Sun 5 Aug 2012
An Archived Movie Review by Walter Albert: THE KILLING (1956).
Posted by Steve under Crime Films , Reviews[25] Comments
Movie Reviews by Walter Albert
THE KILLING. United Artists, 1956. Sterling Hayden, Coleen Gray, Vince Edwards, Jay C. Flippen, Ted DeCorsia, Marie Windsor, Elisha Cook, Joe Sawyer, James Edwards, Timothy Carey, Kola Kwariani, Jay Adler. Screenplay: Stanley Kubrick, with dialogue by Jim Thompson, based on the novel Clean Break by Lionel White. Director: Stanley Kubrick.
Stanley Kubrick has been one of the most admired and respected film directors for at least twenty years, with a record that few contemporary filmmakers can match.
His first major critical breakthrough was the striking anti-war film, The Paths of Glory (1957), which can be honorably compared to Lewis Milestone’s All Quiet on the Western Front (1931) and Jean Renoir’s Grande lllusion (1937), but his acceptance by both critics and audiences probably dates from 1963 and his savagely funny Dr. Strangelove. or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb.
This success was comfirmed with one of the most innovative and influential films of the period, 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), a success that has not been matched for the critics or the public by any of the three films he has directed since then: A Clockwork Orange (1971), Barry Lyndon (1975), or The Shining (1980).
Indeed the massive failure of Barry Lyndon to find an audience in this country and the critical disapproval that greeted his filming of Stephen King’s book, The Shining have appeared to provoke a reassessment of his work by many critics that can probably be best summed up by the observation that there may be less in his films than meets the eye.
Barry Lyndon was generally thought to be a beautiful but vapid film with an eccentric casting of Ryan O’Neal as the ambitious, doomed Barry, a performance that, according to a similar critical opinion, was perhaps equaled in its inappropriateness by Jack Nicholson in The Shining.
I don’t intend to devote this column to a defense of Kubrick’s recent films — although I will say that I think Barry Lyndon is one of the most underrated films of the past decade — but rather to turn to his third feature-length film, The Killing (1956).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KQXokRldBUo
The Killing is a black-and-white film (does anyone remember that black-and-white used to be the preferred medium for films?) based on Lionel White’s caper novel, Clean Break, with a script by Kubrick and additional dialogue by writer Jim Thompson.
After a series of short documentaries growing out of his work as a photographer for Look magazine, Kubrick filmed a claustrophobic war drama (Fear and Desire, 1953), of which there seem to be no prints for public viewing, and Killer’s Kiss (1955), a melodrama of a “girl … kidnapped by the sadistic owner of a dance hall and rescued … by a gallant young boxer.”
However, The Killing seems to be the earliest film that Kubrick is willing to acknowledge as his own, and, coming at the end of the great period of films noir which preceded Hollywood’s capitulation to the seductions of color, it is one of the best of the post-war “B” films and, in its bold dislocation of chronology, a film that, at moments, has some of the freshness and excitement of the New Wave French films of the late fifties and early sixties.
The French renaissance was in large part due to the influence of the post-war American “B” films that were a revelation to the directors, and The Killing is clearly, in its conventions and style, related to the work of other American directors of the period.
The Killing is the story of a meticulously planned impossible robbery: of the office of a race-track whose security is thought to be unassailable.
While The Killing is a well-crafted caper film that might appear to be limited in conception and execution (a usual criticism of genre films), the boldness of the planning and accomplishing of the robbery are not unlike the risks that Kubrick has taken in film after film: the slave whose vagabond army challenges the legions of Rome (Spartacus); the filming of Nabokov’s perverse and witty Lolita, whose subject was hardly the kind to be approved by the Legion of Decency or the United Mothers of America; the unsettling blend of beauty and violence in A Clockwork Orange and The Shining; the anarchistic comedy of Dr. Strangelove and the Olympian, epic canvas of Barry Lyndon; and, of course, the imaginative rehabilitation of the science-fiction film in 2001.
All of these films, so stylistically diverse and so difficult for an auteur-oriented criticism to assimilate, are so many challenges to the established and the conventional. They may be thought to be self-fulfilling fantasies, but there is a common thread running through these films from the earliest to the most recent in the impossible attempted and failed.
