Before Stanley Kubrick became the film legend he is mostly known as today, he was responsible for some lesser known movies that were equally as influential as 2001 or Clockwork Orange. I am referring to The Killing, an exciting and well made movie from the 50s which involves a heist, a gritty noir atmosphere, and one of the most infuriating (but deserved) endings in film history. Although there definitely is quite a lot of killing in this, arguably the most important character killed isn't even a human being. The story follows Johnny Clay (Sterling Hayden), a criminal who wants to carry out one last ambitious crime so that he can have enough money to move somewhere with his wife Fay (Coleen Gray). Johnny's plan is to steal a huge amount of money (2 million dollars) from a horseracing event. He knows that it's going to be almost impossible to carry this out unless there are multiple distractions going on, so Johnny calls upon his associates to get him through this. A window teller named George (Elisha Cook Jr) tells his wife Sherry (Marie Windsor) about what is about to take place, knowing that Sherry doesn't have much love for him after failing to get rich when they were originally married. Behind her husband's back, Sherry gets her secret boyfriend Val (Vince Edwards) to try and steal the money which will result from the heist. Shortly before the race is to take place, Johnny enlists the assistance of an assassin named Nikki (Timothy Carey) to snipe a specific racing horse named Red Lightning during the event so as to cause a distraction. When the day comes, Nikki gets in a vantage point to shoot the horse from as it runs around a bend. He successfully kills the animal, but is himself shot dead by a cop as he tries to drive away. Concurrently, one of Johnny's thugs creates an argument with a bartender and fights several cops barehanded. Johnny takes advantage of the confusion, puts on a rubber mask, and robs the money counting room of the racetrack. He throws the huge sack containing the money out the window to a waiting car. Later, the criminals meet at an apartment to each receive their cut of the riches, but before Johnny gets there, Val and a goon of his threaten everyone with shotguns. George guns Val and the other guy down, and within a few seconds, everyone in the room (but George) is dead. He then visits his uncaring wife and shoots her, before dying himself. Johnny decides to keep the money in a safe place until he can split it with the (now dead) conspirators, so he decides to stuff all of it into a briefcase and fly away with it. At the airport, the security give Johnny and his wife a hard time because of luggage size regulations, but his package is allowed on the plane anyway. As the briefcase is about to be loaded onto the aircraft, a dog jumps from an old lady's arms and startles the driver of the luggage cart, making him swerve. The briefcase containing millions of dollars falls to the tarmac and spills open, the bills being kicked all over the place by the engine backwash. Fay tries to convince Johnny to run away, but he knows it's over for him as two guards with pistols close in. This movie is really good and demonstrates how much of a perfectionist Kubrick was, even early in his career. The film pioneers a storytelling technique that is used often today (particularly by Tarantino) in that the plot is mostly told out of order. We get to see what takes place before the crime and after, but the movie never really goes that much into the heist itself. It shows Johnny stealing the money, Nikki sniping the horse, and the fight started by one of Johnny's men at the bar nearby, but that's pretty much it. This helps the film feel more varied, especially to first time watchers, since the order of events is not simply linear. As for the actors, Hayden is great as the leader of the conspirators, but my favorite characters have to be the roles played by Timothy Carey and Marie Windsor. Carey was an odd person, and only directors willing to put up with his strange and boisterous behavior were willing to cast him. Similarly to Lawrence Tierney, who was a real life criminal who even shot at his own nephew once, Carey put on good performances even if he was kind of strange. Marie on the other hand portrays Sherry perfectly, since she encapsulates exactly what the quintessential noir woman should be. She goes behind her husband's back to enact a nefarious plot of her own, and even after he gets shot towards the end, she doesn't really feel bad. Even though the end of this movie had me pretty frustrated because Johnny was almost home free, I was able to accept it because the rest of the film is so good. This is one noir that manages to be a trailblazer despite being made at a time when noir was mostly over.
Review of The Killing
