The Killing | |
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![]() Theatrical release poster | |
Directed by | Stanley Kubrick |
Screenplay by | Stanley Kubrick |
Dialogue by | Jim Thompson |
Based on | Clean Break by Lionel White |
Produced by | James B. Harris |
Starring | |
Cinematography | Lucien Ballard |
Edited by | Betty Steinberg |
Music by | Gerald Fried |
Production company | Harris-Kubrick Pictures Corporation |
Distributed by | United Artists |
Release date |
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Running time | 84 minutes [2] |
Country | United States |
Language | English |
Budget | $320,000 [3] |
The Killing is a 1956 American film noir directed by Stanley Kubrick and produced by James B. Harris. [4] It was written by Kubrick and Jim Thompson and based on Lionel White's novel Clean Break. It stars Sterling Hayden, Coleen Gray, and Vince Edwards, and features Marie Windsor, Elisha Cook Jr., Jay C. Flippen and Timothy Carey. [1]
Johnny Clay, a career criminal recently released from prison, plans the heist of a horse racetrack, with an estimated take of two million dollars. His associate Marvin Unger provides financial backing for the plot, makes his apartment available as a hideout, and provides its address to two of the track's employees: cashier George Peatty, and bartender Mike O'Reilly. Corrupt police officer Randy Kennan joins the scheme. George, trapped in a loveless marriage with his materialistic wife Sherry, confesses the plan to her, which she immediately communicates to her boyfriend Val.
At the hideout, the five men conspire regarding the details of the heist. Johnny discloses that two other men will be involved, and paid low, flat fees for their roles: a sharpshooter will kill the favored horse in the race to sow confusion, and a wrestler will make a scene at the bar to create a diversion. Sherry is discovered to be eavesdropping on the plot, and the others separate George and Sherry. Johnny orders Sherry not to interfere further until the heist is completed.
On the morning of the heist, Marvin expresses paternal feelings for Johnny, suggesting that they go away together following its completion. Johnny rebuffs this suggestion, ordering Marvin to stay away from the track while the heist is in progress. Mike smuggles a gun into the track's locker room, opposite its money room. Marvin, who is very drunk, appears at the track, against Johnny's wishes, and to the disturbance of the others. Despite this, all others are in position, and they commit to the heist. As the wrestler starts a fight at the bar, drawing security away from the money room, George helps Johnny access the locker room. Johnny acquires the gun, dons a mask, and holds up the money room as the horse is shot, throwing a sack of money out the window, where Randy collects it. When the sharpshooter attempts to get away, his tire is punctured by a horseshoe just thrown on the ground by an attendant he'd antagonized, and he is shot dead.
At the hideout, the others await the return of Johnny, now in possession of the money. Val ambushes the hideout, a shootout ensues, and a wounded George is left as the last man standing. As George stumbles outside, Johnny sees that something is clearly wrong, and continues driving. He purchases a large suitcase, transfers the money into it, and struggles to secure it. George returns to his apartment, kills Sherry, and collapses. At the airport, Johnny reunites with his girlfriend Fay. They fail to register the suitcase as carry-on luggage, and have no choice but to check it. When a baggage cart driver swerves in order to avoid hitting a dog, the suitcase bursts open, and the money is scattered in the wind by a propeller. While attempting to leave, Johnny is identified by authorities. Although Fay urges Johnny to run, he refuses, calmly accepting his fate.
I give Stanley a free hand to create, and he leaves the money problems to me.
— James Harris [5]
We want to make good movies, and make them cheap. The two are not incompatible.