But with all of his attraction to the difficult and the resistant, Kubrick’s intelligence is not seduced by these visions. There is a lucidity in his recognition of the traps the great projects pose that is reflected in an ironic detachment that seems to enclose his films, even at their most outrageous and troubling, in a harmoniously balanced form. His comedy sense works against comic release; his sense of the horrific almost seems to be devoid of terror and fear.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r69KohzTYfg&feature=related
The conspirators are led by Sterling Hayden as Johnny Clay, a petty crook whose name is an all to accurate gauge of his prospects. His unimposing gang — Jay C. Flippen, Joe Sawyer, Ted de Corsia, Elisha Cook, Jr. — is perfectly cast from among the character actors who worked in films where their perfect control of an essential character could do much to salvage a film starring Hollywood’s latest vapidly empty romantic team.
There is not a single flaw in the casting — although the film itself is not without weaknesses — and the most surprising pairing of Elisha Cook, Jr., and Marie Windsor. Cook is a race-track employee whose dream of making it seem to have gone down the same chute as his marriage. Windsor is a posing, mocking bitch who deceives her husband with a small-time hood (Vince Edwards) and betrays the details of the plan her deluded husband reveals to her in an ill-considered moment.
Windsor is herself deceived by Edwards, a betrayal she is as aware of, at times, as Cook is of her true feelings for him. But the husband and wife are also wedded to their dreams and the flaw in the concept of the robbery is not in the plan but in human nature and, more distressingly, a bored and vengeful deity, Chance, that a dozen times in the film works against the project and its participants.
Lovers of a tight narrative in which there are no embarrassing moments of slack will not be happy with The Killing, where Kubrick is not afraid to linger over a sentimental scene (involving Flippen’s sick wife) that is ironically countered, by a Cook-Windsor confrontation; to introduce an overly friendly parking-lot attendant to interfere with one of the carefully timed “events,” or a traffic jam to delay Hayden’s return with the money; and, finally, to use a fat lady and a small, pampered dog to expose Hayden in the final moments of the film when he might be close to escaping with the money.
These gimmicks don’t always work: the parking-lot attendant is played by black actor James Edwards, whose speedy warming-up to a white mobster (they are both cripples) is unconvincing in the climate of the fifties; and the woman and, dog are too obviously planted and the reversal too clearly telegraphed to the audience.
But it might also be argued that these less-than-convincing details are a perfect demonstration of Kubrick’s belief in an almost diabolically conscious fate that takes its pleasure in blatantly countering the human actors’ futile attempts to work out their own destiny. And the most striking shot in the film looks like a still photograph of the conspirators lying dead in a confused jumble, sprawled near the hoods who came to take the money from them.
At the center of the film is the performance of Sterling Hayden, an earnest, unpretentious master of the game who can bring off the robbery but not carry off the spoils. Hayden does make a killing, but there is also the brutal slaughter, and it is difficult not to see the climax of the film in the room where the bloodied, wounded Elisha Cook, along with the audience, stares in horror at the tangled bodies, rather than in the impersonal, busy air terminal where Hayden’s final moves are checkmated.
The final shot is brilliant: as Hayden turns to the doors leading to the terminal, he sees two security men approaching. They frame the words THE END superimposed on the shot and they are the final punctuation for the film as surely as they punctuate Hayden’s collapse. In these final minutes we first seem him from the rear, his body sagging, almost without life, and when he turns to the camera and his captors he turns accepting the defeat that has crushed him.
There is one technique in particular that sets this film apart from other caper films I have seen. Our pleasure in this kind of film is usually in the planning of the caper and in our close attendance upon its execution and the aftermath. We expect to follow the timed and coordinated execution as if we were ourselves participants.
Kubrick, in an unsettling and exciting denial of those expectations, films the robbery from different points of view, backing up in time to show the different strategies which lead to the robbery. Kubrick has shrugged off any credit for this technique, saying that it was this narrative shifting that had interested him in White’s novel. The technique may be adapted, but that does not lessen its cinematic effectiveness.
