The Killing at 70

Did this clown mask inspire The Dark Night? It looks familiar.

Long-time readers know that Stanley Kubrick is my favorite film director. But he had a rather mediocre start to his career. Fear and Desire (1953) is a struggle to get through. Kubrick later wanted the physical reels of film destroyed but, of course, some copies survived. I’m glad I watched it. There is a crude outline of who he was then. The Eisenstein editing techniques of cutting on the action rather than before it or after it are there. Other than that, the film is not worth watching.

Killer's Kiss (1955) is eh. There is a bit of Kubrick humor and the room filled with mannequins as two men try to kill each other near the end of the movie is rather eye-popping and interesting. Otherwise, it looks and feels like the first movie in a random 1950’s double-feature.

Then came 1956. Kubrick is 27 years old and climbing the ladder. Killer’s Kiss proved he could direct scenes. His partner at the time, James B. Harris, knew people who knew people. Kubrick impressed these people enough to now direct a cast containing some known stars. Sterling Hayden is the lead role and does a fine job. Vince Edwards is in the early “pretty boy” part of his career.

Kubrick was operating with a tiny budget, and working inside the most formulaic genre Hollywood had at the time — the heist picture. The Killing was primarily inspired by Lionel White’s pulp novel Clean Break. The choice of material both interested Kubrick personally but, moreover, gave him an idea for a story. Being pulp fiction it had a certain general audience appeal to it as well.

But he then proceeds to do with this novel what he would do with every other novel he made a film about. He rewrote it to suit his interest. He uses the genre as a chassis then does everything he can to complicate it.

Three shots.  Three dead bodies.  Ridiculous results.

Johnny (Sterling Hayden) stuffs a couple of million in cash into a large suitcase. This scene is a little over the top for me but whatever. It's funny, hopefully that's Kubrick's point.

George (Elisha Cook, Jr.) seems meek through most of the film.  But he ends up killing almost everybody including his cheating wife in this well-composed shot.  The swinging parroket cage is well-lighted and an excellent touch.

The story appears linear. It isn't. It jumps through time, returning to the same scenes from different perspectives, layering the narrative rather than running straight through it. Orson Welles almost certainly inspired this. No one was doing it quite this way in American crime pictures at the time. This is an attempt at an art film in traditional heist movie clothing.

Kubrick also moved the camera in every possible direction — side to side, tracking backward and forward, even handheld (always operated by himself). He chose lenses his cameraman didn't want to use. For a key dolly shot of the gang discussing the heist around a table, he ordered a 25mm lens, very wide angle, extending the depth of field. His cameraman set up the shot with a 50mm instead. Thought it conventionally framed the same field of view. He was right but Kubrick was not thinking conventionally, of course.

Given the total composition of the dolly shot, passing by objects in the foreground between the camera (the audience) and the actors, Kubrick wanted to pull the viewer into the full composition of the shot, foreground through background. The camera operator did not agree, so he advocated for his choice. Kubrick simply told him to get off the set unless he changed the lens. The cameraman likely wanted to get paid so he did as he was told. The result is one of the more striking shots in the film — the room opens up, the perspective flattens slightly, foreground and background meld, something feels just slightly off in a way you can't quite name. That is Kubrick.

Watching the racetrack robbery, I kept thinking of the Joker's crew in clown masks at the opening of The Dark Knight. Nolan probably had an episode featuring the Joker from the 1960's TV series Batman in mind.  I am not a connoisseur of movies with masked characters. But the similarity is rather obvious to me.

Kubrick’s storytelling is clever. The audience understands, from the beginning, that a complicated plan is being executed. What we don't know is exactly what the plan is. The reveal happens in real (plot) time. All the preparation has already happened before the film starts. The first two-thirds of the movie is setup, meeting, side character stories — pieces being placed in line with private motivations. But we only understand what piece fits where as the heist unfolds. The audience puts the pieces together as they appear. We know something is going to happen. We just don't know what, precisely, is happening.

The whole movie is a build. Everything — the time loops, the scrambled perspectives, the careful intercutting — exists in service of the film’s last twenty minutes. But this story telling method confused studio executives in 1956. They demanded narration to make the story legible. Kubrick didn't want it.

He was right not to want it. The Dragnet-style voiceover is the most dated element in the picture and the one that ages it most visibly. Without it, the film would feel more daring. But, it was not his choice. The studio execs knew that audiences in the 50’s were not prepared for what Kubrick was attempting. The narration was the handrail. It made the film watchable for people who would otherwise have been lost. Harris and Kubrick understood that the main thing was to get the picture seen regardless of aesthetic preferences.

Toward the end of the film, Hayden’s character attempts to check a large suitcase as carry-on luggage. It is not a complicated scene. There is no gunfight, no chase, no dramatic action at all. Just a man (and his girlfriend) at a counter and a suitcase and a problem.

Kubrick captures it as a single shot with a lot of visual depth. The check-in station sits in the foreground, a second station visible in the distance, the top of the suitcase framed along the bottom of the image. Everything pauses. The whole situation lives in this one composition. The scene just sits there and lets the tension breathe.

This is the most "Kubrick-like" shot/scene in the film.

