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.