The Killing
by Stanley Kubrick
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DVD Cover Information
Actor: Coleen Gray, Elisha Cook Jr., Jay C. Flippen, Sterling Hayden, Vince EdwardsDirector: Stanley Kubrick
Brand: TWENTIETH CENTURY FOX HOME ENT
Cinematographer: Lucien Ballard
Writer: Stanley Kubrick
Editor: Betty Steinberg
Producer: Alexander Singer
Producer: James B. Harris
Writer: Jim Thompson
Writer: Lionel White
DVD: Region Code 1
Audio: English (Original Language), Dolby Digital 2.0; French (Original Language), Dolby Digital 2.0; English (Subtitled)
Format: Black & White, Dolby, DVD-Video, NTSC
Picture Format: Academy Ratio, 1.33:1
Running Time: 85 minutes
DVD Release Date: 1999-06-29
Audience Rating: NR (Not Rated)
Studio: MGM (Video & DVD)
Movie Reviews of The Killing
Movie Review: The master plan
Summary: 4 Stars
Stanley's Kubrick's third feature film made such a big splash that it has often been mistaken for his first, and is a particularly well constructed heist film that shows the complex planning involved in a big racetrack robbery at many stages before and after the crime. Like his previous film, KILLER'S KISS, Kubrick (working here with the classic crime writer Jim Thompson), employs a very complex narrative time scheme that involves multiple flashbacks; unlike as with the previous film, however, the screenplay here is a miracle of efficiency, and has been imitated many times since. We see all the minor plays recruited for the big heist, and then have the pleasure of seeing all the parts come together for the payoff: clearly Kubrick's allegory here is for how films themselves are made, with his cool mastermind Johnny (Sterling Hayden) standing in for the director, marshaling the different smaller players together to pull off the big score. But the fun of the film is seeing the multiple loose ends left during the planning of the crime that cause everything to unravel afterwards: the great shot near the end that reveals the fate of the heist money seems also a potential metaphor for a film's costs should it prove unsuccessful.
Since the inhumanly clean scheme is undone by human messiness, much depends on the talents of the supporting cast in showing how the scheme could fall apart completely, and they pull it off quite well. The most memorable are the small-time Elisha Cook and Marie Windsor (looking like a cross between Dolores Gray and Ileana Douglas, and wearing nightgowns in almost all of her scenes) as his unloving wife, who of course prefers darkly handsome Vince Edwards to her loser of a spouse. The cinematography is superb, and there's a great traveling shot of the mammoth Kola Kwariani making his way behind spectators to the racetrack bar as part of the scheme; even so, it's not quite at the level of the unforgettable exterior shots from KILLER'S KISS, which, though undoubtedly a more flawed film than this one, may in the end be more memorable.
Summary of The Killing
When ex-con Johnny Clay (Sterling Hayden) says he has a plan to make a killing, everybody wants to be in on the action. Especially when the plan is to steal $2 million in a racetrack robbery scheme in which "no one will get hurt." But despite all their careful plotting, Clay and his men have overlooked one thing: Sherry Peatty (Marie Windsor), a money-hungry, double-crossing dame who's planning to make a financial killing of her own...even if she has to wipe out Clay's entire gang to do it! Directed in a revolutionary story-telling technique by the legendary Stanley Kubrick, The Killing is tough, taut, tense and one of the greatest crime thrillers ever made!Stanley Kubrick's third feature, and first screen classic, is one of the great crime films of the 1950s. The Killing was written in collaboration with Jim Thompson, who penned pulp novels like The Grifters, The Killer Inside Me, and Pop. 1280, all of which were made into classic films. This time writing directly for the screen, Thompson joined with Kubrick to concoct a story about a desperate gang of lowlifes led by a grim, determined Sterling Hayden. Together they devise and execute a complex racetrack robbery, but inner tensions and the iron fist of fate work against them. The cast is uniformly superb, with Hayden, Jay C. Flippen, Timothy Carey, Marie Windsor, and Elisha Cook Jr. fleshing out characters torn between grandiose ambition and petty desire. Cinematographer Lucian Ballard fashions distorted, starkly lit interiors that reflect the psychological tensions of the characters. He and Kubrick also create one of the most memorably ironic final sequences in film history.
The Killing is a perfect introduction to the art and joys of film noir, and its bizarre narrative structure has been copied many times since. For a terrific double feature, see it with John Huston's The Asphalt Jungle, another noir masterpiece featuring Hayden; or Paths of Glory, Kubrick's next picture, again cowritten with Thompson; or even Jackie Brown, in which Quentin Tarantino pays homage to the ways this film leaps around in time. More commercial than some of Kubrick's later work, The Killing remains a tour de force by one of the world's finest filmmakers. --Raphael Shargel
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