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IMDB Summary: Johnny Clay (Sterling Hayden), an ex-convict, organizes a $2 million racecourse hold-up. His accomplices are race track cashier George Peatty (Elisha Cook, Jr.); the barman Mike OReilly (Joe Sawyer), crooked policeman Randy Kenna (Ted de Corsia), and former alcoholic Marvin Unger (Jay C. Filppen) who finances the operation. Johnny’s fiancee, Fay (Colleen Gray), worries that he may go back to prison for this but he tells her that the risks are worth taking.
George needs the money to give to his nagging and narcissistic wife Sherry (Marie Windsor), who is having an affair with Val Cannon (Vince Edwards), whom is trying to persuade Sherry to let him kill George so they can run off with his money. Mike needs the money to care for his constantly sick wife. Randy is revealed to need the money to pay off some local bookies for bad gambling debts…..
A young Stanley Kubrick
I had never heard of The Killing until putting together my List of Shame and was excited when I saw that it was from Stanley Kubrick. Surprisingly, this is not Stanley Kubrick’s first movie but actually his fourth. While I’d never heard of any of his previous films the movies that followed The Killing in order are Paths of Glory, Spartacus, Lolita, Dr. Strangelove, and 2001. The Killing must’ve Kubrick’s breakout film.
The movie is a little slow and uninviting at first. Each scene is introduced through the use of abysmal narration that sounds like re-edited voice overs from Dragnet. The voice overs provide exact (maybe?) times of each scene and a bunch of unnecessary detail that is implied by most of the onscreen action anyway. I was reminded a little of the original cut of Blade Runner with Harrison Ford’s dead pan and excruciating narration interfering with that movie. It wouldn’t surprise me if, like Ridley Scott, Kubrick had been forced to add the voice over by the studio.
There are also a number of characters that need to be introduced before the story can get going. This is a convention of heist films that has come a long way. Whether it’s Steven Soderberg in Ocean’s 11 or Michael Mann in Heat, the sequences in modern heist films where we meet all of the various thieves and scoundrel’s are some of the most fun in each of those movies. Here everything feels plodding and perfunctory. We meet each of the individual players in the robbery and find out why they are willing participants in it, but none of them are really interesting enough for us to care. Except for George, played by Elisha Cook Jr who was also Willem in The Maltese Falcon. Here again Cook creates the only likable everyman in a sea of degenerates. He desperately seeks affection from his wife Sherry who obviously dislikes him but knows how to manipulate his neurosis. When she senses he is keeping a secret from her Sherry coaxes the information out of him until he sings like a captive canary (I know…just watch it.)
Visually, the movie is a little uneven. Scenes occur in dark rooms with what appears to be very little light other than the bulbs we see onscreen. It’s effective and often beautiful, creating an inky black canvas for these dark-hearted characters to inhabit. And yet many of the day sequences are bizarrely washed out and shot at flat angles which evoked more of a fifties television feel than crime thriller.
Still, once all the muscle has been hired and everyone’s plans laid out for us, the movie takes off. Kubrick uses a non-linear editing style to show how every robber’s part in the story unfolds, frequently retelling bits and pieces of one section from another characters perspective. The intensity builds well. The difference between a caper film like Ocean’s 11 and a heist film like this is that in Ocean’s 11 we know everything is going to work out, just not how. In a heist film we’re pretty sure that something is going to go wrong, just not how. Johnny’s plan is a perfect one but the people executing it are not and when the consequences of their imperfection boil over, the results were, for me, completely unexpected.
The final half hour of the film was as captivating as any sequence in a Hitchcock or Scorsese or Nolan film.
Or, for that matter, Stanley Kubrick.
Verdict: Watch
note: If, like me, you hadn’t seen this movie but are planning on it, avoid IMDB until you do. There are some unfortunate spoilers in the original movies marketing material.
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