A Clockwork ‘Killing’: 1956

Lionel White wrote brisk, doomstruck thrillers whose fast-paced timelines led to disaster as inexorably as the ticking of Satan’s clock. Critics called him “the master of the heist novel." More specifically, of heists that go wrong. His 1953 book Clean Break became Stanley Kubrick’s third movie, The Killing, in 1956. After seventy years, Stanley’s first Hollywood picture still holds up, in every sense.

I’ll try to minimize spoilers, but since the film was made in the waning years of Hollywood’s “crime must not pay” guidelines, you already know going in that sunny days and roses are highly unlikely outcomes for ex-convict Johnny Clay (Sterling Hayden) and his ragtag band of would-be million-dollar thieves.

They aren’t your usual film noir crew of mean thugs, leering goons, threatening leg-breakers, and teenage bully gunsels in cheap suits. Quite the contrary, they are markedly ordinary lower-to-middle-class middle-aged men with stable, inconspicuous jobs conveniently in or near the racetrack. Strangers to each other, they share only a pressing need for money and a willingness to break the law.

As with 1960’s Ocean’s Eleven, these larcenous amateurs are recruited because the police and private cops can supposedly spot the pros on sight. So, like an episode of Mission: Impossible, the intricate robbery plan has to be explained to the orchestrators and thereby to us. As with M: I, in The Killing you aren’t promised or given every piece of the jigsaw puzzle up front. Some intriguing plot surprises are in store.

Kubrick bought and adapted Clean Break with his then-producing partner, Jim Harris. He followed a pattern that would last throughout his career: identify the key must-have scenes in the book and keep its dialog and basic shape, while paring it down to filmable length. They didn’t change much, but their few changes were real improvements.

Stanley Kubrick came along when there were no film schools to speak of, and no film festivals for promising newcomers. There were next-to-no ways for talented outsiders to become filmmakers.

Some postwar directors made it through a brief, intense Fifties fad for prime-time live television, a different craft than movie directing with only overlapping connections to the megaphone gods of the film studio. But John Frankenheimer, Sidney Lumet, Arthur Penn and others did manage to make the jump from the TV control room. Robert Altman came from industrial documentaries in Kansas City. Roger Corman clawed his way up pre-selling each movie regionally across the South and Southwest. For Kubrick’s two earlier films, his main backer—his uncle—owned a chain of drugstores in The Bronx. You do it any way you can.

One thing that people noticed right away about this film: an unusual number of flashbacks, some of them jumping back on each other. (Did Quentin Tarantino and Christopher Nolan see this movie? They did.) Each character’s day of the robbery restarts the clock from the beginning, with staccato, ominous narration: “He knew it would take exactly thirteen minutes to reach the track. A minute or two early was forgivable. Ten seconds late would be fatal.”

Imagine if High Noon had been written like this.

“When the second train whistle sounded, he knew that Frank Miller was two minutes away. He holstered his gun and pinned on his tin badge”. Dissolve to…

“Five hours earlier, Frank Miller started his day in the rooms of a lady of easy virtue. He knew that only a small-town sheriff stood between him, freedom, and a railroad payroll.”

Kubrick has always admitted that this eye-catching, rigidly time-based plot structure, unusual in its day, wasn’t his invention. It was right there in Lionel White’s novel.

Kubrick later disowned his first feature, the almost unseen Fear and Desire, as being like “a child’s drawing on a fridge”. He wasn’t wrong. His second film, 1955’s Killer’s Kiss, was less pretentious and more professional. Although still a cheapie, it was just good enough to sell to United Artists, who agreed to back The Killing—if Kubrick could sign a star. Sterling Hayden wasn’t a major star, but he made the grade. It helped that he was remembered from a similar role in a much bigger crime story, John Huston’s The Asphalt Jungle in 1950. United Artists’ money made it possible to hire a decent cast, an experienced cinematographer, Lucien Ballard, and a fine composer, Gerald Fried.

In his later career, Kubrick always hungered for the ultimate, and for all the nobility there may be in people, ol’ Stan was more inclined to dwell on the darker side of men and organized violence. One of the gutsiest and least-known of Stanley’s swings for the fences, The Killing was the true beginning of his career, Kubrick’s first genuine mid-sized hit. Not to mention it being one of the very best-crafted film noir “perfect crime” stories you’re ever likely to see. Give it a look; you won’t have any trouble finding it free online.