by Julian Spivey

The Killing, released in 1956, is what occurs when you put one of cinema’s greatest directors, Stanley Kubrick and the film noir genre together.

The Killing is about a con man, Johnny Clay, played by Sterling Hayden who has just been released from prison and wants to pull one last heist before he leaves his lawbreaking profession behind. He gets a group together and plans to steal thousands of dollars from a racetrack. Involved in the heist are George Peatty, played by Elisha Cook, who is a track cashier, Randy Kennan, played by Ted DeCorsia, a dirty cop used to throw off suspicion, and Nikki Arcane, played by Timothy Carey, a sharp-shooting psychopath hired to take down a racehorse which is the point that sets the entire heist into motion.

The heist goes just as planned for Clay until the very end when the movie’s femme fatale, Sherry Peatty (George’s wife), played by Marie Windsor, gets involved. A small (but amazingly dramatic) entangling of the plan soon follows, and when Clay sees a bloodied George Peatty stumbling across the street he goes to the backup plan of taking the money to a safe spot to be divvied up at a later time.

Clay buys a suitcase, stuffs the money inside and promptly heads to an airport, where he is forced to check the suitcase because it doesn’t meet the carry on size requirements. Soon follows one of the most ironic, and shocking endings to any cinematic classic. It proves that sometimes meticulous plans that seem to go perfectly can be fractured by such a minute detail.

The word film noir basically translates as “black film” and that is exactly what the viewer gets with Kubrick’s The Killing. The Killing has every film noir aspect down pat from the femme fatale performance given by Windsor to its stylistic low key lighting and disillusioned finale. The film is ultimately and distinguishably summed up by its final, almost whispered line, “What’s the difference?” spoken by Hayden’s Clay.   

Quentin Tarantino must surely be a fan of Kubrick’s second full feature film The Killing.  Kubrick’s non-linear direction in The Killing was innovative for its time, but has since been used to rave reviews by Tarantino and other directors, especially in Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction.

The Killing creeps along a little slowly at the beginning and if the viewer doesn’t give it there undivided attention it could seem confusing, but the movie rapidly picks up speed as the heist takes place and leaves the viewer with a bang of an ending. The Killing, only Kubrick’s second full feature, showed exactly what the talented director could do and was proof of further classics to come. Kubrick would become better known later in his career for such classics as Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, 2001: A Space Odyssey, A Clockwork Orange, and The Shining.