Kubrick populated his picture with mugs straight out of Hollywood’s “hard boiled” character actor collection - “faces” like Jay C. As Johnny, fresh out of Alcatraz, he’s believably pitiless about abusing men in the gang, and women, and plotting a heist that depends on a strongman chess player he knows ( Kola Kwariani) busting up a bar and getting arrested and an ex-military sniper ( Timothy Carey, superb) killing a prized racehorse to throw a race’s results into turmoil and buy the time necessary to empty the safe in the cash counting room. Skipping over all that, ignoring the whole Rodney Dangerfield “cameo” in the brawl scene and the first of Kubrick’s uses of actor Joe Turkel, the simple evidence of what’s on the screen still holds the eye and fires the imagination.Ĭasting a genuine he-man among Hollywood’s “movie stars,” Sterling Hayden, pays the flintiest of dividends. gets slapped around because his greedy, unfaithful wife ( Marie Windsor) has been caught eavesdropping on the gang’s plans, “The Killing” takes off, pulls us in and earns its reputation as an inspiration to generations and the landmark thriller it is seen as today.Ĭlassic films are always overwhelmed by their legend and the details-cluttered back-story of how they got made. The folding-in of second unit racetrack and stock footage isn’t seamlessly handled and the multiple points-of-view versions of the heist - a $2 million robbery at a California horse track - has a clumsiness about it that others (Tarantino in “Reservoir Dogs”) managed to improve on.īut about 20 minutes in, when race track cashier George, played by the iconic “little man” of many a crime drama Elisha Cook Jr. It’s only on reflection that we wonder if Kubrick wasn’t the first to think of the flower box bit, and other touches, way back in 1955. The tropes of many a gangster movie and heist picture - “assembling the team” (a collection of heavies), machine gun in a violin case and later tucked into a delivery box of long-stemmed roses - are trotted out.
Voice-over narration, the crutch of many a hack and the bane of “let the pictures tell the story” guys like Kubrick, over-explains and dumbs down the movie to an almost irredeemable degree. I submit that even at this late date, with director Stanley Kubrick long parked near the top of the cinematic pantheon, that we’re allowed to watch at least the first 20 minutes of the first jewel in his crown, “The Killing,” thinking “this isn’t all that.”
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