After the ambitious, philosophical war movie Fear and Desire and the solid film noir Killer’s Kiss, Stanley Kubrick achieved his first true masterpiece with The Killing. Not a moment is wasted in its lean, tightly twisting 84 minutes, and it has remained a high-water mark of the genre for well over half a century now. Quentin Tarantino has acknowledged its influence on Reservoir Dogs and its nonlinear, novelistic narrative undoubtedly provided some inspiration for Pulp Fiction as well. Astute viewers will also recognize the iconic clown mask Christopher Nolan used to pay tribute to this classic in The Dark Knight’s opening heist sequence.
The Killing is a master class in plotting and dialogue from start to finish, and foreshadowing is one of its greatest strengths, beginning with the title; our ensemble aims to make a killing with their racetrack robbery, but things don’t quite go according to plan and, yeah, most of them wind up dead. The omniscient narrator (Art Gilmore, known for TV cop shows like Highway Patrol and Dragnet) has the terse, slightly gruff tone of a newspaperman on the crime beat. Coupled with the newsreel-like footage of the race being set up under the opening titles, this gives The Killing an immediate feeling of documentary reality. The narration is similar to the military reportage Kubrick would later use in Dr. Strangelove, and a far cry from the elegant, novelistic narrator of Barry Lyndon, but a distinctly literary device nonetheless.
Introducing Marvin Unger (Jay C. Flippen), a key player in the racetrack heist around which the movie revolves, our narrator tells us, “he began to feel as if he had as much effect on the final outcome of the operation as a single piece of a jumbled jigsaw puzzle has to its predetermined final design.” This ingeniously foreshadows not only the nature of the heist itself—in which the entire plan hinges on each separate piece fitting perfectly in its spatial and chronological place—but also the tightly convoluted nature of the narrative, as well as the grim fatalism of its conclusion.
“None of these men are criminals in the usual sense,” says Johnny Clay (Sterling Hayden) of his compatriots in crime, “but they got their problems, and they’ve all got a little larceny in them.” Indeed, one of these unusual criminals, Randy Kennan (Ted DeCorsia), is a police patrolman, but he has gambling debts to pay off; Mike O’Reilly (Joe Sawyer), a bartender at the racetrack, is caring for a sick wife, and George Peatty (Elisha Cook) has one who hates him.
Sherry Peatty (Marie Windsor) is a classic femme fatale, a gold-digging shrew with nothing but withering scorn and sarcasm for George’s every word. Her obvious loathing of him and his impoverished state makes George’s motivation for taking part in the heist all the more tragic; as if getting his share of the big score will make the heartless Sherry suddenly show him the kind of love and devotion Fay (Coleen Gray) shows Johnny. George’s devotion to Sherry is truly pitiable, especially considering she makes no effort to hide her disdain for him. Johnny is a classic Sterling Hayden character—calm, commanding, and cool—while the sniveling, pathetic George is quintessential Elisha Cook.
“Any time you take a chance,” Johnny tells Fay early on, “you better make sure the rewards are worth the risk, because they can put you away just as fast for a ten-dollar heist as they can for a million-dollar job.” Johnny knows the score, which explains his grim resignation at the way things ultimately turn out. In the beginning, though, he has an elaborate scheme involving blind participants paid in advance to do specific tasks without knowing anything of the overall plan, much like a genius inventor might delegate the building of smaller parts to various work crews who know nothing of the grand design for the invention.
Sherry is a wrench in this carefully orchestrated machinery from the moment her foolish husband lets her catch wind of the plan, expertly pumping George for information that she immediately shares with her aloof lover, Val Cannon (Vince Edwards). After being caught listening at the keyhole of the conspirators’ meeting place and knocked out cold by Johnny, Sherry quickly begins flirting with him and trying to play him as she always has George. Johnny sees right through her, but the damage has already been done, as George feels emasculated and mistrustful of Johnny after the incident. He wants to drop out of the heist, but Sherry has her own plans; she talks him into staying the course with some of the most transparent gold-digging the silver screen has ever known.
Of all the many well-drawn supporting characters in The Killing, my favorite has to be Maurice Oboukhoff (Kola Kwariani, a real-life chess buddy of Kubrick’s), the formidable wrestler, chess master and philosopher recruited by Johnny to cause a distraction at the track, which he does by wrestling seven armed cops to a draw with the ferocity (and torso hair) of a bear. Here’s how he tells a fella not to pry: “You have undoubtedly heard of the Siberian goat herder who tried to discover the true nature of the sun. He stared up at the heavenly body until it made him blind. There are many things of this sort, including love, and death, and my business for today.” What an eloquent way to tell someone to fuck off and mind their own!
