It’s been a very long time since I wrote about one of the most popular and debated filmmakers of all time. But it really does seem sometimes that there isn’t a lot left to say about Stanley Kubrick. Even in my essay on 2001 several years ago, there were hardly any new observations to it -just myself affirming my own reading of it informed by various perspectives several others have had. But I hadn’t seen his earliest movies, which were surprisingly included in a retrospective series a national cinema chain was putting on this past month. And so I figured the time was finally right to at long last complete the Kubrick filmography.
Given the stature of the man and those innovative works that have become definitive to cinema, these lesser-known early movies are a fundamental curiosity -what do they mean to the totality of his career, how do they point to the mythic figure, his voice, and his style? And probably the critical movie of Kubrick’s early career was 1956’s The Killing, a bridge between his first two amateur independent features and the bigger scale Hollywood productions that would soon follow. A relatively cheaply produced film noir and heist movie that didn’t make a profit, The Killing was nonetheless successful enough within the industry and with critics to genuinely count as the director’s big break. So what was so special about it?
Well, like many a Kubrick movie to follow it expresses a fairly dim outlook on human nature, simply in the fact that its cast is comprised of exclusively awful people. Sterling Hayden, later the catalysing conspiracy-obsessed General Jack D. Ripper for Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove, is a similar brutal obsessive as Johnny Clay, chief architect of a major heist to rob a racetrack. Organizing the job with six collaborators and the goal of using the money to settle down, the major wrinkle in the plan becomes Sherry (Marie Windsor), the wife of the insecure teller George (Elisha Cook Jr.) -who conspires with her lover to steal the money from the gang once the heist is complete. The ripple of this doesn’t come into play until late in the film, as much of the movie proceeds without immediate conflict.
The bulk of the movie is in fact the set-up of the heist and the establishing of these characters, a brusque set of rogues whose base identity and movements are conveyed through a narrator (an uncredited Art Gilmore -the go-to radio announcer of that time, who gives the film the feel of a procedural). They are in addition to George, the racetrack bartender Mike (Joe Sawyer), a corrupt cop Randy (Ted de Corsia), Marvin (Jay C. Flippen) -who doesn’t seem to have any specific responsibility, and two distractions: sharpshooter Nikki (Timothy Carey) -tasked with taking out a horse- and career wrestler Maurice (Kola Kwariani) -tasked with starting a bar fight. Kubrick picked most of these actors, Hayden included, off of their work in other film noirs that he liked, and they all certainly fit well within that hard-boiled mode. The movie itself feels grittier because of this, and because this character actor cast features no box office stars like Humphrey Bogart or Fred MacMurray to depreciate, even in a small way, the movie’s severe tone. There is no white knight or morally conscionable figure -indeed the movie goes out of its way to prove otherwise. It dedicates a small sequence of Nikki finding his perch to showcase him as a racist. Another scene sees Randy callously ignore a woman crying to him for help -driving away as soon as she reaches his cop car window. And Johnny himself has no qualms at all violently threatening Sherry when he learns she knows about the plan.
The elaborate nature of the plan itself is interesting, if perhaps not enough so to warrant so much of the film’s attention, But in the details of this, Kubrick and his actors articulate well the tone of the piece. In many respects, The Killing is as pure a film noir as you can get -on a level not unlike Edgar G. Ulmer’s Detour. Even though it doesn’t feature as much suspense or consistent levels of seedy violence, it epitomizes the genre in a plethora of other ways. It’s got the crime plot and the femme fatale of course, the compromised anti-hero and the shabby underground setting. The gruff actors play their parts in a heightened manner, especially Hayden who’s got the quick tongue and forthright cadence that has become the cliché of the form. And when it erupts, the violence is particularly brutal and pulpy. In fact the movie, mainly in its last ten minutes or so when all the shit hits the fan, is very stark in its influence on Quentin Tarantino -as in, George Lucas ripping exact compositions from The Searchers and Hidden Fortress for Star Wars kind of influence. There is a shoot-out in an apartment building shot very similarly to the one from Pulp Fiction, including in the framing of the dead bodies on the floor. And a little later a sequence from inside a car endeavouring to escape bears more than a passing resemblance to an equivalent scene in. Reservoir Dogs. Tarantino has openly likened Reservoir Dogs to The Killing, another movie about a mismatched gang of assholes involved in a heist. Only in his movie it goes horribly wrong. The Killing however manages to pull the heist off with little issue -save for one casualty that didn’t particularly matter to the plan much to begin with.
Kubrick lays it out very meticulously, aided by the narrator cluing in the audience as to times and locations of various figures. In the execution though, one of his curious choices is the use of a clown mask for Johnny when he holds up the back-room counters for the cash. Not only does this once again demonstrate the film’s influence, the mask looking remarkably similar to the one the Joker wears when pulling off the bank robbery at the beginning of Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight (I was also reminded of the ex-president masks from Point Break), it showcases Kubrick’s unique edge for that time. It feels ahead of the curb for the 1950s, the use of such a colourful mask juxtaposed against a potentially violent criminal endeavour. And it’s an image that stands out, so much so that in spite of its brevity it became the cover art for this film’s Criterion edition. And of course it’s easy to draw a line from this armed hold-up by a masked man to the far more distressing masked criminal assault in A Clockwork Orange. Perhaps that too is why the scene and the imagery feels more violent than it is.
But then, the movie does get pretty violent -even if it comes late and in seemingly one great torrent. It is perhaps in perfect keeping with Kubrick’s particular twisted sensibility that after all that build-up the heist is completed virtually without a hitch -only for everything to go wrong immediately after. Those last ten minutes or so are really quite insane, as Sherry’s boyfriend Val (Vince Edwards) -accompanied by sidekick Joe Turkel (‘Lloyd’ from The Shining) turns up to steal the money, George guns them down while they manage to kill off the rest of the conspirators, George staggers home to confront Sherry -killing her before he himself drops dead; and Johnny, who witnessed part of this, flees with the money himself only to be cornered with his girlfriend Fay (Coleen Gray) at the airport after in the most delectable pay-off Kubrick could have devised, the suitcase carrying all the money (which he’d established was a cheap case with a crummy lock) while being loaded onto the plane is knocked off the carousel by freak happenstance, breaking open and causing the cash to be swept all over the runway by the plane’s turbines. Perhaps it is justice that Johnny, who’d earlier expressed no sympathy for killing a horse as part of the plan, is foiled by a loose dog distracting the baggage driver.
A lot of Kubrick’s signatures aren’t really identifiable in this movie, but in this last series of sequences he kicks into gear in a way not so palpable elsewhere. It is a very sharp turn into sudden chaos, and he illustrates it very efficiently; as well as the immediate desperation of Johnny both in hiding the money and then trying to get it past airport security. Hayden gets to play fear for the first time, which is quite satisfying. Again, nobody is worth investing in so there’s a wicked delight to their fall, which Kubrick obviously relishes. And it puts the movie on a slightly different plane than other film noirs.
It’s completely understandable how this is what got him greater attention in Hollywood. And that attention was vital. Without the industry confidence instilled by The Killing and its producer James B. Harris, Kubrick wouldn’t have made Paths of Glory, which in turn wouldn’t have gotten him behind Spartacus and all of the freedom that movie’s success bought for him into the 1960s, where he would truly make his name as Stanley Kubrick the Icon. Arguably, The Killing then is the most important movie of his career. It may not represent Kubrick as we conventionally think of him, but it is still striking in a way that many of his movies were. It’s vivid and curious, cynical and darkly funny; as perfectly emblematic of hardboiled crime cinema as his later movies were for their own genres.
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