Roger Ebert asked, “It’s tempting to search here for themes and a style he would return to in his later masterpieces, but…Seeing it without his credit, would you guess it was by Kubrick?” On the surface, the answer is self-evidently no, but to a more critical eye, we can see the early signs of an emerging artistic genius, clearly and unmistakably.
The Killing is not a great film by any means. It’s not going to appear on many lists of cinematic achievement in the 20th century, nor is it even frequently remarked upon as part of master director Stanley Kubrick’s works, coming nowhere near classics like 2001: A Space Odyssey and The Shining or even his lesser known efforts like Lolita. Released in 1956, the film suffers from being derivative in many respects, a heist movie that blends tropes made popular in the 1940s film noir era including the femme fatale and various elements of the criminal underworld. The set up, based on the novel Clean Break by Lionel White, is exceedingly simple and the outcome equally obvious from the very beginning. An ex-convict, Johnny, realizes he went to jail for small-time crimes that suffered from the wrong risk-reward ratio, and decides he can right that wrong by pulling off one big score to retire with his dame, Fay. To that end, he comes up with what appears to be the perfect plan to rob a horse track and recruits a team of employees at the track, a sniper, a wrestler, and a police officer to pull it off, because what could possibly go wrong with any supposedly perfect criminal plan? Kubrick isn’t naive enough to believe an audience, even in the mid 1950s, wouldn’t be aware that something will in fact go horribly wrong, and early in the film, the teller at the racetrack, George, tries to impress his dissatisfied wife with the scheme, promising they will be rich soon even though everyone was sworn to secrecy. The wife, in turn, tells the man she’s having an affair with and conspires with him to rob the robbers. For even more criminal fun, the robbers are also aware that the wife knows, having discovered her sneaking around a meeting, meaning the plan was blown before it even began and yet they went through with it anyway as the audience says no, no, no, this isn’t going to work the entire time. Therefore, it is not a surprise that chaos ensues and almost everyone dies in the end. That is, after all, the formula for these types of films, as it always has been and always will be. The same formula also requires at least one person to believe they might escape with their lives and the score. The audience, once again, knows this will never happen, so Kubrick chooses to conclude with a bad joke, when the airline refuses to allow Johnny and his dame a carry-on suitcase large enough for all of the cash. Rather than simply walk out of the airport and drive to Mexico, he decides to have it checked instead, but an accident on the tarmac involving a small dog causes the bag to burst open, sending millions of dollars all across the runway. Johnny simply admits defeat at this point, and rather than fleeing from the police, he tells his fiancé, “What’s the difference?” allowing himself to be arrested as the final credits roll.
If this film was made by almost any other director, it would likely have been long forgotten for obvious reasons, but this is Stanley Kubrick, a man I have credited with little exaggeration for turning films into art after Alfred Hitchcock invented the industry almost whole cloth. (Of course, this isn’t strictly true, consider Fellini’s 8½.) Regardless, we should not be surprised that there are more than a few signs of his emerging genius that elevate it above standard B-movie fare, nor that it has remained influential in some ways among filmmakers to this day. Chief among these is a structure that is largely unique for the era, perhaps even decades ahead of its time. Instead of telling the story in chronological order or following in Citizen Kane’s footsteps with an opening in the present before flashing back to the past, The Killing jumps around in time throughout a tight 80 or so minutes, relying on an omniscient third party narrator with a classic 1950’s voice to keep the audience oriented – and to have a little fun at the same time. Thus, the film begins with a scene at the racetrack introducing the bartender and the teller before jumping back to events that had occurred previously, then after, then previously. The timing and narrative importance of these events is given further weight by the seemingly strict precision of the narrator, who either always states a specific time or a period relative to the last sequence as though his life depended on getting the facts just right. The details, whether 10.15 in the morning, or 40 minutes earlier, or sometime the previous day are from crucial to the outcome, of course, and cinephiles have spotted several inconsistencies, but it works for dramatic impact, lending a weight and credibility that would otherwise be lacking, as though the police were painstakingly recreating the timeline of the Kennedy assassination or some other matter of huge national import. It also offers the narrative freedom to introduce characters in terms of their relative importance rather than merely chronological concerns, plus spend more time with each character than we would if Kubrick were trying to tell all of the stories of an ensemble cast at once. We’re even able to visit the scene of the crime first, prior to meeting Johnny and learning the details of the heist. The result is vastly improved pacing, making a rather ordinary story for its kind seem to fit together like a puzzle or perhaps more fittingly, like the scheme of the heist itself, and a little extra suspense that lends obvious plot elements a more uncertain feel.
