Tue 16 Aug 2016
THE KILLING. United Artists, 1956. Sterling Hayden, Coleen Gray, Vince Edwards, Jay C. Flippen, Ted DeCorsia, Marie Windsor, Elisha Cook, Joe Sawyer. Screenplay: Stanley Kubrick, with additional dialogue by Jim Thompson; based on the novel Clean Break by Lionel White. Director: Stanley Kubrick.
A revolutionary heist film in many regards, and considered by many viewers as a classic. (It has an 8.0 rating on IMDb.) Not Kubrick’s first film, but while it’s one that while it didn’t make a lot of money at the box office, what it did do was to make film critics sit up and take notice of a new guy in town.
The story is a old one by now, and maybe it was even then: The theft of $2,000,000 in cash from a race track is meticulously planned, and everything goes as smooth as silk when all of a sudden, it doesn’t. What’s distinctive about this film is that it’s shown in non-linear fashion, and I’m willing to wager that in 1956 audiences were not ready for stories told that way, even with some (studio required) voiceover narration to help them out.
One problem I personally have with this film is that I do not believe for one second that Marie Windsor’s character would stay married to Elisha Cook for five minutes, much less than five years. I only wish she had had more screen time. What a femme fatale she was in almost every movie she made, and she was never more fatale than she is in this one.
It is the ending that makes this movie pure noir. When he’s forced to improvise, Sterling Hayden, the mastermind of the plot that he sees disintegrating around him, he starts to make mistakes that he might not otherwise. All that effort — and all that money — [SPOILER ALERT] just blowing away in the wind.
August 16th, 2016 at 10:10 pm
Steve,
Good review of an almost perfect caper movie. It would be hard to find any fault in it. The only American caper movie I like better would be “The Asphalt Jungle,” which in my opinion, IS perfect. I’d agree about the marriage of Marie and Elisha, but it works so damn well, who cares. I would add the names of Timothy Carey and Kola Kwariani to that list of names at the top. Two more GREAT acting jobs on this movie.
August 17th, 2016 at 3:57 am
My favorite “caper”movies are still THE GREAT St LOUIS BANK ROBBERY and BIG DEAL ON MADONNA STREET.
There is some controversy about how much Jim Thompson contributed to the screenplay, with Kubrick’s fan coming down on one side and Thompson’s fans saying he wuz robbed.
August 18th, 2016 at 2:03 pm
Some credit has to go to Lionel White’s CLEAN BREAK which is damn good in itself. Like ASPHALT JUNGLE this film is surprisingly unsentimental and unsympathetic.
You may find yourself rooting a bit for Hayden, but only in relation to almost everyone else in the film but Gray and Flippen.
I agree about Windsor. It’s a shame she ended up playing parodies of roles like this and older bad girls gone to seed. She was also a gifted comic actress. Here she generates enough heat to melt ice and enough cool to refreeze it.