Kiss Before Dying
Directed by Gerd OswaldIn a mid-century American college town, Bud Corliss is a young man of corrosive ambition and no inherited means. When his girlfriend Dorothy Kingship becomes pregnant and threatens to derail his carefully constructed plans, Bud recognizes her not as a person but as an obstacle. Dorothy is the daughter of copper magnate Leo Kingship, and Bud has spent months cultivating proximity to that wealth. The pregnancy is an inconvenience he resolves with cold efficiency, staging her death as a suicide from a municipal building's upper floor.
Dorothy's sister Ellen, unconvinced by the official verdict, begins her own investigation into the circumstances of the death. The irony the film permits itself is quiet but precise: Ellen, drawn into the orbit of a sympathetic law student named Gordon Grant, finds herself falling toward the same man who killed her sister, though she cannot yet name what she senses. Bud pivots effortlessly, transferring his attention from one Kingship daughter to the other, recalibrating his performance of sincerity without missing a step.
Kiss Before Dying belongs to a cluster of 1950s noirs organized around the sociopathic male – the man whose charm functions as camouflage rather than character. Where earlier noir often granted its criminals some comprehensible appetite, Bud Corliss operates on pure calculation, making the film less a crime picture than a study in fraudulent surfaces. The Kingship fortune looms over every scene as both motive and moral indictment of the postwar aspiration that Bud has taken to its logical extreme.