Kubrick, even at this early stage of his career, deftly builds on this technique during the heist itself, where characters that are only seen in the background of key shots in one timeline get their full story told in another. In one particularly clever instance, we can see Johnny lurking by a doorway to the money counting room from the bar, just before the heist is about to begin, when the wrestler will stage a fight with the barkeep as a distraction, more on that in a moment. It is only after the fight concludes that we follow Johnny’s own unique path to the doorway, and learn the steps he has taken to get there in preparation for the actual robbery. The robbery itself is straight out of more modern fare like Point Break, where Johnny dons a strange mask to hide his true identity, brandishing a large weapon in front of a small group of old men counting money in something that reminded me a little of David Lynch. Similarly, we witness the beginning of the denouement with the requisite bloodbath when the wife’s lover shows up, but do not learn why Johnny wasn’t present at the massacre until afterwards, as the film flashes back to his experience after he almost crashes his car into the wounded bank teller. At least some of the success of the non-chronological order making the film more fun and interesting is because of the narrator himself, working in an inexplicably uncredited role. Art Gilmore had a long career in radio, using a distinct no-nonsense style made popular by sportscasters in the 1930’s. In addition to The Killing, he was the announcer for Amos ‘n’ Andy, The Adventures of Frank Race, Dr. Christian, and Stars Over Hollywood. He voiced Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and did countless film trailers. If anyone can ever be described as having a voice for radio, Mr. Gilmore was it, and yet oddly, Kubrick himself was said to hate the narration, significantly cutting it down in the final version of the film, even mixing it up and making some of the details inaccurate. He did so even though he would revisit the notion of a detached, at times satirical narrator twenty years later in Barry Lyndon, who opens that film by noting the main character’s father would have made an excellent lawyer if he wasn’t killed in a duel over the purchase of some horses. It also suggests that even at this early stage in career, Kubrick was not afraid to allow the final product to evolve over time, discarding with preconceived notions, playing around with different options, and refusing to settle. He did not yet have the power to do over a hundred takes – the entire film was shot in barely a week – but he did have a sense of how a true artist follows a thread until the end, and he was not afraid to trust in his audience to follow along. Thematically, there is another benefit: Given the audience is likely aware of how these movies end, telling the story out of order underscores that the plot is largely irrelevant to the enjoyment and the sheer fun of the formula, inserting a sort of metaplay into the discussion.
There are other touches that hint at the master filmmaker and what was to come, primarily Kubrick’s unique shooting style and dry, wry humor. A limited $300,000 budget didn’t allow Kubrick to create anything on the epic scale of 2001: A Space Odyssey or Full Metal Jacket, but we can see some earlier signs of the rack focus and tracking shots that would ultimately define his style. The majority of movies in the 1950’s, especially low-budget, B-movie fare were filmed using traditional shot-counter-shot techniques, mixed up with close ups of the actors in softer focus with typically blurred backgrounds. The action generally happened in the foreground of the frame with the background serving as little more than a set on which to stage events, not an integral part of the scene. Camera movement and longer takes were rare, reserved for prestige filmmakers like Orson Welles in Touch of Evil. Alfred Hitchcock had begun to upend these conventions with the breakthrough Rear Window in 1954, where much of the action happens outside the main apartment set and the film relies on the audience’s awareness that a character is watching other events unfold, but he was close to living legend even then and had the ability to do what he wanted. Kubrick, despite obvious budgetary constraints, used his background as a photographer in The Killing to both stage more complicated two shots and take advantage of broader depth of field. The interplay between the teller and his cheating wife is almost playfully staged, moving back and forth in their small apartment as as he desperately tries to convince her he’s not a loser, While there are none of the true “tracking shots” Kubrick would use in later films, where the camera is positioned in front of the subject and follows them around as they walk forward, such as when Alex walks around the record store in A Clockwork Orange, there are some early indications of his desire to push cinematography to the limit. At several key moments, the camera moves across the entire set, exploring the full space, albeit from a side or slightly overhead angle rather than head on, fully in your face as he would later do. This happens at least twice worth remarking on, in the apartment where the robbers meet to finalize the plan, and at the race track itself, where we can see the arrangement of the teller windows, the door to the money room, and the bar all laid out in a glance, transforming the space into a character in its own right. Kubrick also takes advantage of a deeper focus to highlight actions outside the foreground, as when we can see Johnny from the bar. This approach both aids the out-of-order storytelling and lends a documentary credence to the overall film, along with the narrator suggesting an importance and precision that the story in particular and the genre in general is lacking. In addition, the use of longer takes and more complicated two shots than a movie-goer in 1956 would normally expect allows the actors more time on screen and adds to the overall realism of the unreal that defines the film. Also of interest is the filming and staging of the actual horse races which provide another avenue of excitement, breaking up the more “traditional” dramatic action.
