• The Killing

7/30/23 (Sun)

Stanley Kubrick’s 1956 film was his third feature (though he refuses to acknowledge the first, like Biden’s seventh grandchild) but the first to gather some acclaim, at least critically if not commercially. He’s credited with the screenplay, but Jim Thompson seems to have contributed the key dialogue and cynical tone of the characters.

Johnny (Sterling Hayden) comes out of a five-year prison stretch immediately plotting one last heist before his retirement, aiming to relieve a racetrack of $2 million in bets (“Five years have taught me one thing, if nothing else: Anytime you take a chance, you better be sure the rewards are worth the risk. Because they could put you away just as fast for a $10 heist as they can for a million dollar job”). That starts proceedings off with a bang. He gathers a team of insiders and concocts a scheme in which the lead horse will be shot (preventing the winnings from being paid out), a man will cause a fight in the bar (allowing another to slip unnoticed into the back room), the cash will be taken at gunpoint from the betting area, and a truck will quickly take the cash away. Trouble arises when one of the co-conspirators blabs to his wife, who immediately calls upon her lover to steal the money for themselves. The end result is not pretty, forcing Johnny to attempt to spirit the cash away by plane. That effort comes undone in a most ingenious way. The dispirited Johnny doesn’t even try to get away at that point, shrugging, “What’s the difference?”

The story was taut, and the director wisely doles out information only as needed at the moment. Each character is given a credible motive, and while not always staged perfectly, like a corny scene of a man with his sick wife, it deepened our involvement. The way that the femme fatale squeezes the details of the scheme out of the husband and passes them on to her lover was masterful. The mechanics of the heist itself are never quite clear until the story unfolds from its various angles, deftly building the tension as it subverts our expectations. The ending with the money scattering in the wind was brilliant in both concept and execution (though I did wonder why the guy who went to such detail in planning the complicated scheme could forget to buy a proper suitcase).

The tired use of a Dragnet-style narrator, which featured in films like The Naked City ten years earlier, tells us things that are obvious or could be expressed better through the visuals. That was apparently imposed by the studio against the director’s wishes to clarify the time shifts that are the film’s most distinctive feature. Events repeat themselves in the film from the perspective of different characters like a cubist painting, allowing us slowly but surely to piece together the heist story from the ambiguous clues that had been laid out. The narrative is too on the nose in terms of specific times and doesn’t even fit the actual sequence of events in some cases (for example, the narrative says Johnny arrives at 7:15p when it’s clear that the time was later), making it more confusing than enlightening. Part of that was apparently a deliberate move by Kubrick, perhaps to keep viewers on their toes (and thumb his nose at the studio). The technique was famously picked up by Tarantino, who credits this film for the innovation, and is common today in TV series and film, as in Koreeda’s recent Monster.

The acting is serviceable but bland overall. That works for Hayden, who is appropriately distant in his role as the ringleader, but others barely registered. That was mitigated to an extent by excellent casting that fit the distinctive personalities, as with the ex-wrestler hired to cause a commotion in a bar and the man hired to kill the horse. The one happy exception is Marie Windsor as the shrewish wife who tries to sabotage the heist scheme to her own advantage. She gets great dialogue (to her mousy husband’s claims of an imminent windfall: “Of course, Darling. Did you put the right address on the envelope when you sent it to the North Pole?”) and delivers them with relish. Unfortunately Elisha Cook Jr. as her husband seemed to be sleepwalking through the role with no emotion whatsoever even in his most earnest moments. The parrot had more feeling than he did. The acting is not the film’s strong point.

I was surprised to hear a notable racial slur when the horse killer fended off a black parking attendant who was getting too friendly. I imagine the censors will get to this eventually, but it felt absolutely right under the circumstances.

The title refers nominally to the huge take that the schemers are aiming for in the heist, as well as the shooting of the horse that forms the first part of their plan. But of course it takes on new meaning with all the bodies lying around by the end of the film.

The film, though not widely recognized in its day, is now seen as highly influential in its jagged time structure and is considered one of the great noir pieces. It feels old-fashioned to me, though that could be due partly to the subsequent widespread use of innovations that the film itself introduced. Some scenes are unintentionally (I think) funny, like the Hulk-like wrestler’s shirt being ripped in half in the bar fight as he tosses multiple people effortlessly around, or the cartoonish image of a guy carrying his rifle in a guitar case (and then a flower box). But the tight plot, highly quotable dialogue (“I never had a real husband. Not even a man. Just a bad joke without a punch line”), interesting characters and varying perspectives make it a well-above-average thriller, and jettisoning the redundant narration would elevate it a few notches above that. I’m surprised that no one has remade this. One point to be grateful for: the potential that the film showed convinced the studio to let Kubrick direct another film, which proved to be the truly great Paths of Glory.