Among Stanley Kubrick’s early film output The Killing stands out as the most lastingly influential: Quentin Tarantino credits the film as a huge inspiration for Reservoir Dogs and just about any movie or TV show that plays around with its own internal chronology owes the same debt. This sort of convoluted crime caper had really kicked off with John Huston’s The Asphalt Jungle in 1950. From then on, nouveau noir scripts kept trying to find new ways of telling very similar stories. Here the novel Clean Break is adapted for the screen in a jigsaw-puzzle structure that caught Kubrick’s eye. With a dry narration we’re introduced to the key players in a racetrack heist as it’s being planned, but the story bounces back and forth between what happens to each of them during and before the big event. All of this keeps the audience guessing as to exactly how it will go wrong, while the downbeat telling, the unsympathetic characters and the excessively dramatic score clearly foretell that it will go wrong from the start. The denouement is comically daft no matter how many times you see it.

On the DVD: The Killing is a no-frills DVD transfer, in 4:3 ratio and with its original mono soundtrack. Criminally, just one trailer is all that’s been dug up as an extra. –Paul Tonks

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Product Description
The laconic private eye…the corrupt cop…the heist that goes wrong…the Femme Fatale with the rich husband and dim lover – all are trademark characters of the movement known as film noir, that elusive mixture of stark lighting and even starker emotions. Noir explores the dark side of post-war society – gangsters, hoodlums, prostitutes and killers – and showed how it corrupted the good and the beautiful. Many of these films are now touchstones of what we regard as ‘classic’ Hollywood – The Maltese Falcon(1941), The Big Sleep(1946), Double Indemnity(1944) and The Postman Always Rings Twice(1946). This Pocket Essential charts the progression of the noir style as a vehicle for film-makers who wanted to record the darkness at the heart of American society as it emerged from World War into Cold War. As well as an introductory essay on the origins of Film Noir, this Pocket Essential discusses all the classics from the heyday of the movement in detail and includes a handy reference section for readers who want to know more.

Film Noir – The Pocket Essential Guide

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