The Killing is a film with so many fine things that only a few can be noted: the performance by Kola Kwariani as Maurice, a bald, bullet-headed chess player who stages a row to distract the police from Hayden’s moves; Coleen Gray’s small but important role as Hayden’s girl friend who is only on screen in the beginning and at the end but who is a perfect frame as her fears, expressed in her first scene, are realized at the conclusion; the marvelous use of interiors, in particular Hayden’s apartment which seems to be a series of interconnecting rooms that in spite of their perfect articulation are only vaguely defined and have something of the inevitability of a labyrinth; the bar at the racetrack that opens out toward the track like a stage on which some of the most important scenes of the film are played; and the frantic speed of the horses with their anonymous riders, always viewed from a distance, their movements described by an announcer with some of that detachment that seems so characteristic of Kubrick.
Whatever faults The Killers may have, it is, after thirty years, and a generation’s experiences with Kubrick’s films, an exciting and rich work. The Killers, drawing from the past and revelatory of Kubrick’s future, should not be consigned to fragmented late-night showings on TV and to filmographies. Kubrick remains a challenging and demanding filmmaker, and we should, perhaps, study the earlier movies in his game before we try to judge too quickly the newer ones.
Vol. 7, No. 4, July-August 1983.
August 5th, 2012 at 2:45 pm
No matter how many others I may flirt with as my top choice (Audrey Totter, Gene Tierney, Gail Russell, Lizabeth Scott), I always come back to the femme noirest of them all: Marie Windsor!
August 5th, 2012 at 4:40 pm
Nearly 30 years later, I wonder if Walter’s views of Kubrick has changed.
Kubrick’s strength as a filmmaker was his talent of expressing ideas visually. His weakness was a need for a decent script. 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY is the world’s longest music video, the story and script is weak to the point of nearly being ignored, but Kubrick’s images and editing make the picture worth remembering. DR STRANGELOVE, my favorite of Kubrick’s, owes most to the Terry Southern script, and the cast. However, it was Kubrick’s decision to film it in a documentary style that makes the movie a film classic.
Considering Kubrick’s talent for images, is it any surprise he excelled in noir, the film genre that is nearly all images?
August 5th, 2012 at 4:42 pm
The ‘inappropriateness of Nicholson in Shining’ ????????
Excuse me if I beg your pardon, I saw that film immediately after its release, and found it disturbing, as it was intended, but a Classic. Due to the very appropriate acting of Nicholson.
Well, critcs and films, and eunuchs and children….
The Doc
August 5th, 2012 at 7:25 pm
Sometimes critics get it right and sometimes they don’t.
Here’s what Wikipedia has to say about the initial reception of THE SHINING:
“The film had a slow start at the box office, but gained momentum, eventually doing well commercially and making Warner Bros. a profit. It opened at first to mixed reviews. For example, Variety was critical, saying “With everything to work with, […] Kubrick has teamed with jumpy Jack Nicholson to destroy all that was so terrifying about Stephen King’s bestseller.” It was the only one of Kubrick’s last nine films to get no nominations at all from either the Oscars or Golden Globes, but was nominated for a pair of Razzie Awards, including Worst Director and Worst Actress (Duvall), in the very first year that award was given.”
and
“Roger Ebert’s initial review of the film was unfavorable, but he later re-evaluated it and in 2006, The Shining made it into Ebert’s series of “Great Movie” reviews…”
Also from Wikipedia:
“Stephen King has been quoted as saying that although Kubrick made a film with memorable imagery, it was not a good adaptation of his novel and is the only adaptation of his novels that he could “remember hating”…”
On the other hand, I found one rather positive contemporaneous review online (Janet Maslin, New York Times), who said:
“Mr. Nicholson’s Jack is one of his most vibrant characterizations, furiously alive in every frame and fueled by an explosive anger.”
August 5th, 2012 at 8:11 pm
Critical evaluation comes down to opinion, albeit informed. The only test for a film or film actor, and I put the leading players not the director at the forefront, is in the memory of those who have seen the movie. What James Stewart so aptly termed, pieces of time. On Dave Kehr’s blog an array of so-called intellectuals are carrying on over the re-evaluation by Sight and Sound of Citizen Kane and the exaltation of Vertigo. Means nothing. Not even fun.
