The Killing (1956)

Official trailer

The Killing is Stanley Kubrick’s 1956 American film noir adapting Lionel White’s 1955 novel Clean Break. The film depicts career criminal Johnny Clay planning a two-million-dollar racetrack robbery during the seventh race. Johnny assembles a five-man team that includes corrupt cop Randy Kennan, racetrack window clerk George Peatty, bartender Mike O’Reilly, and chess player Maurice Oboukhoff.

The operation requires precise timing across multiple locations during the same window of minutes. The film’s non-linear structure depicts each team member’s role separately, returning repeatedly to the same moments from different perspectives.

Sterling Hayden plays Johnny Clay. Coleen Gray plays Fay. Vince Edwards plays Val Cannon. Jay C. Flippen plays Marvin Unger. Marie Windsor plays Sherry Peatty. Elisha Cook Jr. plays George Peatty. Joe Sawyer plays Mike O’Reilly. Ted de Corsia plays Randy Kennan. Timothy Carey plays sharpshooter Nikki Arane. Kola Kwariani plays Maurice Oboukhoff. Kubrick wrote the screenplay with dialogue by Jim Thompson. Harris-Kubrick Productions produced the film on a budget of approximately 320,000 dollars, and it grossed approximately 600,000 dollars on initial release.

I get a kick out of every minute of The Killing, which is lean, mean and cheap. A twenty-seven-year-old Kubrick takes a racetrack and a crew of small-time losers and builds a clock, and my pleasure is watching every gear catch. It’s a 9, and the only thing keeping it off a 10 is a narrator who talks more than I’d like.

Stanley Kubrick’s third film, The Killing, established him as a director worth tracking. Kubrick was twenty-seven during production.

The film reads as one of the foundational non-linear heist productions in American cinema. This operation requires multiple participants performing coordinated actions across different locations during the same minutes. The structural choice to depict each participant separately, returning repeatedly to the same time period from different perspectives, has influenced films that came after including Pulp Fiction (1994), Reservoir Dogs (1992), and others.

The Jim Thompson dialogue gives the screenplay a hard-boiled tone that Kubrick’s youth hadn’t yet developed independently. The Sterling Hayden performance as Johnny Clay matches the controlled professionalism the heist genre requires.

The Non-Linear Structure

Kubrick built the film on a deliberate non-linear chronology, with a voiceover narrator helping the audience keep track. The narrator announces specific times throughout the operation. At 3:45 PM Marvin Unger enters the racetrack. At 4:23 PM George Peatty arrives at his window. At 4:30 PM Maurice Oboukhoff begins his diversion. It’s useful, and I still wish Kubrick trusted me a little more, because a few of those time stamps tell me what the cutting has already made clear. That’s my one real gripe with the film.

The work has influenced other filmmakers across multiple decades.

Pulp Fiction (1994) extends Kubrick’s non-linear approach to non-heist material. Reservoir Dogs (1992) examines what happens before and after a heist that the film never shows directly. Memento (2000), Snatch (2000), and other productions trace their structural approaches partly to The Killing. The decision to break linear chronology in service of subject matter requirements has been imitated extensively. The Kubrick original remains the foundational example.

The Sherry Peatty Subplot

Marie Windsor plays Sherry Peatty as the unfaithful wife who manipulates her weak husband George into revealing the heist plans.

She conveys the information to her actual lover Val Cannon, who plans to ambush the team and steal the money during the post-heist meeting. The character became one of the canonical noir femme fatales of the 1950s. Windsor played the role with the controlled cruelty the part required. She manipulates George through emotional withdrawal and contempt while operating with Val toward the shared theft.

Marie Windsor is my favorite thing in the film. She treats Elisha Cook Jr.’s George like something she found on her shoe, and their scenes together are so cruel they turn funny. I’d watch a whole movie of her ruining men.

The Sherry plot drives the film’s catastrophic conclusion. Val and his accomplice ambush the meeting where the team gathers to divide the money. The resulting violence kills almost everyone. Only Johnny and George survive briefly. George dies after returning home and killing Sherry. Johnny is captured at the airport when his suitcase containing the money falls open on the runway and the bills blow away in the wind. The structural choice to have the heist succeed while the later split fails has influenced later heist films extensively.

That suitcase popping open on the runway is the heist-film ending I’d rank above all the others. After all the planning and all those dead men, the money goes off in the wind while Johnny watches, and it’s cruel and perfect and I wouldn’t change a frame of it. Most heist films before The Killing centered on the heist’s success or failure. The Killing centers on what happens after the heist’s success.

The Jim Thompson Dialogue

Jim Thompson contributed the dialogue to Kubrick’s screenplay. Thompson was one of the principal hard-boiled crime novelists of the 1950s, having written The Killer Inside Me (1952), Savage Night (1953), and many other novels. His ability to construct criminal dialogue with operational precision matched the heist material that Kubrick was depicting. The collaboration is a rare case of a major novelist contributing dialogue to a film adaptation of a different novel by another author.

Thompson’s dialogue contribution gives The Killing a verbal style that Kubrick alone couldn’t have produced at age twenty-seven. The criminals speak with the particular vocabulary that working hard-boiled writers had developed across the previous two decades of pulp fiction. The hard-boiled tone reached its peak in the 1950s and would gradually fade through the 1960s and beyond. The Killing works at the height of the tradition. Kubrick’s later collaboration with Thompson on Paths of Glory (1957) extended their working relationship.

Thompson’s lines are a big part of why I rate it this high. These men talk like people who learned English from racing forms and parole officers, and it gives a cheap picture a voice money couldn’t buy.

Does The Killing still hold up?

Kubrick’s resources matched his ambition for the first time on The Killing, his third film, and I think it’s still the sharpest heist movie America has made. The split-perspective structure has been copied for decades, Windsor’s Sherry drives it into a brutal finish, and Thompson’s dialogue gives it a voice Kubrick couldn’t have found alone at twenty-seven.

The over-helpful narrator is all that holds me at a 9. Anybody who cares about heist films, non-linear structure or Kubrick before Spartacus should see it.

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