The Killing

Director Stanley Kubrick on the set

Kubrick with Sterling Hayden

Kubrick sandwiched between Kola Kwariani (left) and Sterling Hayden

Kubrick (left) with Vince Edwards and Marie Windsor

Sterling Hayden with Marie Windsor

THE KILLING          A                    

USA  (83 mi)  1956 d:  Stanley Kubrick

The film that put Kubrick on the map, released by the studio as the second film in a double-feature, shot in just 24 days on a B-movie budget of only $320,000, elevated from the forty thousand he had to work with to film KILLER’S KISS (1955), but a flop financially, yet critics acknowledged a spectacular young talent, and the first Kubrick film to be adapted from another source.  The director was particularly impressed by the time structure in Lionel White’s 1955 crime thriller Clean Break, as White was the master of the heist gone wrong novel.  Even after 60 years, this is still a perfectly conceived film classic, a 50’s black and white film noir suspense thriller with voiceover narration and an unusual overlapping time structure that goes back and forth in time, starring Sterling Hayden at the top of his game as the bold and brash ringleader Johnny Clay, the recently released ex-con who plans a perfect heist at the Lansdowne Racetrack for $2 million smackeroos (actually shot at the Bay Meadows Racetrack just outside of San Francisco), assembling a five-man team of novices, an oddly devised collection of outsiders and luckless misfits, all driven by a desperate craving for money as the answer to all their prayers, where the ingenious scheme is carried out perfectly in a tightly planned time schedule until, little by little, everything unravels.  There is terrific dialogue written by Kubrick and Jim Thompson (who felt cheated over his secondary “additional dialogue” credit, claiming he wrote most of the screenplay), great acting from a collection of B-movie standouts, loaded with suspense and atmosphere, as well as huge doses of humor, and while it’s beautifully realized by the constant handheld camera movement of cinematographer Lucien Ballard who actually got his start working with Josef von Sternberg in the mid 30’s, eventually working with Sam Peckinpah, shooting The Wild Bunch (1969), mostly shot in and around Los Angeles, there were severe disagreements between the 27-year old director and the camera crew, as Kubrick was insistent upon adhering to his own compositional vision, shooting the aftermath of the shootout scene himself, which Martin Scorsese may have had in mind in Taxi Driver (1976).  The ingeniously complex narrative structure feels like a flashback film, yet there are no flashbacks, as the story is simply told out of order, with the dry voice of a narrator providing a 3^rd person newsreel style accounting of what’s taking place in each sequence, recalling the March of Time newsreels that Kubrick directed, specifying the exact time of the action, transmitting expository information, keeping viewers detached from the central drama, giving the film a documentary style depiction, each segment feeling like a story within a story.  The first few sequences are particularly illuminating, as they introduce the main characters, while also providing multiple levels of character motivation, delving into their inner psychology, revealing a fairly atypical gang of thieves, including two insiders.  Johnny and his girl Fay (Coleen Gray) set the stage, as she’s a complete contrast from the usual femme fatale role, instead showing an intense devotion to Johnny.  Mike O’Reilly (Joe Sawyer), the track bartender, has a bedridden wife at home, while the crooked cop, Officer Randy Kennan (Ted de Corsia), is up to his ears in debt to loan sharks, while George Peatty (Elisha Cook Jr.), a half-pint window teller at the track, is in over his head in a masochistic relationship to his disinterested, money-grubbing wife Sherry (Marie Windsor), spilling the beans to her about the upcoming heist while she’s two-timing him with another man, Val Cannon (Vince Edwards), who then wants a piece of the action.  The odd man out is Marvin Unger (Jay C. Flippen), whose bankroll is financing the operation, with suggestions of a homoerotic subtext with Johnny.    