August 5th, 2012 at 9:01 pm
#5. Barry, it can be fun to argue as long as everyone understands there is no correct answer, and the point is explore other POVs that could lead you to see the film in a new and different way.
Sadly, today the goal seems to be the loudest not the most insightful.
The list can be found here:
http://www.bfi.org.uk/news/50-greatest-films-all-time
I have no idea where the love of VERTIGO has come from, back in my days Hitchcock’s PSYCHO and NORTH BY NORTHWEST were higher thought of. CITIZEN KANE has never been high on my list of Best Films. Best directed yes, but the film has a weak story and cardboard characters and nothing to interest the viewer beyond pretty pictures. Give me CASABLANCA any day.
August 5th, 2012 at 9:13 pm
Michael:
Of course. And our thoughts coincide. I don’t like Kane, but Orson and Everett Sloane are just grand…
August 6th, 2012 at 12:21 pm
It was Joe Sawyer’s character who had the sick wife. maybe I’m wrong but I got the impression that Jay C. Flippen’s character (he supplied the seed money for the robbery) was gay.
As for 2001, I’ve never been able to stay awake through it.
August 6th, 2012 at 1:57 pm
Michael makes a good point about Kubrick needing a good script, but it has to be said that Kubrick was always made a point of being very involved with the writing of the script (Arthur C Clarke was always very open about the fact that the original film script and the novel of 2001 were collaborations between him and Kubrick). As regards THE SHINING, I remember an interview with the director, where he said that what attracted him to the book was narrative trick that King played, whereby the reader is lead to believe that the Nicholson character might actually be mad. After his wife imprisons him, the ghosts unlock the door of the room that he is held prisoner in, proving that that the supernatural aspect of the story is actually real. However, King has said that Kubrick told him that he thought that the ghosts were all in the mind of Nicholson’s character! Confusing.
Although BARRY LYNDON is an absolutely gorgeous film, I would still rate THE KILLING higher. I just think that it’s a tighter production all round. It’s rather a shame that he never tried to do another noir or caper movie later on.
August 6th, 2012 at 2:18 pm
Michael: Just had a look at ‘best movies’ list. I suspect that the love of VERTIGO comes from a number of places. The fact that it was originally a bit of flop means that the critics can ‘rescue’ it from oblivion. I love VERTIGO, although it isn’t his best film (which I would say was REAR WINDOW, although everyone has their own favourite). VERTIGO is, however, his most fascinating film. It seems to be a straight thriller, but you get the feeling that Hitchcock was never quite certain how to tell the story. It is both strongly romantic and anti-romantic, and James Stewart’s character starts as a sort of tragic hero, but gets progressively scarier as the story unfolds. It doesn’t quite work, but it does repay many viewings, which is probably why the critics like it so much. Although this is thoroughly de-railing the post, my 10 fave Hitchcock movies are REAR WINDOW/TROUBLE WITH HARRY/NTH BY NORTHWEST/VERTIGO/STRANGERS ON A TRAIN/ROPE/FOREIGN CORRESPONDENT/SHADOW OF A DOUBT/TO CATCH A THIEF/THE LADY VANISHES.
August 7th, 2012 at 12:54 am
Lionel White seems to be an underrated crime writer. “The Killing” (“Clean Break”) is the only crime novel which was reprinted by BLACK LIZARD.
August 7th, 2012 at 1:52 am
I read a lot of White’s books when I was in high school, mostly the Gold Medal’s, but a few of the others when they were reprinted in paperback. They were good, but I’m afraid that after this many years, I don’t remember any details. Nothing sticks out.
CLEAN BREAK came out in paperback from Signet under the movie’s title, THE KILLING, but if I read it, I don’t remember it. It would be interesting to compare the movie with the book to see what it was that Kubrick added to it.
Other books by White that were made into US films:
THE BIG CAPER, 1959 with Rory Calhoun.
THE MONEY TRAP, 1965, with Glenn Ford, Elke Summer & Rita Hayworth.
THE NIGHT OF THE FOLLOWING DAY, 1968, with Marlon Brando & Richard Boone; based on the novel THE SNATCHERS.
I’ve seen the last two, not the first. NIGHT OF THE FOLLOWING DAY is terrific, MONEY TRAP not as good as I expected, with the stars it had in it.
