The Killing

None of these men are criminals in the usual sense: but, they’ve got their problems and they’ve all got a little larceny in ’em.

Directed by Stanley Kubrick

USA, 1956

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Watching a Kubrick film is like gazing up at a mountain top. You look up and wonder, ‘How could anyone have climbed that high?’ – Martin Scorsese

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The Shining, Full Metal Jacket, Barry Lyndon, and of course 2001: A Space Odyssey… you might not like the films of Stanley Kubrick – there is something about that monomaniacal degree of control that some find repellent – but it is difficult to argue with the point that even his minor films feel epic in scope. With The Killing, however, we are hiking in the foothills of the Kubrick landscape. Made when he was just 28 years old this cinematic juvenilia is a succinct – succinct?? Stanley Kubrick?? – heist movie that failed at the box office, but the signs of his technical virtuosity are there for all to see.

The Killing is a classic of the ‘50s heist movie genre. Tough-talking Johnny Clay has just finished a five-year stretch in prison. He doesn’t want to go back so comes up with an ‘ingenious’ plan: to rob a racetrack just after the big race, collecting $2 million of track receipts. He pulls together a team including a corrupt policeman, one of the racetrack clerks and a bartender at the track, all of whom will have a vital role to play, each an essential piece of the puzzle.

What we have here is a genre movie with stock characters, but the way Kubrick tells the story makes us forget that. He combines newsreel footage of events at the racetrack with the melodrama and espresso-black irony of Greek tragedy, all overlaid with the detached Dragnet voiceover of a narrator who may not be as reliable as at first seems the case.

On top of this The Killing unfolds through a fractured narrative with repetition and ellipsis. At 85 minutes, it’s a taut film without a wasted frame, yet Kubrick manages to keep you uncertain: you know that things are going to go bad – that much is obvious – but when? And how?

In the set-up for the robbery, Kubrick shoots long, deliberate takes laced with plenty of hard-boiled dialogue penned by that dime store Dostoyevsky, Jim Thompson, who adapted Lionel White’s novel Clean Break (although Kubrick credited himself as screenwriter).  But once the heist itself kicks off, the camera movements become abrupt and explosive. What makes The Killing so watchable, however, is the cast: a collection of B-movie character actors with desperation dripping off them like cheap eau de cologne.

Sterling Hayden plays the lead, Johnny Clay, a big man with the disposition of a brick wall but underneath he is just a lost little boy. As an old friend says:

Oh Johnny my friend, you were never too bright but I love you anyway.

Elisha Cook Jr. excels, as ever, as the timid milquetoast George, seriously underestimated by his scheming, adulterous wife Sherry (Marie Windsor), as fatale a femme as you’ll ever encounter:

It isn't fair. I never had anybody but you. Not a real husband. Not even a man. Just a bad joke without a punch line.

Timothy Carey in a weird performance is a creepy hitman hired to assassinate a racehorse, but the highlight is the real-life professional wrestler and chess player Kola Kwariani who pretty much plays himself as a philosophical heavy:

You know, I often thought that the gangster and the artist are the same in the eyes of the masses. They’re admired and hero-worshipped, but there is always present an underlying wish to see them destroyed at the peak of their glory.

There are so many weak links in the plan that it is surprising that the robbery actually comes off… well, almost. A few loose words leads to an explosive shootout leaving much of the gang, blood-splattered, lying dead on a seedy apartment floor. But the quietly devastating final scene involves a playful terrier and a suitcase with a flimsy lock.

As a blizzard of dollar bills flies across the screen, you can imagine Kubrick, a passionate chess player himself, moving his pieces across the board with precise control, for good or ill… just like clockwork.

As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods;
They kill us for their sport.

Reids’ Results (out of 100)

C - 75

T - 71

N - 73

S - 74

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Coming next… Monster(2023)