Kisses of Death, Flashes of Brilliance

The Death Kiss (Edwin L. Marin, 1932) is a fair-to-middling comedy-mystery hybrid about a movie star who gets shot to death on a film set and the pursuit of his killer. The comedy relies mostly on some dry wit and buffoonery, and the mystery has some clever aspects. It's not a bad film, but it's not terribly memorable--save for two aspects. 

One, Bela Lugosi is in really fine and atypical form here as one of the movie's quasi-antagonists and murder suspects. The script requires him to be somewhat abrasive and therefore credible as a murderer, but Lugosi's performance adds sympathy and ambiguity, so much so that I was thinking to myself that maybe he wouldn't turn out to be the murderer after all. (SPOILERS for a 94-year old movie: he didn't!) 

Two, Marin and his team add flashes of colour during two scenes of this black-and-white film. The first comes as the police are reviewing film in the projection room--film that might reveal the killer's identity. But the projector explodes, and does so in what I think must be hand-painted colour on the frames. The effect is quite dramatic, and if it caught me by surprise, I imagine audiences in 1932 must have been really impressed. There's also some use of the technique for light sources in the aftermath. 

Showing admirable restraint, this trick isn't used again until the film's climax, when the killer is tracked down and a running gunfight breaks out. Again we get hand-painted colour on flashlights and, most effectively, flashes of red and yellow gunfire. It really is a very cool effect that elevates the picture.