‘Individuality’s a monster and it must be strangled in its cradle to make our friends feel confident…’
Despite being Stanley Kubrick’s third film, The Killing is the moment when the great master properly announced himself to the world of cinema. While it wasn’t hugely commercially successful, The Killing, along with Paths of Glory a year later, set the wheels in motion for Kubrick to become perhaps the most important American filmmaker of all time. Unsurprisingly, it’s pretty great…
Johnny Clay (Sterling Hayden), a career criminal, plots a frankly absurd plan to rob a racetrack that is based around someone shooting a house in the middle of a race. He recruits George Peatty (Elisha Cook Jr.), a cashier at the racetrack trapped in a loveless marriage with his materialistic wife, Sherry(Marie Windsor), and Nikki (Timothy Carey), a talented sharpshooter, to help him realise his scheme.
While The Killing is nowhere near as good as Kubrick’s best work, you can see the genesis of his genius throughout this thing. It’s there in the revolutionary camera work, the almost documentary filming style, the ability to coax performances out of his cast, the brutality of the barroom brawl sequence… The Killing falls firmly into the film noir tradition, but in its best moments, most notably the acerbic depiction of a marriage falling apart, the film feels closer to a British kitchen sink drama than it does to classic noir.
The Killing is more than just an early Stanley Kubrick film; it’s a tight and taut crime thriller that is still wildly entertaining even all these years later. Well worth checking out.