Kubrick has never been known as a humorist by any means, but diehard fans of his work like myself tend to think he should have been or is at least undersold in that regard. Beneath the drama and tragedy, Kubrick has always exhibited a flair for the satirical, a dry humor that pervades much of his films. The Killing shows us this approach in its infancy even beyond the rat-tat-tat deliver of the narrator. The ending, for example, might well be a little silly and unrealistic as who in their right mind would let a suitcase with $2 million dollars in it out of their sight for a second, but the lead up when not one but two airline employees carefully study the size of the bag and inform Johnny that it is exceeds the dimensions of a carry on is classic Kubrick, down to their belief that they can solve his problem by refunding his ticket. It helps that the bag itself exceeds the allowable carry on size by a large margin. We can see from our seats that it’s never going to be allowed on the plane, and yet Johnny himself appears dumbfounded this could be the case, perhaps because he’s been in prison and has never been on a plane before, asking to speak to a manager as if that has ever helped at an airport. The humor also emphasizes an early interest in bureaucracy, where decisions are made according to a rigid set of rules. He would explore this topic to devastating effect in Dr. Strangelove or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, when a chain of procedural events set in motion by one man ends the world. The Killing doesn’t have that size and scope, but the bizarre nature of modern life where many of the decisions we make in our interactions with others are governed by codes and regulations we have no control over is an early sign of where Kubrick would go in the future. The attitude of the airline employees is also pitch perfect – a little bored, a little interested in helping Johnny out, but unable to do anything about it whatever they wish. Otherwise, the decision to stage a distraction with a chess-playing wrestler starting a fight seems its own bizarre joke, down to the massive amount of hair on his back and the hapless track security guards attempting to subdue the man while a crowd looks on. Here, Kubrick might be a lean a little more outright slap stick than he would ever again, but he used it to add interest to what would have been a boring, paint-by-numbers scene. The audience knows the man is there to start a fight. They know the purpose of the fight and where it fits in the plan, but were likely not prepared for a true wrestling match where all that was missing was the steel cage. Similarly, the overly helpful security guard in the parking lot who keeps interrupting the sharp shooter when he is trying to pull out his weapon elevates another ordinary scene, transforming a bit part in to something memorable, especially when the man reacts to a racial slur and throws a horseshoe that will ultimately puncture the sharpshooter’s tire and lead to his death. The idea that he might have survived if only he’d been a little nicer is literally vintage Kubrick.
For these reasons and more, The Killing is not without its admirers. One could argue that Quintin Tarantino’s entire career is based on remaking it not once, but twice between Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction. The film maintains a high 96% fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes, which summarizes the critical reception as “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.” The New York Times’ A. H. Weiler claimed, “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.” Variety was equally positive, noting “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.” Since its release – where it fared poorly at the box office, barely grossing a third of the budget – The Killing has acquired something of a cult following. Eddie Muller, an expert on film noir, rated it the 15th best noir film ever made while wryly observing “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.” In 2012, Roger Ebert asked, “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?” On the surface, the answer is self-evidently no if only because the genre and script are largely derivative, but to a more critical eye, we can see the early signs of an emerging artistic genius, clearly and unmistakably. As I noted yesterday, Charles Darwin didn’t spring into existence as a giant in science. The same was true for Kubrick, who also got there through hard work and dedication to his craft.
Confessions of a Conservative Atheist 