I watched both movies when they came out, never since, so you can take those comments for what they’re worth. The only detail I remember is how tough a tough guy Richard Boone could be. It showed me an altogether different side of Paladin, that’s for sure.
August 7th, 2012 at 8:56 am
In the 1950’s Hitchcock was usually regarded as a “mere entertainer”.
Then French critics of the “auteur” school came along, and started suggesting that Hitchcock was a major artist. Auteurism spread to Britain, where Robin Wood wrote a book about Hitchcock in 1965, and the US, where Andrew Sarris championed the “auteur theory” and Hitchcock.
Most of the auteurists saw VERTIGO as Hitchcock’s richest and greatest film. This view was well-established by the 1960’s among both English-speaking and French auteurists.
I became an auteurist in 1971, and was well aware of VERTIGO’s reputation, when watching the are 1972 TV screening that was the only public showing of VERTIGO for decades. It was awesome to the max, to use a technical term!
VERTIGO has never lost its reputation.
The recent high placing in film polls simply reflects this long time standing.
August 7th, 2012 at 9:01 am
In today’s society it has become fashionable to attack experts.
Ordinary people are the salt of the earth, right? They know much more that these expert elitists – or do they?
In fact, experts on film history know much more than the average joe. And they are willing and eager to share their knowledge in books.
Just about everyone could learn a lot from Andrew Sarris’ history of classic Hollywood film, THE AMERICAN CINEMA: DIRECTORS AND DIRECTIONS. This book is full of picks and analyses of major films most people have never heard of, but which they would love if they saw.
It is the most eye opening experience imaginable.
By the way, Sarris picks THE MONEY TRAP as the best film of its director Burt Kennedy. I agree.
August 7th, 2012 at 9:43 am
#13 and 14, Mike Grost forgive me if I am too blunt in the following.
As a paid (and failed) writer of television and film (a local TV wrap around horror movie series and two screenplays that died in development), I despise the auteur theory. I tried getting through Sarris’s book but got tired of throwing it against the wall.
The best Burt Kennedy film(s) were the two SUPPORT YOUR LOCAL…with James Garner.
My favorite anti-auteur story is when screenwriter Robert Riskin, who had grown weary of Frank Capra stealing all the credit, dropped 400 blank pieces of paper on Capra’s desk and told him to put the “Capra Touch” on that.
We live in a society that values the individual over the group, the single hero, the single artist. Film and television rarely work that way.
Does auteurs exist, yes, but they are rare. Woody Allen is, Hitchcock (and Kubrick) was not. This does not mean Hitchcock was not a great director, he was one of the best behind the camera. He was a great visual stylist. I most admire Hitchcock for his understanding of film. His discussion on the rules of suspense and film is more important to learn than anything Sarris ever said or wrote.
August 7th, 2012 at 9:55 am
Well, michael, DOers and BLAers, as I wrote far above.
The Doc
August 7th, 2012 at 11:50 am
#16, Doc, having been a writer, critic, and viewer the true difference is motivation. Why do we watch or read?
The creative person seeks to tell a story. The critic seeks to understand, examine and teach. The viewer is there for escape and enjoyment.
August 7th, 2012 at 2:05 pm
Well, michael, the viewer is not necessarily a totally thoughtless drunkard, looking for another shot.
Even the normal viewer thinks about movies, books, etc. before and after consumption, discusses them with friends, or on a blog-
what sets the viewer apart from the professional critic is his healthy lack of ideology. The viewer rarely exclaims ‘How gauche’ .
August 7th, 2012 at 4:12 pm
When it comes to films, I call myself a viewer first and a reviewer second, and I’m strictly a seat of the pants kind of guy when it comes to the latter.
When it comes to critics, I find I learn a lot from them, even when I disagree with them. Sometimes the best critic/reviewer is the one you disagree with all the time.
In case anybody wants to know this, here’s how I approach watching films. The first time I’m watching for the story. The second time I’m watching the actors to see exactly it is what they are doing.
The director has to wait for the third time through before I can see what he is doing. This isn’t as cut and dried as it sounds, of course. Lots of overlap going on. I can multi-task!
