The Killing (1956, Stanley Kubrick)
The Killing is a little movie about a big heist. Clocking in at only 84 minutes, Kubrick has really stripped this down to essentials. Basically, it’s about a bunch of guys who are gonna rip off the race track. They all have different jobs to do: there’s Johnny Clay (Sterling Hayden), an ex-con who’s the mastermind of the plan. His accomplices are track cashier George Peatty (Elisha Cook, Jr), barman Mike O’Reilly (Joe Sawyer), policeman Randy Kenna (Ted de Corsia), and moneyman Marvin Unger (Jay C. Filppen). These guys all need the money for various reasons, but it’s not really important to go into that.
Johnny has this all planned out perfectly. But George, unfortunately, is married to a woman who doesn’t love him and is awfully money hungry. George is weak, so he lets slip details about the heist. His wife, Sherry (Marie Windsor), can’t keep her trap shut and tells all to the guy she’s sleeping with, Val Cannon (Vince Edwards), and the two come up with a plan to keep all the money for themselves.
It sounds complicated, but it’s really not. The movie is told in flashes, with a narrator telling us what’s happening to whom, and when. As an aside, narrators are almost never a good thing, and that holds true here as well — it’s annoying and superfluous. However, the jumping back and forth in the telling of the story works wonderfully and keeps things moving along at breakneck pace. We see what each guy did at what time, and then jump back to see what the others were doing. Hey, at least it’s never boring.
Another thing I really appreciated is that it wasn’t full of silly and contrived plot twists like the Ocean’s movies. Well, ok, so the ending does mirror the original Ocean’s Eleven a bit, but that’s a good thing.
I thoroughly enjoyed this cool heist movie; it has good performances, perfect timing, and despite it’s annoying narrator is well worth seeing, especially considering its short running time. And I don’t even usually like Kubrick.
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