The Killing

1955

After five years in prison, Johnny organises a final job to start a new life: the hold-up of the betting window at a racetrack. Assisted by his old friend Marvin Unger, Johnny recruits accomplices on the scene of the "crime": Randy, Mike and George. Thanks to two other acolytes hired to create a diversion, they pull off their heist, but the splitting-up of the money does not go as planned, and Johnny will be arrested by the police at an airport.

The Killing was released in the United States on 6 June 1956 and in France on 27 December 1957. Its complex, non-chronological narrative structure alternates the points of view of the different protagonists; a voice-over provides temporal reference points.

The Killing was shot under far better financial conditions than Kubrick's first two films: meeting producer James B. Harris, with whom he formed Harris-Kubrick Pictures, allowed him to enjoy a comfortable budget. The director was finally able to hire a professional crew and "good actors" (1): Sterling Hayden, hero of John Huston's The Asphalt Jungle (1950), Elisha Cook Jr., Marie Windsor... The script, an adaptation of Lionel White's novel The Clean Break, was co-written with Jim Thompson (also dialogue writer), a great author of thrillers not yet well known at the time.

The film was a critical success in the States: a reviewer in Time magazine even thanked Kubrick for having "shown more audacity with dialogue and camera than Hollywood has seen since the obstreperous Orson Welles went riding out of town" (2). In France, the work also received good reviews, even though Godard considered it "the film of a good student, nothing more" (3).