Most movies aren’t deserving of more than one viewing. Some I have seen twice, and only a handful have I watched a third time to see and understand what the director is doing, and for me, that’s what it would take.
I don’t have enough oars in the water to say Yea or Nay when it comes to the “auteur” theory of filmmaking. I learn a lot from discussions like these.
If a film isn’t entertaining to me as a viewer, seeing that that’s my primary motivation for watching a film, I won’t watch it again, but I may look to see what critics might have had to say: why the movie didn’t work for them either, or as often as not, what it was that I missed.
Whether I care whether I missed it or not is whole ‘nother matter.
This whole comment was written strictly under my own “seat of the pants” limitations, but unless I change my mind about anything I’ve said, for the moment, it works for me.
August 7th, 2012 at 8:16 pm
From what Mike Grost had to say in Comment #14, I may have to take another look at THE MONEY TRAP, which came out in 1965. This is rather late for a black-and-white movie to be released, but that’s hardly the reason that I don’t remember it with a lot of enthusiasm.
I may be wrong, but I remember both Glenn Ford and Rita Hayworth as looking tired in this movie, more so than their respective parts would require. (Not so Elke Summer!)
But a second viewing has changed my mind about a movie more than once, and right now, this one sounds as though it’s worth another chance.
August 7th, 2012 at 10:39 pm
One of the great things about the video revolution is that it enables the viewer to do what Steve describes in Comment #19. If you have a favorite film, you no longer have to wait until it is on TV and then see it once. Now you can buy the dvd for example and view it several times. Often there are extras such as interviews and commentaries also.
For intstance, a few years ago I watched just about all the Alfred Hitchcock movies. There were 3 or 4 early ones I couldn’t find but for a couple months, I watched one film each day. I did the same with other directors such as another of my favorites, Ingmar Bergman. Also John Huston, Kubrick, Woody Allen, etc.
One of the things I was studying was the so called “auteur” theory that Mike Grost mentions. Andrew Sarris was a big believer in this theory and his arguement is very interesting to say the least. However, I do have to admit that though the director often is a big part of most films, there are other factors that make it hard to be a firm believer in the auteur theory.
In addition to the director, there is the influence of the screenwriters, the actors, the cinematographer, etc. Even a strong director with a big ego, will find it very hard to over shadow all this talent and keep it under his control.
For instance just about every film that I’ve seen with John Alton as cinematographer shows his influence in a big way. Directors may direct but that doesn’t mean they are the only major factor in the making of a movie. There are a few exceptions such as Woody Allen who can act, direct, write, produce, his own films. Ingmar Bergman certainly left his stamp on every movie he directed. But there are other factors in play most of the time and thus it is hard for me to believe in the auteur movement.
August 8th, 2012 at 7:05 am
Many of the points posters make here are well taken.
I subscribe to a logically “weaker” version of the auteur theory. One that asserts that “many directors make a creative contribution to their films. It is good to learn about and enjoy these contributions. Others also contribute to the films, such as writers, photographers and designers.”
*
THE MONEY TRAP seems to be on TCM this morning.
I don’t know if this film will be to everyone’s taste. It is indeed set among seedy people, and Ford and Hayworth do look exhausted and de-glamorized.
Haven’t seen this for a long while. Hope it stands the test of time!
Kennedy’s SUPPORT YOUR LOCAL GUNFIGHTER is indeed a funny comedy.
August 8th, 2012 at 12:09 pm
Taste is what makes these lists and arguing over others’ opinions so much fun. It is rare for any comedy not made in the silent era or by Woody Allen to make any of these top film lists. But I am a fan of comedy/drama so I am bias towards them over the drama that make up most lists.
Mike, your view of the auteur theory is one most of today’s critics (me included) agree with. I think the change came when some of today’s lesser talented directors declared themselves great auteurs.
Of course, the writer in me naturally hates the credit grabbing directors:).
August 8th, 2012 at 3:17 pm
UUUH, how gauche, you are an auteur allzo?
Pooof, you must come to our self-important group of self-sufficient gabblerrz !
August 8th, 2012 at 8:20 pm
Ah, yes, Doc. I’ve seen some critics get a little carried away with themselves, too. Let me know if you ever see me gabblerrzing!