The Killing (1956)

Film: The Killing (1956)
Stars: Sterling Hayden, Coleen Gray, Vince Edwards, Jay C. Flippen, Elisha Cook, Jr., Marie Windsor
Director: Stanley Kubrick
Oscar History: No nominations
Snap Judgment Ranking: 4/5 stars

Throughout the Month of June, as a birthday present to myself, we'll be profiling 15 famous film noir movies I've never seen (my favorite film genre).  Look at the bottom of this review for some of the other movies we've profiled.

Some of the films in this series are on here because they were massive hits in their era, quickly becoming classics in their genre.  The Killing, on the other hand, was decidedly not a hit in its era-it barely even got released.  A low-budget film of the mid-1950's, it was paired as the second feature to Bandido!, a forgettable Robert Mitchum western from United Artists.  One could argue that only Hayden & Gray are even remotely known today on the cast list, and even then only for supporting parts in classic films, not as leads (Gray is John Wayne's love interest in Red River, Hayden was the corrupt police officer in The Godfather).  But the movie had an enormous impact after the film was made, and you can probably guess that considering who is listed above not as a star of the film, but as its director-this was one of the first movies that Stanley Kubrick, one of the cinema's greatest masters, ever made.

(Spoilers Ahead) The film is really interesting in the way that it's set up, so the plot is going to sound a bit more mundane than it actually is.  The film is about a heist at a horse track, where a group of men led by Johnny Clay (Hayden) are pulling off an intricate robbery that will happen when one of the horses in the race is shot, and then another man breaks out into a fight to distract the guards long enough for Johnny to steal all of the money that has been bet on the races that day.  The plan goes awry when one of the men's (George, played by Cook) wife Sherry (Windsor) tells her lover Val (Edwards) about the robbery, and tries to pull a double cross on George and the other men by stealing the money after it's stolen.  This ends with all of the men dead save for Johnny and George, and George is gravely injured, going back to his home to kill Sherry, who thinks she's about to be rich with her handsome boyfriend (and potentially with a dead husband to boot).  Johnny and his girlfriend Fay (Gray) try to flee, but their airline won't let them carry on the bag that has all of the cash (it's too large), so they check it, and then watch as a loose dog distracts the luggage carrier's driver, causing the suitcase to fall on the runway and let the entire $2 million get sucked up in a whirl.  Johnny & Fay begin to run, but a despondent Johnny basically gives himself up to the police, proclaiming "what's the difference?" in the process.

The most striking thing about the picture is that it's told out-of-sequence.  While the final moments with Johnny are truly the last moments chronologically in the film, we continually see certain scenes from different angles.  For example, the death of the horse is told through the lens of Johnny, as well as the person who shoots the horse, as well as the man who starts the robbery, with the track announcer serving as a reminder of where we are at during the heist.  This works spectacularly well, and might be the first time I can remember seeing such a narrative device in a Hollywood picture.  It then gives us explanations as to why something odd might be happening in one scene (for example, why is meticulous Johnny running late and not in the room when Val & George shoot up the hideaway?), and for a movie that is focused entirely on a heist itself, it shows all of the ways the crime can go right (and ultimately wrong) despite the best intentions of those involved.  The movie has been stated as an inspiration for Quentin Tarantino's Reservoir Dogs, but honestly it's hard not to see Pulp Fiction in the way that the movie unfolds as well.  The film was little seen at the time, but one of the people that did see it was Dore Schary, who hired Kubrick to direct Paths of Glory, which led to Spartacus, which led to Kubrick being a household name.

The movie's acting is quite interesting.  The movie uses a large cast, many of the actors bit players from other noir films (Cook, for example, has a small part in The Maltese Falcon and Gray was in Nightmare Alley which we investigated earlier this month).  One could argue that no one is giving a standout performance (Cook & Windsor get the best parts, though), but all of the work feels very much in service to the director, frequently giving standard, boilerplate roles more meaning in the small ways that the characters skew from our standard understanding of noir.  Look at the way that Gray, whose character is a saint, is ultimately the person who is trying to keep Johnny on the run in the final moments of the film, making you wonder for a second just how they ended up together, and exactly how innocent her character is.  These slight deviations in what could (and likely would have been without this particular director) have been a forgettable noir give a nod to what eventually would be auteur theory in Hollywood movies, something that Kubrick more than almost anyone else would exemplify.  Of course, this was strangely the last film that Kubrick ever filmed entirely in the United States, but that's a story for another day.

Previous Films in the Series: The Big Heat, Pickup on South Street, Gun Crazy, Night and the City, In a Lonely Place, They Live By Night, Nightmare Alley, Ride the Pink Horse, The Killers, The Woman in the Window, The Big Sleep