Review of Kiss Before Dying, A

Introduction

Bud Corliss is an ambitious, cold and calculating student who is aiming for the top. He`s involved with Dorothy Kingship, the daughter of a mining magnate and fully expects to use her to achieve his dreams. Things don`t go to plan though, when Dory falls pregnant, and expects Bud to marry her. What`s worse is that Dory is estranged from her father and refuses to even talk to him. Faced with the problems of an unwanted child, and a poverty-stricken marriage, Bud hatches a nefarious scheme to get out of his predicament. When Dory`s sister Ellen refuses to accept her sister`s suicide, she visits the town to investigate, but Bud seizes another opportunity to marry into the same rich family, and continues his Machiavellian plan to get rid of any evidence.

Video

A Kiss Before Dying is presented in 2.35:1 anamorphic widescreen. It`s a fairly impressive transfer for a film that`s close to 50 years old and the picture is clear and colourful for the most past and rarely afflicted by excessive print damage. The layer transfer is a little obvious and the film itself isn`t exactly imaginatively directed.

Audio

The sound comes in DD 2.0 English, German, French and Italian. It`s a functional mono track for the most part and the dialogue is clearly audible except for once when Gordon Grant`s dialogue is obscured by a passing car horn, and the final exchange of the film that is missing on the original English track, as well as in the subtitles. Curiously the lines are dubbed for the foreign language tracks, so anyone speaking French, German or Italian will get the final moments of camp melodrama.

Features

Trailer and subtitles.

Conclusion

Phew, what a stinker! The writing was on the wall, when the first scene introduced us to Bud and his pregnant girlfriend. To calm her nerves he offers her a cigarette. With hindsight that sounds pretty horrific, but I suppose that would have been acceptable then. But what follows is a badly acted, poorly scripted waste of 90 minutes, with few redeeming attributes and causing unintentional hilarity rather than being remotely thrilling.

The problem really is that a young Robert Wagner has to carry the movie as the reprehensible scheming Bud Corliss, and unless your villain is exceptionally charismatic, it`s hard to base a film around him, and Bud Corliss is no Hannibal Lecter. He`s a heavy-lidded slimy cad and bounder, not least because of the copious amounts of Brylcreem in his hair, but beyond a certain calculating demeanour he doesn`t really have many personality traits. The acting and characterisations rarely go beyond the level of soap opera, and the plot is riddled with holes. Jeffrey Hunter plays Gordon Grant, College Professor/Police Detective complete with cardigan, glasses and pipe. All that`s missing are a pair of slippers to complete the stereotype. It`s hard to believe that the same actor was cast as the Son of God.

It takes half the movie for Bud to plot the demise of his phenomenally dense girlfriend in a remarkably convoluted way, and by then I thought that I was watching an episode of Columbo and wouldn`t have been surprised had the dishevelled detective turned up. Unfortunately I wasn`t even permitted that small mercy, and had to sit through another 45 minutes of tired dialogue and silly situations. I never thought that they made B-movies in widescreen, but the panoramic image belies the turgid script. Robert Corliss goes to a college populated with middle-aged adolescents, and he conveniently finds a how to murder manual in the college library. What else can I say? A Kiss Before Dying is cheesy, corny, naff, dire, dismal and any other negative descriptive that you can think of. It`s completely implausible and has more plot holes than a sieve. Certain back catalogue titles ought to remain on Betamax.