In addition, Johnny has hired two specialists to perform specific functions that are not part of the five-way split, knowing nothing about the overall operation, and paid up front not to ask questions.  Professional wrestler and chess master (and philosopher) Kola Kwariani plays Maurice, paid to start a fight with the bartender and create a disturbance, distracting track cops from the heist taking place, while oddball movie psychopath Timothy Carey is Nikki Arane, a lunatic gun nut and sharpshooter, is paid to shoot the lead horse during the high stakes race, creating yet another distraction, slowing the crowd’s mad dash to collect their winnings.  Influenced by the success of John Huston’s THE ASPHALT JUNGLE (1950), it spawned a whole subset of crime heist movies, all exploiting a headlines-grabbing event, the January 1950 robbery of the Brinks Armored truck office in Boston, at the time the largest heist in American history.  The Halloween mask that Johnny uses for the crime mirrors the method used by the Brinks robbers.  While Sterling Hayden is connected to Huston’s film, appearing as a gunman, three members of this cast, Hayden, Ted de Corsia and Timothy Carey, appeared together the previous year in the low-budget noir film, André de Toth’s Crime Wave (1954), also featuring a near documentary style, while the art director, Ruth Sobotka, was Kubrick’s wife at the time, who amazingly drew charcoal drawings of every scene for the actors to study.  This film’s hard-boiled script represents a giant leap forward in quality from his earlier work, with Kubrick masterfully accentuating the meticulous precision needed to carry out this master heist, billed as the perfect crime, eventually thwarted by human fallabilities, a theme returned to frequently by Kubrick, including LOLITA (1962), 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), and A Clockwork Orange (1971), where most of his career, with the exception of Kirk Douglas in PATHS OF GLORY (1957) or Spartacus (1960), Kubrick displayed a preference for flawed protagonists who aren’t particularly virtuous or admirable, finding anti-heroes who are by no means sympathetic.  Despite Hayden’s rock solid performance as the tight-lipped, perfectly chiseled, hard-nosed protagonist, emulating the virile masculinity of film noir, we never penetrate his inner psyche, knowing nothing about his backstory other than the knowledge he served 5 long years in prison, so while he has his appeal (and legions of followers), the film itself is tinged with an existential noirish fatalism, with the narrator at one point informing viewers that this could be the last day in Johnny’s life, reminded at every turn how easily things could go off the rails, where instead of one man standing out, the beauty of the film is the emphasis on the coordinated planning and execution, where each one is an essential cog in the overall success of the plan, continually offering shifting points of view.  Young gun Quentin Tarantino was so enthralled with the nervy Kubrick style, not just Reservoir Dogs (1992) and Pulp Fiction (1994), but the climax in Jackie Brown (1997) all emulate what Kubrick does in this film, each one showing different character’s perspectives told out of order, drawing comparisons to Kurosawa’s RASHOMON (1950), actually receiving a call of support from Marlon Brando afterwards who was impressed by such a distinctive style from a first-time filmmaker.         

While Johnny is singled out with more screen time, as he is the brains behind the operation, it’s curious that no character in the film, including the omniscient narrator, is fortunate enough to have all the information, as each have knowledge of only certain parts of the overall operation as it unfolds, leaving viewers in the most advantageous position, as we see all.  Johnny, for instance, never sees Nikki shoot the lead horse Red Lightning, or sees the cop drive away with the money, or hears the revealing conversations between Sherry and Val opening up a new can or worms, and he is excluded from the startling revelations at their meet site afterwards, arriving late, seeing one of the men covered in blood staggering to his car, beating a hasty retreat away from danger.  Viewers, on the other hand, see every aspect of the robbery, and are privy to the intimate conversations between lovers, which is what makes the jagged storyline all the more intriguing, curious to see how it all plays out.  While the film uses the conventions of 1940’s film noir, wrapped in a fog of an all-encompassing fatalism, filled with archetypal characters that we immediately recognize, it’s the unfamiliar elements Kubrick brings to the story that are most fascinating, where he expertly blends the familiar with the unfamiliar, something he does with all his films, no two of which are the same, combining elements of classical Hollywood with a more modernist technique, always finding new material that stands on its own, becoming something we’ve never really seen before.  Other films have used fragmented narrative methods before, but not to the extent that it becomes the organizing principle of the film aesthetic.   Members of the gang rarely see one another during the course of the heist, becoming glaringly obvious when they do intersect, if only for a brief moment, using double takes, returning again and again to the same moment in time, but from a different perspective, pushing the conventional obsession with time to the breaking point, with Kubrick literally replaying his narrative, continually accumulating more clues, creating a puzzle for the audience to piece together, where the fragmentary structure only heightens the interest.  The taut manner in which it all unfolds, with near mathematical precision, provides a good likelihood that they can ultimately get away with it, even if they are an unlikely group of small timers, and they very nearly do pull it off.  If not for a Hitchcockian device so brilliantly used in The Birds (1963), introducing a persnickety old woman in her 80’s, Mrs. Bundy (Ethel Griffies), as a know-it-all who views herself as an ornithological expert, insisting “Birds are not aggressive creatures,” while here Kubrick introduces another chatty old grandmother (Cecil Elliott) at the airport, holding a diminutive poodle that she obviously spoils and dotes upon, but allows the poodle to escape and erratically create enough havoc at the airport terminal that Johnny’s dreams simply evaporate into thin air.  So close, and yet so far.  Like the crime itself, it’s an almost perfect film experience.   

The Directors Series: Stanley Kubrick • Cinephilia & Beyond 

They Live By Night

THEY LIVE BY NIGHT         A-                

USA  (95 mi)  1948  d:  Nicholas Ray

Take it easy, but take it.                      