— Stanley Kubrick [5]
While playing chess in Washington Square, Kubrick met producer James B. Harris, who had sold his film distribution company and was looking for a new young talent. Harris considered Kubrick "the most intelligent, most creative person [he had] ever come in contact with", and the two formed the Harris-Kubrick Pictures Corporation in 1955. [6] Harris purchased the rights to Lionel White's novel Clean Break for $10,000, beating United Artists, which was interested in the film as a vehicle for Frank Sinatra. [6] At Kubrick's suggestion they hired hardboiled fiction novelist Jim Thompson to write the script. United Artists told the pair that it would help finance the picture if Harris and Kubrick could find a high-profile actor to star. They signed Sterling Hayden, who agreed to accept $40,000. But Hayden wasn't a big enough star for UA, which wound up providing only $200,000 for the film; Harris financed the rest using $80,000 of his own money and a $50,000 loan from his father. [7] The film was the first of three on which Harris and Kubrick collaborated as producer and director over less than ten years. [8] Working titles for the film were Clean Break and Bed of Fear. [8] It was the last feature film completely filmed by Kubrick in the United States (interiors for Spartacus were shot on Universal's Hollywood sound stages, but its battle exteriors were shot in Spain).
Three members of the cast—Hayden, Ted de Corsia, and Timothy Carey—had appeared together the previous year in the low-budget noir film Crime Wave . The art director, Ruth Sobotka, was Kubrick's wife at the time. [8] Kubrick and Harris moved from New York to L.A. to shoot the picture, and Kubrick went unpaid during the shooting, surviving on loans from Harris. In addition to Hayden, Kubrick cast actors from films noirs he liked, such as Carey, de Corsia, Elisha Cook Jr. and Marie Windsor. He chose former professional wrestler and old chess friend Kola Kwariani to play an aging, chess-playing grappler. [7] The Hollywood cinematographers' union told Kubrick that he could not be both director and cinematographer, so veteran cinematographer Lucien Ballard was hired to shoot the picture. He and Kubrick often clashed. On one occasion Kubrick favored a long tracking shot, with the camera close to the actors with a 25mm wide-angle lens to provide slight distortion of the image, but Ballard moved it further away and began using a 50mm lens. Kubrick sternly ordered him to put the camera back or he would be fired. [7]
Without a proper release across the U.S., The Killing performed poorly at the box office. In spite of a last-minute promotion as a second feature to Bandido! , it failed to turn a profit. But it garnered critical acclaim, landing on several critics' top-ten lists for 1956. Time wrongly predicted that it would "make a killing at the cash booths"—asserting that Kubrick "has shown more audacity with dialogue and camera than Hollywood has seen since the obstreperous Orson Welles went riding out of town on an exhibitors' poll"—as the film recorded a loss of $130,000. [9] [5]
New York Times film critic A. H. Weiler wrote, "Though The Killing is composed of familiar ingredients and it calls for fuller explanations, it evolves as a fairly diverting melodrama. ... Aficionados of the sport of kings will discover that Mr. Kubrick's cameras have captured some colorful shots of the ponies at Bay Meadows track. Other observers should find The Killing an engrossing little adventure." [10]
Variety liked the acting and wrote, "This story of a $2 million race track holdup and steps leading up to the robbery, occasionally told in a documentary style which at first tends to be somewhat confusing, soon settles into a tense and suspenseful vein which carries through to an unexpected and ironic windup ... Hayden socks over a restrained characterization, and Cook is a particular standout. Windsor is particularly good, as she digs the plan out of her husband and reveals it to her boyfriend." [11]
Kubrick and Harris thought the positive critical reception had made their presence known in Hollywood, but Max Youngstein of United Artists still considered them "not far from the bottom" of the pool of new talent at the time. [12] Dore Schary of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer was impressed with the film, and offered the duo $75,000 to write, direct and produce another, which became Paths of Glory . [12]
The Killing has gained a cult following, among other Kubrick films. [8] For example, Eddie Muller placed the film 15th among his top 25 favorite noir films, saying, "If you believe that a good script is a succession of great scenes, you can't do better than this. Hey, that scene was so good, let's do it again from somebody else's perspective". [13]
