The heist movie was established in 1903 by The Great Train Robbery, the earliest film everyone can name. The carefully planned theft, central to the genre’s three-act structure – planning, execution, aftermath – was brought to America by Fritz Lang in 1937 with his second Hollywood film, You Only Live Once. It became a permanent fixture on the postwar cinematic scene with Robert Siodmak’s noir classic Criss Cross (1949); John Huston’s The Asphalt Jungle (1950); Charles Crichton’s The Lavender Hill Mob (1951), “a caper movie”, as comic versions the heist flick were dubbed; and Jules Dassin’s Rififi (1955).
After two rarely seen shoestring failures, the 27-year-old Stanley Kubrick was attracted by Clean Break, a low-budget novel about an ingenious racetrack robbery by pulp writer Lionel White, and by the $320,000 budget raised by his new partner, James B Harris. The pair moved to California to shoot the picture on location in LA, at Charlie Chaplin’s old studio and at a San Francisco racecourse. Everything went speedily and well and the movie brought professional fame and critical respect to both, though due to a wilful failure by United Artists to publicise the film, financial success did not come to Kubrick until Spartacus.
Harris and Kubrick hired hardboiled, low-life author Jim Thompson to write the dialogue (his first film), persuaded Lucien Ballard (soon to become Peckinpah’s regular cameraman) to undertake the high contrast black-and-white cinematography and got Sterling Hayden, the leading heavy in The Asphalt Jungle, to lead a gang of familiar faces with little known names as the bruised, sympathetic losers executing the heist. Among them are perennial fall guy Elisha Cook Jr and shop-soiled femme fatale Marie Windsor.
Cut to the bone, punctuated by fades-to-black, The Killing’s detached semi-documentary voice-over constantly turns back at each move in the plot, distorting time to pick up the story where it had left off at various crucial junctures. Thematically, The Killing anticipates themes, motifs and incidents to come in Kubrick’s oeuvre, most famously the notion of master plans undone by human fallibility, that are also to be found in the tales of fate and life’s absurdity of by his mentors Lang and Huston. The expectations created were rarely to be disappointed over the next 40 years. The movie has never looked better than on this Blu-ray disc which, among other things, contains Kubrick’s second film, Killer’s Kiss.