The Killing

Stanley Kubrick's third film, the one which put him on the map, is a tight low-budget noir-ish black-and-white heist thriller .

Sterling Hayden plays a small-time crook, Johnny Clay,  who teams up with a bunch of losers (played by Vince Edwards, Jay C. Flippen and Elisha Cook Jr. amongst others) in order to rob a racetrack. Coleen Gray plays Johnny''s girlfriend but it is Marie Windsor who stands out as the villain of the piece.

Downbeat all the way, Kubrick uses the multi-perspective approach, stopping the narrative development to show us the same events as perceived by different characters, effectively leading us to the inevitable nihilistic conclusion.

Scripted by Kubrick from a novel by Lionel White, the cracking dialogue is credited to pulp fiction specialist Jim Thompson who would also work on Kubrick's next film, Paths Of Glory (1957) as well as write the novel on which Peckinpah's The Getaway (1972) was based.

 

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