—Chicamaw (Howard da Silva), becoming Chicagoan Studs Terkel’s famous radio sign off line

Despite his legendary auterist status, embraced and idolized by the Cahiers du Cinéma crowd in the 50’s and 60’s, including Jacques Rivette and François Truffaut, Ray remained a director at the margins of the American studio system, a quintessential film maverick offering a return to poetic lyricism through much more personalized films, despite working within various genres, becoming a master at conveying loneliness through alienated characters draped in a sense of melancholy, providing an alternative vision in their continuing quest for a better world.  While this is ostensibly a lovers on the run film, with morally ambiguous film noir shadings, what distinguishes it are the idiosyncratic touches that basically reconfigure what we are seeing, signaling a shift in the noir genre by introducing rural outlaws instead of urban criminals or private eyes, using the road movie as an American symbol of that elusive freedom, while offering prophetic revelations.  Adapted by Ray from the 1937 Edward Anderson Depression novel Thieves Like Us, filmed again by Robert Altman in THIEVES LIKE US (1974), this film debut has a distinctly spare look about it with a drawn-out sense of fatalism, using naturalistic performances, shot by George E. Diskant, who also shot Ray’s On Dangerous Ground (1952), becoming one of the better doomed lover stories about a couple of innocents who never had a chance at life, framed in a black and white world of criminality, where consequences await those who pursue a life of crime.  The film is also noted for displaying an equally unusual sound design, including train whistles and brief snippets of blues or folk songs representative of Southern traditions, even Christmas songs.  In the 1930’s, Ray had worked with John and Alan Lomax traveling through the South while recording folk songs for the Library of Congress, so he brought this familiarity to his first picture.  Farley Granger is Bowie, a handsome young kid on the run with a couple of seasoned bank robbers, where all three break out of prison together, headed by T-Dub (Jay C. Flippen) and his psychopathic partner Chicamaw (Howard da Silva).  While temporarily holed up, Bowie meets Chicamaw’s niece Keechie, Cathy O’Donnell, the girl next door in William Wyler’s THE BEST YEARS OF OUR LIVES (1946), initially dressed in overalls and cap, looking plain and ordinary, boyish even, without an ounce of feminine allure, which becomes markedly different over time.  But the awkward interest they take in one another develops quickly through an intense yearning expressed through an unpretentious series of personal questions for each other, where their closely guarded selves open up ever so slightly.  Both Granger and O’Donnell teamed up again in Anthony Mann’s crime thriller Side Street (1950).  Despite warnings from Keechie that nothing good can come from robbing banks, Bowie feels he owes these guys his help, like some sort of apprentice, and basically does what they ask, but after a successful heist, he screws up with a car crash afterwards, leaving his gun and traceable fingerprints behind, where the newspapers start calling him the ringleader, which aggravates his veteran partners, a kid getting top billing, but also brings the cops down upon them in greater force.  In an interesting move, they each split up, where the camera only follows Bowie and Keechie, where a hardened crime story turns into a tender youth romance on the run, featuring close-up shots of the couple gazing into each other’s eyes, filled with heart rendering moments and melodramatic twists.  

Described in his memoir Front and Center by John Houseman, who produced this early work:

From his year’s apprenticeship with Frank Lloyd Wright, Nick had acquired a perfectionism and a sense of commitment to his work which were rare in the theater and even more rare in the film business.  But in his personal life he was the victim of irresistible impulses that, finally, left his career and personal relationships in ruins.  Brought up in the Depression, one of a generation with a strong anti-Establishment bias, he had been taught to regard hardship and poverty as a virtue and wealth and power as evil.  When success came to him in its sudden, overwhelmingly Hollywood way and he found himself, almost overnight, living among the rich and powerful with a six-figure income of his own, he was torn by deep feelings of guilt, for which his compulsive, idiotic gambling ($30,000 lost in one night in Las Vegas) might have been a neurotic form of atonement. 

