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 3rd 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.
