread and butter" pictures that were "made at a price," but that when it came to The Killing, which according to Youngstein was "head and shoulders above his previous attractions," having got "many rave reviews," the exhibs wouldn't pay any more for The Killing than they had for previous Haydens. Youngstein's point: Exhibitor attitude impedes producer initiative.

SKY GIANT (1938) --- Commercial flying gets a wing up when test pilots Richard Dix and Chester Morris take the stick for martinet fleet boss Harry Carey. They also quarrel over hand of Carey offspring Joan Fontaine, who must look at this (but would she?) and wonder how it's possible to outlive so many people by so many years. Air sagas are irresistible always --- never mind sameness of yarns back on the ground. Metro and Warners did them bigger than RKO could afford to, but Sky Giant gets an A for effort and square-jaw conviction of Dix and Morris, bullheads you knew had to team eventually, neither being a stranger to scarf and goggles, nor fighting for first or last dance with an ingénue who could only pick one, but easily play daughter to either. Typecasting and immediate viewer association was no bad thing at its prime --- patrons liked Dix/Morris in repeated action, maybe because both were equal adept at quieter scenes. Fontaine was "the girl" clearly eager to graduate past such work. Did she realize pros like D & M made that possible via helping her look good in scenes played opposite them?

THE FOUR SKULLS OF JONATHAN DRAKE (1959) --- The sort of cheap (some would say wretchedly so) thriller, and the word may be misapplied, that lured youngsters out of healthier sunshine to learn process of cleaving heads, then shrinking them, taught by has-it-come-to-this Henry Daniell, who some of them might have recognized from distinguished work in long-past The Body Snatcher. There are sick elements amidst endless talk --- a stray moccasin sewn from human flesh --- don't ask. "Action," as if the word applies, takes place solely in neighboring houses and a mausoleum situated between them (funny, there's no such arrangement anywhere near me). Knowing for fifty years I'd someday have to strike Four Skulls off a see list (by fiat of multiple Famous Monster mags), duty was finally observed on TCM, where the long-await fully fulfilled expectation, or lack of. Four Skulls played '59 dates on top of a bill with Invisible Invaders, which I did see in 1964 and so have sentiment for. Admitted is fact I'd have felt similarly about Jonathan Drake given first view at a tenderer age, an experience I'm sorry now to have missed, for having come to these Four Skulls so late, they can't place among child-acquired souvenirs.