In 1998, Jonathan Rosenbaum of the Chicago Reader included the film in his unranked list of the best American films not included on the AFI Top 100. [14]
In 1999, film critic Mike Emery wrote, "Kubrick's camerawork was well on the way to finding the fluid style of his later work, and the sparse, low-budget circumstances give the film a raw, urgent sort of look. As good as the story and direction are, though, the true strength of The Killing lies in the characters and characterizations." [15] The same year, director Peter Bogdanovich wrote in The New York Times that while The Killing did not make money, it, along with Paths of Glory , established "Kubrick's reputation as a budding genius among critics and studio executives." [16]
In 2012, Roger Ebert added The Killing to his list of "Great Movies". In his opening remarks, Ebert writes, "Stanley Kubrick considered The Killing (1956) to be his first mature feature, after a couple of short warm-ups. He was 28 when it was released, having already been an obsessed chess player, a photographer for Look magazine and a director of March of Time newsreels. It's tempting to search here for themes and a style he would return to in his later masterpieces, but few directors seemed so determined to make every one of his films an individual, free-standing work. Seeing it without his credit, would you guess it was by Kubrick? Would you connect Dr. Strangelove with Barry Lyndon ?" [17]
On the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes , 96% of 47 critics' reviews are positive, with an average rating of 8.6/10.The website's consensus reads: "An expertly crafted noir with more on its mind than stylishly staged violence, The Killing establishes Stanley Kubrick as a filmmaker of uncommon vision and control." [18]
Metacritic , which uses a weighted average , assigned the film a score of 91 out of 100, based on 15 critics, indicating "universal acclaim". [19]
Nominations
Quentin Tarantino has said that this film was an influence on Reservoir Dogs , that he thought of that film as "my Killing, my take on that kind of heist movie." [20]
A digitally restored version of The Killing was released on DVD and Blu-ray by The Criterion Collection, which also included Killer's Kiss as a bonus feature. [21] On July 26, 2022, Kino Lorber (under the KL Studio Classics line) released a Ultra HD Blu-ray edition of the film from a new remaster of the original negative with new audio commentary by film historian Alan K. Rode. [22]
Full Metal Jacket is a 1987 war film directed and produced by Stanley Kubrick, from a screenplay he co-wrote with Michael Herr and Gustav Hasford. The film is based on Hasford's 1979 autobiographical novel The Short-Timers. It stars Matthew Modine, R. Lee Ermey, Vincent D'Onofrio, Adam Baldwin, Dorian Harewood, and Arliss Howard.
Paths of Glory is a 1957 American anti-war film co-written and directed by Stanley Kubrick, based on the novel of the same name by Humphrey Cobb, which was based on the Souain corporals affair during World War I. The film stars Kirk Douglas as Colonel Dax, the commanding officer of French soldiers who refuse to continue a suicidal attack, after which Dax attempts to defend them against charges of cowardice in a court-martial.
Stanley Kubrick was an American film director, screenwriter, producer, and photographer. Widely considered one of the greatest filmmakers of all time, his films were nearly all adaptations of novels or short stories, spanning a number of genres and gaining recognition for their intense attention to detail, innovative cinematography, extensive set design, and dark humor.
Reservoir Dogs is a 1992 American crime film written and directed by Quentin Tarantino in his feature-length debut. It stars Harvey Keitel, Tim Roth, Chris Penn, Steve Buscemi, Lawrence Tierney, Michael Madsen, Tarantino, and Edward Bunker as diamond thieves whose heist of a jewelry store goes terribly wrong. Kirk Baltz, Randy Brooks, and Steven Wright also play supporting roles. The film incorporates many motifs that have become Tarantino's hallmarks: violent crime, pop culture references, profanity, and nonlinear storytelling.
One-Eyed Jacks is a 1961 American Western film directed by and starring Marlon Brando, his only directorial credit. Brando portrays the lead character Rio, and Karl Malden plays his partner, "Dad" Longworth. The supporting cast features Pina Pellicer, Katy Jurado, Ben Johnson and Slim Pickens. In 2018, the film was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress.
The Asphalt Jungle is a 1950 American heist film noir directed and co-written by John Huston, and starring Sterling Hayden and Louis Calhern, with Jean Hagen, James Whitmore, Sam Jaffe, John McIntire, and Marilyn Monroe in one of her earliest roles. Based on the 1949 novel by W. R. Burnett, it tells the story of a jewel robbery in a Midwestern city.
