One of my favorite directors is Stanley Kubrick. Yes, he was apparently a nightmare for actors, but the movies he made are often beautiful things. There’s often an emotional distance between the audience and the characters, and the stories he tells are not gentle things. Kubrick movies often have gorgeous shot composition, and he was a man who loved to push himself in new directions. I won’t say I have loved all of his work–I don’t think I’ll ever be much of a fan of 2001–but when I’m gettin’ into his stuff, it’s really good stuff. However, even the great directors had to start somewhere.
The point is, I opted to watch one of his early works, The Killing, on The Criterion Channel.
Career criminal Johnny Clay (Sterling Hayden) would like nothing more than to marry his girlfriend Fay (Coleen Gray). However, he wants to have one final score before he does so, and the local racetrack looks to have about $2 million that he can probably get if he has the right crew to help out. To that end, he recruits a crooked cop, a racetrack bartender, a sharpshooter, a wrestler, and George (Elisha Cook Jr). George is a betting window teller, and while various members of the group have their reasons, George’s may be a little problematic: he wants respect from his wife Sherry (Marie Windsor). She has other plans.
Johnny’s plan, however, is rather brilliant. They involve a lot distractions caused by members of the gang, a bit of quick change action, and everyone knowing their place in the scheme before they can divide the money. The problem is that the more people that are brought in, the harder it is to keep things secret. That’s where Sherry comes in. In what should be a surprise to absolutely no one, she’s cheating on George, and her lover Val (Vince Edwards), well, he looks like the kind of guy who would love to throw a monkey wrench into the works. Can Johnny get his last big score, or is it all going to go to hell?
Now, I knew a little about this movie before I sat down to watch it, and let me say this: I didn’t know Kubrick had a noir this good in his filmography. I probably shouldn’t be too surprised. For all the emotional distancing that most of Kubrick’s work had, the sort of stuff that was intended to disturb an audience more than anything else, it’s hard to pin him down to just one genre. The man behind The Shining also made a costumed epic in the form of Spartacus. For Kubrick, it was generally a matter of style over genre, and I mean that in the best possible sense of the word. I would think something like The Killing, being made early in Kubrick’s career, might have been closer to work-for-hire than the sorts of movies he was making twenty and thirty years later. And sure, why not a noir? Noir actually fits within his general wheelhouse if you think about it.
Which is to say the movie really works. Kubrick’s movie hits all the right beats for the genre. The characters are criminals, but there’s a code between them. If Sherry and Val didn’t get involved, the group would probably have pulled off the caper without a hitch. It’s a simple genre film told extremely well. I’d say I didn’t know Kubrick had it in him, but c’mon. That would be a lie. He had it in him. I just had to find it to see it.
Grade: A
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