As one of the great directors whose works spanned genres and broke new ground in the presentation of film as an iconoclastic art form, Stanley Kubrick left a legacy behind that can’t easily be defined. He didn’t have a specific niche within the film industry, and his films were as likely to produce a razor sharp satire of mutually assured destruction politicking as they were a chilling portrait of unbridled human nature in the absence of law and human civility. However, not all of his films were quite so layered, and before he had made a name for himself and could take on the more abstract films for which he’s become revered, he made The Killing, a film well within the 1950s trend of gangster films, but with a non-linear timeline that makes it an undeniable ancestor to some of the best crime films of the last four decades.
Every thief looks forward to that “last heist”, the crime that puts them permanently in the black so they can retire to a life of comfort with a suitcase full of cash and the fuzz miles off their scent. Johnny Clay (Sterling Hayden) has planned his around the robbery of a racetrack with the help of a cop (Ted De Corsia), a sniper (Timothy Carey), a wrestler, and George (Elisha Cook Jr.), their inside man who works at one of the betting windows. With the job just days away, George gets a little over-eager and lets slip news of the heist to his femme fatale of a wife, Sherry (Marie Windsor), armed with a rapier wit, who arranges a plan of her own with her lover-on-the-side, Val (Vince Edwards).
Sterling Hayden’s stiff portrayal of lead criminal Johnny really doesn’t drive the film along until midway through the heist, and consequently the burden falls onto some of the character who were originally, at least in the novel The Killing is based off of, just part of the entourage. Indicative of that is the superbly written scene between George and Sherry, he attempting to convince her that he’s worth her affection and she firing off scathing remarks against his validity as a man. The scene stands out in the film’s first act and makes their story, as dysfunctional husband and wife, the focus of the film before and after the heist.
As heists go, the plan has no special flair or nuance that sets it apart from the expansive history of filmic thefts, rather it was how Kubrick told the story that took audiences aback. The Killing shows the preparation for the job from the perspectives of the different hired hands involved, and consequently it shifts back and forth on a timeline revealing where each man came into play. The film’s voice over, which at first seems superfluous and a bit out of place, reveals itself as a fix to aid an audience that might be caught off-guard by seeing the same scene from different character arcs.
Visually, Kubrick’s signature style of tracking shots have always made The Killing a cinematic treat, but up until now the full effect got lost in translation as imperfect film transfers and degraded film stock copies detracted from Kubrick’s meticulous staging and frame composition. The audio track is crisp with the noticeable distortion in earlier versions of the print removed. The score sounds excellent.
Blu-ray Bonus Features
The Killing has quite a bit to offer fans of the film, but those looking for extras rich with Kubrick-centric pieces might be disappointed. For the Kubrick fans, a restored version of his 1955 film Killer’s Kiss (which immediately preceded The Killing) can be found here, and while it’s one of Kubrick’s lesser films, it shows evidence of his camera style and a keen eye for using on-location sets as it’s as much a showcase of New York City as anything else. As a film, it suffers substantially in the scripting with stilted dialogue and an unfortunately long voiceover where little happens visually in the process. It’s a film about aesthetic more than anything else, but it’s great to see it here as it’s an apt pairing for The Killing. A complementary featurette of film critic Geoffrey O’Brien discussing Killer’s Kiss is also included, but considering the somewhat disappointing nature of Killer’s Kiss, it’s not all that enticing to listen to O’Brien dissect it for all its rather obvious flaws.
The next best featurette is a series of clips from a French interview from a grizzly looking, aged Sterling Hayden who’s rather salty and plainspoken about his experiences working on the film. It’s quite funny at times, and apart from the interview with James B. Harris, a producer on The Killing, it’s one of the most candid testaments to Kubrick’s working process I’ve seen. The Harris interview has plenty of photos from the production, but it’s much more a retrospective about the challenges faced in getting the film greenlit and then keeping it in a positive light in the public’s attention after release. An interesting tangent is brought up here about Frank Sinatra having also wanted to option The Killing until Kubrick snatched it up, and you can’t help but wonder if we’d have seen the Rat Pack in The Killing instead of Ocean’s Eleven had it gone otherwise. I think it’s fair to say that film lovers are happy with how that played out, as a Frank Sinatra take on The Killing would have felt far too saccharine, and it would have lacked the great scenes between Elisha Cook Jr. and Marie Windsor that Jim Thompson wrote in specifically for this adaptation.
There’s a great piece on the working relationship between Kubrick and writer Jim Thompson, who wrote the dialogue for The Killing, which as noted before was easily one of the film’s high points. However, at first, Jim Thompson kind of got snubbed by Kubrick who gave himself sole credit as the film’s writer and minimized Thompson’s credit in the original credits, only to have it corrected later on. Considering Thompson’s contribution to the film, that seems downright criminal, but the two would work together on other projects, so it clearly wasn’t unforgivable.
"The Killing (The Criterion Collection)" is on sale August 16, 2011 and is not rated. Crime. Directed by Stanley Kubrick. Written by Stanley Kubrick, Jim Thompson. Starring Sterling Hayden, Timothy Carey, Elisha Cook Jr, Marie Windsor, Vince Edwards, Ted De Corsia.