Sterling Walter Hayden was an American actor, author, sailor, model and Marine. A leading man for most of his career, he specialized in Westerns and film noir throughout the 1950s, in films such as John Huston's The Asphalt Jungle (1950), Nicholas Ray's Johnny Guitar (1954), and Stanley Kubrick's The Killing (1956). He became noted for supporting roles in the 1960s, perhaps most memorably as General Jack D. Ripper in Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964).
Killer's Kiss is a 1955 American independently-produced crime film noir directed by Stanley Kubrick and written by Kubrick and Howard Sackler. It is the second feature film directed by Kubrick, following his 1953 debut feature Fear and Desire. The film stars Jamie Smith, Irene Kane, and Frank Silvera.
The heist film or caper film is a subgenre of crime films and the caper story, focused on the planning, execution, and aftermath of a significant robbery.
The Killers is a 1964 American neo noir crime film. Written by Gene L. Coon and directed by Don Siegel, it is the second Hollywood adaptation of Ernest Hemingway's 1927 short story of the same name, following the 1946 version. There is also a 1956 Russian version directed by Andrei Tarkovsky.
Rififi is a 1955 French crime film adaptation of Auguste Le Breton's novel of the same name. Directed by American blacklisted filmmaker Jules Dassin, the film stars Jean Servais as the aging gangster Tony "le Stéphanois", Carl Möhner as Jo "le Suédois", Robert Manuel as Mario Farrati, and Jules Dassin as César "le Milanais". The foursome band together to commit an almost impossible theft, the burglary of an exclusive jewelry shop in the Rue de la Paix. The centerpiece of the film is an intricate half-hour heist scene depicting the crime in detail, shot in near silence, without dialogue or music. The fictional burglary has been mimicked by criminals in actual crimes around the world.
Crime Wave is a 1954 American film noir starring Sterling Hayden and Gene Nelson, and directed by Andre de Toth. It was adapted from a short story which originally appeared in The Saturday Evening Post - "Criminal Mark" by John and Ward Hawkins.
The Killing of a Chinese Bookie is a 1976 American neo-noir crime film written and directed by John Cassavetes and starring Ben Gazzara. A rough and gritty film, this is the second of their three collaborations, following Husbands and preceding Opening Night. Timothy Carey, Seymour Cassel, Morgan Woodward, Meade Roberts, and Azizi Johari appear in supporting roles.
House of Games is a 1987 American neo-noir film about con-men and confidence scams by David Mamet, his directorial debut. He also wrote the screenplay, based on a story he co-wrote with Jonathan Katz. The film's cast includes Lindsay Crouse, Joe Mantegna, Ricky Jay, and J. T. Walsh.
Bob le flambeur is a 1956 French heist gangster film directed by Jean-Pierre Melville and starring Roger Duchesne as Bob. It is often considered both a film noir and a precursor to the French New Wave, the latter because of its use of handheld camera and a single jump cut.
Timothy Agoglia Carey was an American film and television character actor who was typically cast as manic or violent characters who are driven to extremes. He is particularly known for his collaborations with Stanley Kubrick in the films The Killing (1956) and Paths of Glory (1957), and for appearing in the two John Cassavetes directed films Minnie and Moskowitz (1971) and The Killing of a Chinese Bookie (1976). Other notable film credits include Crime Wave (1954), East of Eden (1955), One-Eyed Jacks (1961), Beach Blanket Bingo (1965), Head (1968) and The Outfit (1973).
A Personal Journey with Martin Scorsese Through American Movies is a 1995 British documentary film of 225 minutes in length, presented by Martin Scorsese and produced by the British Film Institute.
The Criminal is a 1960 British neo-noir crime film directed by Joseph Losey and starring Stanley Baker, Sam Wanamaker, Grégoire Aslan, Jill Bennett, and Margit Saad. Baker plays Johnny Bannion, a recently-paroled gangster who is sent back to prison after robbing a racetrack, with both the authorities and the criminal underworld looking for the money.
Nicholas Nestor "Kola" Kwariani, known by the ring name Nick the Wrestler, was a Georgian professional wrestler and chess player.
Stanley Kubrick (1928–1999) directed thirteen feature films and three short documentaries over the course of his career. His work as a director, spanning diverse genres, is widely regarded as extremely influential.