The Killing (1956)

After Killer’s Kiss Stanley Kubrick met James B. Harris. The two of them started a production company together and their first project was The Killing. The film was based on a book called Clean Break and they got funding from United Artist, making The Killing Kubrick’s first real Hollywood picture. Kubrick also regarded The Killing as his first professional film.

In the film we follow a group of men, led by Johnny Clay (Sterling Hayden), perform a well-planned robbery of a racetrack. But in the end the money is lost and the men either imprisoned or dead.   Naremore mentions that critics often use this movie as a template for Kubrick’s subsequent work, which usually involves a careful plan that goes disastrously awry. This theme describes the metaphysical conflict between order and contingency.

In the film we can hear the narrator telling us the exact time a person is leaving, which tells us that the robbery is very well planned. The plan even has alternatives if something should go wrong. The narrator tells us this when Johnny drives to the apartment where they will divide the money and he sees George, all covered in blood, walk out from there. But even a robbery so well planned cannot escape the unpredictable. There are multiple events in the movie like this. George telling Sherry, Sherry telling Val, Nikki’s encounter with the parking attendant (even if it did not affected the overall plan), the broken locks on the suitcase, the little dog at the airport etc. These contingencies were some of the reasons the plan failed.

Thinking about this made me realize that the group themselves are a contingency. Even if they had a plan, no matter how detailed and pre-planned it was, the disturbed the “order” of the horserace. The horse that Nikki shot was the horse everybody expected to win. I am also sure the audience did not expect a big hairy man without a shirt beating up security guards either.

And now to something completely different.

Christopher Nolan payed homage to The Killing in the opening sequence of The Dark Knight, were the Joker and his thugs perform a well-planned bank robbery. The most obvious similarity is the use of clown masks.

Christopher Nolan is a filmmaker that is very influenced by Stanley Kubrick and I will have more reasons to come back to this later in the course. 

Killer's Kiss (1955)

Last week we watched Stanley Kubrick’s second fiction film, Killer’s Kiss. When watching the film you can clearly see similarities form his documentary Day of the Fight and pictures that he took while working for LOOK magazine. We discussed the film on Wednesday and covered several aspects of the film. But one thing we did not talk about was the characters costumes.

Costumes are not something I usually look at or pay much attention to when I watch a film, but in this case I did.  They came to mind when we were discussing the parallels between Davey and Gloria in this scene:

Davey portrays himself as a tough guy. He is a boxer, his apartment is very rough and masculine. He even has a machete hanging on the wall.  But he also seems to have a softer side. On his mirror he has pictures of his family and he has some fish that he cares about. This image of himself as a tough guy can be seen in Davey’s costume. When he walks out of his apartment he is wearing dark pants and a dark jacket with a white shirt underneath. The dark clothes becomes the rough/tough image Davey is trying to portray, but it is not who he actually is. We later find out that Davey is not a very good fighter and runs away when he is supposed to save Gloria.

Gloria’s place, in contrast to Davey’s, is more light and colorful and of course more feminine. Gloria’s choice of clothing also contrasts Davey’s. She wears a light colored skirt, a light colored coat and a dark blouse. If we analyze Gloria’s outfit the same way we did Davey’s this means that she is trying to put up a perfect image of herself but there is something dark in her. At this point of the movie we don’t know what that is, but it turns out that she has a relationship with a criminal/violent man and a troubled relationship with her sister and father. She is also not the most loyal person since she goes back and forward between the two male characters Davey and Vincent.

In conclusion the characters costumes in this scene form the Ying and Yang, and hints that the two characters are perfect for each other and that they will end up together. 

After this short analysis of the costumes I just wanted to mention something I noticed in the book On Kubrick by James Naremore. The author discusses the mannequin fight and mentions that the two characters looks like gladiators. This is something I will come back to in a couple of weeks when we watch Kubrick’s film about a very famous gladiator.