A bisexual director whose affairs and addictions were reflected in existential films about outsiders and rebels, Truffaut indicated Ray’s films brought a “European sensibility” and an uncommon degree of realism to classic Hollywood fare, describing Ray as “the poet of nightfall,” suggesting his films are “about people whom society was opposing and whom society was crushing, and who were almost doomed to be defeated by society.”  The film introduction is telling, expressed in a prelude sequence, showing romantic images of the couple in love kissing onscreen while alerting viewers that “This boy... and this girl... were never properly introduced to the world we live in...”  What immediately follows is an aerial view of an action shot, certainly atypical of the times, capturing a speeding car cutting across a barren rural landscape, revealing an outlaw gang making their escape, placing the film in a noirish crime setting, making this is the first scene Nicholas Ray ever directed.  The film radically reconceptualizes what it means to operate as a romantic couple within a film noir universe, where all attempts to leave a life of crime behind ends in a failure to recapture their lost innocence.  Yet the strength of the film lies in the creation of a passionate yearning for a better life, beautifully captured by a depth of emotion in their shared closeness, where it’s easily the first time something this good has happened in their young, undeveloped lives.  The stark economic poverty of the Depression mirrors their starving emotional centers that crave love and all it entails, offering a hopeful alternative to a life of crime.  Cathy O’Donnell is not your typical lead actress, lacking star power beauty, but she has a gentle kindness and human warmth, where fragility is her femininity, something inexpressible while living in the company of outlaws, where everyone is hardened and rightly suspicious of others.  Farley Granger, who went on to star in Hitchcock’s ROPE (1948) and Strangers On a Train (1951), has matinee idol good looks, yet he’s a sympathetic figure, initially imprisoned at the tender age of 16 for a murder he didn’t commit, now only 23 and still a kid, where he seemingly has his whole life in front of him.  Once they separate from the others, their innocence is reflected in their behavior, a bit giddy to be in each other’s company, like a drunken revelry, treasuring those small moments of intimacy.  1946 marked a postwar turning point, entering a golden era in Hollywood history, no longer interested in escapist fantasies, developing a taste for problem pictures and film noir settings, reflecting the frustrations of those returning from war, where so many of the film noir protagonists are war veterans.  Filmed in 1947, the film was not released until two years later, released a year earlier in England, as it was postponed while Howard Hughes was in the process of buying the RKO Studios, wary of the projects already in production as they didn’t reflect his own personal stamp of approval, showing little interest in the film, finally released after two subsequent Ray films had already played in theaters.

  

What’s memorable about this film is the moody tone, which shifts from the criminal milieu of hardened cynicism to romantic adolescents dreaming about their place in the world, where the two couldn’t be more opposite.  But they give it a try in a beautifully developed interlude sequence, getting married on a whim and leading a short life of domestic tranquility, living in some idyllic remote mountainside cabin in the woods that may as well be a million miles from anywhere.  But Chicamaw interrupts their marital bliss, claiming they made an “investment” in choosing Bowie to break out of jail with them, refusing his request for freedom, pressuring him back into criminality, which is all they really know.  In an interesting twist, they don’t show the subsequent robbery itself, just the downbeat aftereffects, as the tone of doom and gloom is everpresent as the radio announces the updated news reports.  By the time Bowie gets back to Keechie, his face is plastered all over the newspapers, even in the isolated mountain regions, where they quickly make an escape, sleeping by day, traveling only by night, where they soon learn they can’t trust anyone.  Their dialogue comes in short bursts, as neither one talks much, or reveals much, seemingly banal exchanges, yet they’re so tuned into each other’s wavelength where they have a certain timeless charm about them, beautifully expressed by an exchange of watches that are never actually set to any real time, operating in a world all their own where they set their own rules.  When they go out for a night on the town, “just like other people,” it’s curious how they separate themselves from the conventional world, showing a distinct disinterest in people walking in the park, riding horses, or playing golf, revealing how they’ve cultivated their own path living as outsiders, existing in their own world, where freedom is largely a figment of their imagination, always dreaming of escaping to Mexico, including a dreamy nightclub sequence that includes black jazz singer Marie Bryant singing “Your Red Wagon,” your red wagon - YouTube (3:59), “where you get burned when you play with fire,” all of which feels completely outside the time and place where they happen to be, yet psychologically the world is closing in on them as they know of no place left to go, a predecessor to Gun Crazy (1950), Bonnie and Clyde (1967), and BADLANDS (1973).  The betrayal at the end is a bleak reminder of the anti-Communist purges of the Hollywood blacklist during the Red Scare, filmed just as HUAC was reopening its hearings, foreshadowing circumstances where Ray himself, a devout leftist and former Communist party member in the late 30’s, would name names before the committee in the early 1950’s, yet surprisingly he was not hounded and remained free to continue working uninterrupted, largely protected by a close friendship with RKO movie mogul Howard Hughes.  What’s interesting are the familiar themes expressed in Ray’s later work Rebel Without a Cause (1955), like doomed romance, the rhapsodic intimacy of young love, adolescent flights of fantasy, a safe place protected from the outside world, the ineffectual family structure, or having no reliable friends to turn to, where the depths of alienation are so deep that all these kids ever talk about is being just like other people, just like real people.  All they want is to have a chance in this world.  But by the end, the framing of the two lovers is like a practice run-through of the final scene in REBEL WITHOUT A CAUSE, as the scenes of haunting emotional devastation have an eerie familiarity about them.  

Eddie Muller's intro to "They Live by Night" (1949) on TCM ... YouTube (4:26)