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A Kiss Before Dying, like Leave Her to Heaven and Slightly
Scarlet, “is awash in oranges and reds” (Christopher 226). The color red,
the color of the lipsticked lips in the title sequence, is a key component
of Black Widow, Slightly Scarlet, and A Kiss Before Dying. As for
orange, the classical noir precedent is Leave Her to Heaven. “The warm
amber glow of Leave Her to Heaven," Lee Sanders and Meredith Brody
write in their entry on the film for Film Noir, “occurs in many of the
most prominent photographers of this pre-1954 Technicolor period,”
producing a “distinctive tone” that, pace Ottoson, “can be as ominous as
the grays and blacks of standard film noir” (224). In The Rough Guide to
Film Noir, Ballinger and Graydon elaborate on this insight, noting that
Shamroy’s cinematography “saturates the frame with a sickly, amber
patina which lends it the same degree of foreboding that is found in the
black-and-white noirs of the period” (129). In other words, the orange or
“amber” hue of Leave Her to Heaven not only chromatically reflects
femme fatale Ellen Berent’s (Gene Tierney) “sickness,” her unhealthy
romantic possessiveness, but also insinuates that the natural beauty of
Arizona and its red-desert landscapes may only be a veneer. One thinks
immediately of Tierney’s classically beautiful face: “not content with
restricting the application of an orange gel light to the backlight,
Shamroy emblazons Tierney’s face with an orange cross light, flagging
off the top to keep her forehead in shadow” (Keating 220). One
consequence of this “mannerist” lighting is that there are “two color
temperatures on Tierney’s face” (Keating 220). The issue of temperature
is critical to the chromatic economy of A Kiss before Dying. For instance,
in the film’s title sequence, the “cool” aquamarine letters — again, with
the exception of the copper letter “K” — contrasts with the “hot” red
lips. The beginning of the narrative proper offers additional chromatic
clues, the film cutting from the title sequence to a “cool” blue-tinted,
diffuse-shadowed shot of a framed newspaper article that features a
black-and-white photo of Bud Corliss.
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As a subdued version of Lionel Newman’s jazzy theme plays on
the sound track, the camera pans across a red-and-white STODDARD
pennant imprinted with Venetian-blind shadows and then down again
pass a typewriter to a bed. Off-screen, a woman is softly crying. Dressed
in a pink shirt and red skirt, Dorothy “Dorrie” Kingship is crying because
she’s pregnant and unmarried. With her “poodle” blonde hair and fair
complexion, she could be a twin sister of femme fatale Nancy Ordway
(Peggy Ann Gamer) in Black Widow.
When Dorrie asks Bud, the young man in the white shirt sitting
next to her on the bed, “What are we gonna do?” he offers her a drag of