Stanley Kubrick really gets going with 1956’s The Killing, the first of his grand march through the genres. Paths of Glory, Lolita, 2001: A Space Odyssey, A Clockwork Orange, Barry Lyndon, The Shining, Full Metal Jacket and Eyes Wide Shut would follow but here Kubrick’s attempt to do genre movies in a distinctively different way focuses on film noir, and in particular the noirish heist.
Yes, there had been earlier movies, Killer’s Kiss and Fear and Desire, but Kubrick considered those the training warm-ups of the ambitious amateur rather than considered finished products. Here, thanks to a partnership with producer James Harris, he had enough money and enough technical talent behind and in front of the camera finally to do what he wanted.
That talent includes good actors – Sterling Hayden in particular as the boss of a criminal outfit putting together a heist at a racetrack. With tick-tock precision Johnny’s plan requires the right people to be in the right place at the right time. But right from the start Kubrick shows us the flaw that will blow this plan wide open. Johnny’s inside man, track cashier George Peatty (Elisha Cook Jr), desperate to prove to his floozy wife that he’s not just a sap, blabs about what’s about to go down. And she in turn blabs to her lover, Val (Vince Edwards).
The game, though no one knows it, is already up. “The killing” the boys hope to make turns out to be a killing of a different sort.
Jim Thompson wrote this adaptation of Lionel White’s novel and it has the salty tang of great hardboiled dialogue. Kubrick decided to stick with White’s fancy way with time, in a way Tarantino would later ape in Reservoir Dogs (which owes both White and The Killing a huge debt). Flashing forwards and backwards so some events take place out of chronological order, it confused the hell out of the studio (they insisted on the urgent, explicatory voiceover to keep audiences firmly on track), but repeatedly reinforces the sense of ironic fate at work.
Great noirish faces make up the gang – Hayden (tough), Jay C Flippen (needy), Ted de Corsia (venal), Elisha Cook (paranoid) and Joe Sawyer (complacent), while Marie Windsor is the floozy wife, a noirish femme fatale who turns out to be very deadly indeed.
This was the last movie Kubrick would shoot entirely in the USA, and it’s as if he’s bidding farewell to the land of his birth. There is much in the way of Americana – the race track, a motel, a bus station, the airport. Kubrick is also warming up the visual style that would become his trademark later on. Those long tracking shots through Johnny’s apartment are superb to watch and add a level of bravado that impressed Kirk Douglas enough to seek Kubrick out for Paths of Glory, where Douglas got lots more of the same.
A strident, brassy score by Gerald Fried and stark lighting by Lucien Ballard (who had a tough time working with Kubrick, who knew exactly what he wanted and only hired Ballard because he had to) all add to the sense of watching great noir unfolding in the big scenes. But the small scenes with supporting characters are spiky and flavoursome too – Johnny’s interactions with motel owner Joe Piano (Tito Vuolo), wrestler Kola Kwariani as a chess-playing Russian heavy causing a fracas at the track and setting up the diversion that will allow the heist to take place, Timothy Carey (adept at playing crazies) as the sniper hired to shoot and kill a racehorse.
It looks perfect now – its look, its sound, the dialogue, the casting – but it failed at the box office, making it, after Killer’s Kiss, another dud for Kubrick. But at least Kirk Douglas liked it. And, being a big star with his own production company, in the end that’s all that mattered.
The Killing – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2024