Even better is his summation to Johnny of the type of life they both have chosen, or which has chosen them. “In this life,” he says, “you have to be like everybody else, the perfect mediocrity; no better, no worse. Individuality is a monster and it must be strangled in its cradle to make our friends feel confident. You know, I’ve often thought that the gangster and the artist are the same in the eyes of the masses. They are admired and hero-worshipped, but there is always present [an] underlying wish to see them destroyed at the peak of their glory.”
Another scene with reliably excellent dialogue by the novelist Jim Thompson (famed for The Getaway and The Killer Inside Me, among others) is the more tense negotiation with Nikki Arcane (Timothy Carey, who would go on to shine in the next Kubrick-Thompson collaboration, Paths of Glory), the marksman Johnny hires to shoot a racehorse at a crucial moment; he holds a puppy throughout the scene and speaks almost entirely through clenched teeth. Nikki’s interest in Johnny’s overall scheme is more prying than that of Maurice, but he ultimately acquiesces to Johnny and agrees to his limited part. The way the scene plays out is almost like watching a larger, more seasoned fighting dog backing down a younger upstart.
Perhaps even sadder than George’s unrequited devotion to the treacherous Sherry is Marv’s paternalistic love for Johnny. Before the robbery he pines wistfully, “Wouldn’t it be great if we could just go away, the two of us, and let the old world take a couple of turns, and have a chance to take stock of things? It can be pretty serious and terrible, particularly if it’s not the right person. Getting married, I mean.” Clearly this half-hearted attempt to sabotage Johnny’s plans to marry Fay is not so much a vision of the misery lying ahead for Johnny, but that of Marv’s own future without the younger man.
Seeing all the pieces of the plan so meticulously put in place for the first half of the movie makes the tense day-of-the-heist sequence all the more compelling, as we see how all those puzzle pieces fit—even more riveting, when they don’t—all carefully narrated by our omniscient crime beat reporter. Kubrick’s cinema is a perilous world in which the smallest details can lead to huge calamity, and it is almost invariably some human flaw or weakness that precipitates this.
After making an emotional appeal and a small cash bribe in order to get into position at the track parking lot, Nikki the marksman accidentally makes a friend of the parking attendant (James Edwards), then uses a bigoted slur to get rid of him when his presence threatens to impede on the plan. Disgusted, the parking attendant drops a “lucky” horseshoe he’d been offering Nikki. After successfully assassinating the designated racehorse, Red Lightning, Nikki attempts to make his getaway, only to have his rear tire flattened by the horseshoe.
Sterling Hayden has never been cooler than he is in the execution of the robbery (and that’s saying a lot!), but he almost gets nabbed coming out of the money room. This is a case in which a misplaced puzzle piece actually works to his advantage, when a drunken Marv—who wasn’t supposed to be anywhere near the track—bumps into the cop detaining Johnny. This disorients him just enough to give Johnny the opportunity to deck him and get away.
Back at the hideout, George is squirrely, fearing a double-cross from Johnny, but of course the true double-cross was just too close for him to see; Val and a cohort end up laying waste to the rest of Johnny’s gang and mortally wounding George even as he guns them down. In classic noir fashion, Sherry falls victim to her own iniquity, and no one can blame George when he plugs her before succumbing to his own gunshot wounds. In fact, I think I heard some cheers. “A bad joke without a punchline” are Sherry’s last words, aptly summing up not only her and George’s doomed existence, but the fate of all those involved.
Another small puzzle piece with big implications: as Johnny transfers the money to the biggest suitcase he can find, one of the clasps holding it shut is half-broken… but the suitcase closes. Good enough, he undoubtedly thinks, but another contingency for which he failed to prepare proves his final undoing. The suitcase is far too large to carry on his getaway flight, so he reluctantly checks it, and because of the delay in doing so it ends up perilously stacked atop a pile of other checked baggage on a rolling cart. Some old bag’s small dog runs out on the tarmac, the cart swerves to avoid hitting it… and that broken clasp gives way, flooding the runway with currency, a finale reminiscent of The Treasure of the Sierra Madre in its darkly humorous fatalism.
“Johnny, you’ve got to run,” Fay implores him as the authorities close in on them. “What’s the difference?” Johnny asks rhetorically of an uncaring world. The proverbial jig is up, and we are left to watch as the hero we have admired and worshipped is finally destroyed at the peak of his glory. For Kubrick, The Killing was only the beginning of a glorious career, but nearly 70 years later, it holds up as peak film noir and, for my money, still the best heist movie ever made.
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