Stanley Kubrick (1956)

A really tense, taut thriller (it runs just 84 minutes).  The source material is a pulp novel, Clean Break, by Lionel White.  Kubrick wrote the screenplay, with dialogue by Jim Thompson (a well-known crime writer of the time).  It’s about the planning and execution of a $2m robbery at a San Francisco racecourse – and the variously down-on-their-luck and desperate members of the band of robbers.  Kubrick’s clinical temperament and technical imagination are ideally suited to the material.  You can sense his pleasure in presenting the details of the gang’s preparations, how each of its members reaches the scene and moment of the crime.  But The Killing is much more than technically accomplished.  The casting is very acute:  the actors are physically perfect for the types they play; most of them are good enough – and with the help of Thompson’s pungent writing – to give some individuality to the generic characters they’re interpreting.   The racing sequences are some of the best I’ve seen (unusually, even the horses’ names are fairly convincing).  Kubrick not only makes them exciting to watch (the photographer was Lucien Ballard); he draws out the formidable potential of the sights and sounds of a horse race – so that the racing seems ominous, linking to the impending crime and foreshadowing the doomed ending of the enterprise and of all concerned with it.

Gerald Fried’s wittily discordant music has racetrack reveille notes worked into its brassy, insistent overtones.  And the gradual disintegration of the robbers’ plan is brilliantly structured.   Things start to go wrong, then seriously wrong.  The point comes when you realise the crime is bound to fail – but Kubrick builds the tension so expertly that that point is imperceptible.  You’ve become aware that things are spiralling downwards but you’re not sure when the tide turned.   By the time the film’s climax, in an airport, arrives, most of the characters are dead (and the picture’s title has acquired a double meaning).   You can guess, when a little poodle dog and his doting elderly lady owner appear on the scene (they’ve come to the airport to meet her husband), that they’re going to influence the final outcome but you’ve no idea how.   When the poodle delivers the coup de grâce, the effect is a relief (the dog survives), desolating (you wanted the crime to succeed) and elating – because of the director’s visual aplomb.   The robbers have failed to bring off their ‘perfect crime’ (it seems too daring in several respects to justify that label) but Kubrick has made a virtually faultless film noir.

Sterling Hayden, the best-known name in the cast, is Johnny Clay, recently out of Alcatraz and the gang’s leader, and he dominates proceedings, not just through his physical presence but in the way he suggests a despair that’s never far below the surface of Johnny’s professional cool and competence.   The other vivid performers include Elisha Cook Jr (as a loser who knows it), Marie Windsor (his acid, vampish wife), Vince Edwards (her lover), Jay C Flippen (an older member of the gang, with a oddly ambiguous liking for Johnny),  Ted de Corsia (a crooked, debt-ridden policeman), Joe Sawyer (a racetrack barman, who completes the core membership of the gang), Dorothy Adams (his invalid wife), and James Edwards (a black parking attendant at the racecourse – a racial insult partly catalyses the first death in the story).  Timothy Carey, as the marksman hired to shoot one of the horses (and thus trigger a stewards’ enquiry during which the robbery can take place), is magnetically nasty – although he acts viciousness in a way that looks rather crude in this context.  Coleen Gray, as Johnny’s girlfriend, seems conventional in her first scenes but her anxiety in the closing stages is affecting.   As a wrestler brought on board to provide a crucial distraction in the racecourse bar, Kola Kwariani is a startling physical presence even if his thick accent makes his lines mostly incomprehensible.    Cecil Elliott is the poodle owner.

5 February 2009