The Killing [DVD] [1956]
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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Kubrick’s wonderful early noir classic,
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During a span of 46 years, Stanley Kubrick made only 13 feature films, from “Fear and Desire (1953)” to “Eyes Wide Shut (1999)”. Although each has its own charm and unique taste and style, none looks much like the other in terms of genre and theme. “The Killing” represents Kubrick’s entrance into the dark shadowy world of film noir. He was the master of exploring the dusky side of human nature in his pictures, focusing on crime, deceit, betrayal and morality. So, film noir & Kubrick: what a perfect fit.
The term “killing” refers to an elaborate heist of a race track. The robbery is masterminded by ex-Alcatraz inmate Johnny Clay, who rounds up a motley assortment of crooks, most of whom are small-timers as well as insiders in the race track lounge. Clay and his trusted accomplices have different stories and motives. We know a lot about them because the movie has an unusually convulted narrative structure, which was ahead of its time albeit outdated today. Flipping back and forth in time, he introduces a character, takes him a certain way where each gets a chance to tell his version of the story. Such kind of flashbacks and flashforwards are used in heist sequence, reflecting the various aspects of the robbery in different space and time.
That non-linear storytelling works well with Kubrick’s deft directorial touch, but when the film was first released in 1956, United Artists dumped it on the grounds that it was too weird for average viewer and nobody would sit through that. Then Kubrick decided to re-edit the film. After watching new version he absolutely hated it, and put it back the way first edited it. It was his very first triumph to gain absolute control over his work.
Overall, “The Killing” is a perfect classic film noir, depicting man’s foibles of greed and betrayal devastatingly real. Its importance not only comes from its influence on modern day noirs, such as Tarantino’s “Pulp Fiction” and “Jackie Brown”, but also it manifests what Kubrick was capable of doing with a shoestring budget of $320,000, even at an age of 27.
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|A crime masterpiece,
An early piece of cinema from acclaimed director Stanley Kubrick (2001, The Shining, Full Metal Jacket etc.) The story tells of a group of men who come together to rob a race-track in the middle of their biggest race. Each character has his own part to play in the crime and the robbery can’t go ahead unless they all perfom their own part.
When it comes to the actual robbery, we get to see the crime form each man’s point of view, which means the time of day repeatly shifts to keep up. It’s a style not unlike ‘Pulp Fiction’ (Quentin Tarentino has said on many occasions that this is one of the films that inspired him to write that film as well as Resevoir Dogs)
You could say that the acting is wooden, or 2-dimensional, but it seems to fit the film noir setting of the piece. There is a ‘True Romance’ style shooting and a final twist at the end thrown in for good measure.
If you haven’t seen this film before, you are missing out on a cracking bit of drama. It comes with Tarentino’s seal of approval, and it’s a Kubrick, what more do you want !!
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|Kubrick makes a real killing,
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You can’t help wondering if Sterling Hayden didn’t get the feeling that he was just rehashing his biggest hit The Asphalt Jungle when he starred in heist movie The Killing six years later, but today Kubrick’s shoestring production holds up much better than its big studio predecessor. Only three films into his career and Kubrick was already setting out his big theme – society’s need to break individuals that threaten it into manageable cogs in the machine, aided in its task by their own character flaws. He even has Kola Kwariani spell it out in so many words: “You have not yet learned that in this life you have to be like everyone else. The perfect mediocrity. No better, no worse. Individuality is a monster, and it must be strangled in its cradle to make our friends feel comfortable. 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 underlying wish to see them destroyed at the peak of their glory.”
The individual in question is Hayden’s crook planning the biggest heist of the century with the help of a corrupt cop, a bartender and a racetrack cashier, bankrolled by Jay C. Flippen’s moneyman, who clearly has a crush on him and goes straight to the bottle when he realises it’s not mutual. The film’s big gimmick at the time was the film backtracking to follow each member of the gang as they carry out their part in a vicious but ingenious and perfectly planned-to-the-second racetrack heist. But perfect plans, like computers or Marine recruits, have a tendency to break down due to a human error in the programme, and in this case the human error is Elisha Cook Jr., or more precisely his wife Marie Windsor in a double-crossing downmarket femme fatale role that would have been played by Gloria Graham in a bigger budgeted picture and who delivers a performance that seems the template for Joan Collins’ entire career. Desperate to keep her even though she’s cheating on him with Vince Edwards’ punk (who in turn is cheating on her), he gabs a little too much about the plan…
Hayden gets probably the best role of his career, his fast-talking no-nonsense totally in control delivery giving the film an urgency even when it’s just men sitting in dark rooms talking, and when he delivers his forlorn last line it’s as if the man really has had all the humanity drained out of him. Yet good as he is, the standout in the cast is Elisha Cook Jr in what may well be the his very best performance as the “joke without a punchline” clerk, a man who loses control the more he tries to display it. There’s some fine black and white camerawork from Lucien Ballard boasting alternating stark, almost reportage-style rough-and-ready shots with some strikingly controlled long tracking shots that Kubrick later revised into a visual trademark, and there are a few other pointers to Kubrick’s future work as well – seen with hindsight, Hayden’s clown mask looks remarkably Droog-like, while two of the doomed soldiers in Paths of Glory, Timothy Carey (a man who could look sleepily menacing even when stroking a puppy) and, briefly, Joseph Turkel (best remembered as the ghostly bartender in The Shining) turn up in supporting roles. The Dragnet-style narration can be excessive at times, but does help immensely in the heist finale as the narrative constantly doubles-back on itself and the film’s timeframe, and there’s some terrific dialogue courtesy of the great Jim Thompson (“You like money. You have a great big dollar sign there where most women have a heart.”). It’s still tied to the crime-must-not-pay morality of its day, but it executes it with startling immediacy and a great “What’s the difference?” ending.
The only extra is the original trailer.
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