He should have bought better luggage. The money is blown away on the tarmac in a absurdly strong wind, which impacts no other luggage, of course. Hey, it's the 50's.

"Eh, what's the difference." Sterling Hayden would go to to appear as a supporting actor in Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove and in Francis Ford Coppola's The Godfather.

In rewatching the film this time, looking for signs of the future “great” Kubrick, I immediately connected with this simple scene. The shot doesn't call attention to its own cleverness. It just holds. The camera does not move. There are no edits. This is an example of what Tarkovsky would later call “time pressure.” You sit in that composition and wait, and the waiting is the point. Kubrick already knows this.

Most directors would have cut to some close-ups of exchanged glances or something. Would have moved the camera. Would have used music to tell you how to feel about what you're watching. Kubrick does none of it. He trusts the perfect geometry of the shot to carry everything. The suitcase in the foreground. The space between the two check-in stations. The moment before the resolution, held just long enough to become uncomfortable. That instinct is already completely intact.

The ending delivers a (perhaps surprising) catastrophe for the heist. The complex build-up falls apart through the last third of the film. All the planning, all the careful assembly, all the precise timing — scattered by something completely outside all the details the plan executed. A sudden fierce wind rips open a suitcase on a tarmac. Millions of dollars blows everywhere. Keeping with the existential times, the last line in the film comes from a deflated Hayden: “Eh, what’s the difference?”

There is no justice in this film — not in the moral sense and not in the plot's resolution. Unless you count providence. Kubrick almost certainly did not count providence. He was an atheist, and this is not a film that winks at a higher order. It is a film about how the criminal world eats its own. Carefully constructed plans collapse instantly. All that preparation, all that build-up, dismantled in a crazy killing spree and a single absurd moment.

It might be worth it just to watch a couple of million dollars (supposedly) in bills blown away on a tarmac by some off-camera wind machines. I laughed when I saw it this time. It seems a little too spectacular, something else that dates this film. It seems silly to me. The movie earns its existential conclusion; the spectacle of multiple murders in a brief span of time and the wind machines was certainly taking everything to its limits. I’m not sure it works that well, however.

I felt strange watching The Killing this time. The 1950’s have become a distant time in terms of what you push in the name of convenience. The time loops and the clever withholding of information are all interesting but they are counterbalanced by the massive shortcut of killing (get it?) almost everyone with one shot per person in a few moments time to resolve the plot. Tarantino would copy that in Reservoir Dogs but that was style and it was more accomplished. Here it is just easy resolution after a complex build-up, which turns out to be a let-down, at least for me. Still, this is a young director pushing some real limits — and that tension between the ambition and the execution is exactly what a 6 feels like on my film scale. 6’s are worth watching but do not reward repeat viewings.

For comparison: there are films from the 1950s that are far better. Rear Window, Vertigo, 12 Angry Men, On the Waterfront, The Bridge over the River Kwai, Some Like It Hot, and Ben-Hur. These are all in the 8-10 ranking, they are not only worth watching but worthy of multiple viewings, often getting better each time. The Killing is not among them. Still, the film demonstrated something important about the man who made it. And it has inspired a later generation of directors.

Still, the film gets a 96% rating from critics and a 92% from the audience on Rotten Tomatoes. Obviously, not a bad film. Several traits visible in Kubrick’s mature work appear here, mostly for the first time, imperfectly formed.

The impersonal quality. Kubrick's camera is cold toward its subjects. It usually observes without empathy. Yet this should not imply a lack of emotion. There are powerful emotional moments in all his films. Those moments come through with special starkness.

The mundane dialogue. Unless a scene is purely expository, the characters in The Killing talk the way people actually talk — ordinary, flat, conversational. Kubrick was not interested in characters who sound like characters. He was interested in what sits underneath the mundane conversation.

The complicated plot as total control. Most directors working this material would simplify. Kubrick complicated it. He assembled a plot with many moving parts, calibrated the reveal so that the audience understood what was happening only as it happened, and managed the whole thing without losing the thread. That is craft.

The cinematography is not yet brilliant here — but it is already superior. The 25mm dolly shot is an example not only of Kubrick’s uncompromising vision but his sense of technical control of the end result. This is a director who knows all the conventional choices, all the standard assemblage, never satisfied with expectations and what had been done before. Moreover, he knows everything about photography and how to set up the camera and light a scene.

In truth the film itself matters little compared to what it stimulated, what came afterward. Kubrick proved he could tell a clever story cleverly with some occasional pop in the cinematography. Beyond this, the film demonstrated something to the sort of people in Hollywood that Harris knew. The Killing was probably the cool new film to talk about at society parties. Well done but not “popular” - so to have seen it and appreciated it made for good party talk. You might impress someone. Kubrick made the film but Harris made the connections in a way the young director could only appreciate, not emulate.

At least one person at these parties saw The Killing but noticed the components. He saw the camera movement, the non-linear narrative with a controlled reveal, the command of a complicated plot with an unconventional eye. The obvious competence.

That someone was Dore Schary, head of production at MGM. Harris received a call.

The Killing was released in New York City 70 years ago today.

(To be continued next year.)