"...the gangster and the artist are the same in the eyes of the masses. They are admired and hero worshipped. But there is always present an underlying wish to see them destroyed at the peak of their glory."
Maurice

Credits

Director: Stanley Kubrick
Producer: James B. Harris
Screenplay: Stanley Kubrick, based on Lionel White's Clean Break
Music: Gerald Fried
Running time: 83 min
Cast: Sterling Hayden (Johnny Clay), Marie Windsor (Sherry Peatty), Elisha Cook (George Peatty), Kola Kwariani (Maurice), Joe Sawyer (Mike O'Reilly), Ted de Corsia (Randy Kennan), Jay C. Flippen (Marv Unger), Timothy Carey (Nikki), Colleen Gray (Fay), Vince Edwards (Val), James Edwards (Lot Attendant), Joseph Turkel (Tiny)

---

Plot

A terse crime thriller with twist: a non-linear temporal narrative. Ex-con Johnny Clay has planned the perfect heist: using inside men and various well timed distractions, he can clean out the local racetrack's office. The plan carries off without a hitch, except that most of Johnny's gang is killed off, victims of outside, unforeseen forces. Even Johnny, at the verge of freedom, falls victim to contingency: at the airport his suitcase full of cash breaks open.

Commentary

An excerpt from Kubrick: Inside an Artist’s Maze

Thomas A. Nelson, 1982

Kubrick screws the novel’s story even tighter than Lionel White had, producing a vise of parallel and doubling actions that lend the concept of plot philosophic and reflexive meanings. The Killing, unlike the novel, begins and ends on a Saturday. It introduces each character as a piece in a temporal jigsaw puzzle and concludes one week later by showing how these separate human elements come together in time and space to execute Johnny Clay’s “foolproof” robbery plan. Beginning with the credits, the film builds on an involuted structure of simultaneity and repetition. There, we see documentarylike footage of the Bay Meadows Racetrack and preparations for what will turn out to be the Landsdowne Stakes; later, these shots are repeated three times as they are synchronized to the start of the robbery itself. Thus images that at first lack a specific temporal meaning—but instead are generalized stock shots of a racetrack—are given significance by virtue of an alignment within the context of both Johnny’s plan and Kubrick’s film. Similarly, each of the film’s principal characters, neatly divided between the inside participants and the outside intruders, attempts through the logic of the robbery scheme to give purpose to an otherwise fragmented and desperate existence. We realize, for instance, that at least two of the five insiders must suppress disorderly psychological factors if the plan is to succeed. The fatherly and homosexual attachment Marv Unger feels for Johnny remains latent even though exacerbated by the presence of Clay’s girlfriend Fay; and George Peatty controls his sexual jealousy until after the robbery. In each case, Kubrick extends the novel’s implication that the predictable nature of Johnny’s plan runs contrary to indeterminable human forces.

Important outside complications described in the novel remain almost intact in the film: Randy Kennen has troubles with a loan shark, Mike O’Reilly worries about his invalid wife, Clay has a history of being a small-timer and loser, and George is enslaved by his wife, Sherry. Kubrick, like White, shows how the parallel plot of Sherry and boyfriend Val Cannon represents the one element that endangers both the robbery and getaway; as members of Johnny’s gang come together to finalize the plan, Sherry and Val initiate what will be a counterplot dependent upon the success of the other. Converging very early in the film, therefore, is the reflexive interaction of schemes within schemes, plots within plots. Kubrick gives the race itself an importance not found in the novel, an activity that focuses visually, aurally, and conceptually the film’s complex structure: The Landsdowne Stakes envelops the workings of chance in a closed system—one measured in time, organized in space, and presided over by an off-screen deity (Saturday afternoon at 4:25, a mile and a quarter, on a circular track, and responsive to the track announcer’s control)—and as a result it can be exploited or disrupted by an alien force not part of its logic. All of which means, of course, that Johnny’s plan is equally vulnerable to the unknown activities of Sherry and Val; and analogically, that all three are servants to the temporal/spatial schematics of Kubrick’s film, reminding the audience of an artistic design that guarantees its own success at the expense of the others’ failure.

Kubrick departs from White’s narrative when he magnifies in importance the role of coincidence and chance. The film changes White’s ending, which has George Peatty, bloody from wounds, staggering into the airport terminal and pumping several bullets into Johnny Clay at the moment when escape appears imminent. The final passage of the novel explains the irony of its title—an unnamed policemen pulls a bloodsoaked newspaper from under Johnny’s body and reads a headline that says: RACE TRACK BANDIT MAKES CLEAN BREAK WITH 2 MILLION. Psychology destroys Johnny’s plan in the novel, not, as is true in the film, the fateful turns of a contingent universe. Once he is thrown off his timetable, Kubrick’s protagonist must accept with resignation the fortuities and reversals of chance. At first it appears that luck may save him in the absence of a plan: he arrives at the assigned meeting place 15 minutes late and thereby avoids the film’s second and more grisly “killing,” namely the shootout between his gang and Val’s. But in the end he must flee into the shadows of an accidental world, where a faulty lock on a suitcase and a stranger’s poodle determine his fate. Johnny watches from behind a wire fence as the money, like the gold dust in Huston’s The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948), blows away from the grasp of human aspiration. Kubrick has the film end with Johnny turning to face his captors, a man now stripped of plan and purpose, and admitting defeat (“What’s the use?”) that the film suggests is far more profound than merely the result of a jealous husband’s intervention.

While Kubrick’s treatment of the story and characters displays a thematic clarity absent in his first two feature films, his overall manipulation of narrative and cinematic point of view shows early signs of a mastery present in later works like A Clockwork Orange and Barry Lyndon. The narrator of The Killing, who sounds like the voice from the Highway Patrol television series which played during this time (1955-59), allows Kubrick to cut directly through tiresome exposition and convey essential information; while, at the same time, it strikes what Alexander Walker correctly perceives as an “aural note…to which he tunes the rest of the film.” The “tune” it plays, in fact, recalls the kind of newsreel authenticity Welles so effectively parodied in the “News on the March” sequence (de Rochemont began The March of Time in 1935) of Citizen Kane (1941), but in The Killing this authenticity becomes a near-symphony of reflexive irony. Kubrick’s narrator has an omniscence limited to the external and temporal movements of character and event. His voice is flat and neutral, although he hints at unfolding “puzzles” and “designs,” which remain ambiguous for purposes of plot suspense. His dispassionate objectivity functions as an aural timepiece forever ticking off bits of data that have value only within the mechanical order of Johnny Clay’s plan. More successfully than the film’s characters, the narrator suppresses the contours of an individualized identity so that he may execute efficiently the temporal plan of the film. His voice is all surface and no depth, time-bound and blind to spatial nuances, at once a device for narrative coherence and a foil to Kubrick’s irony. His role in the central action of the film parallels that of the announcer at the racetrack, another disembodied voice we hear in repeated cadences, who also puts his faith in the logic of a mathematically conceived form. As we watch Johnny in a dehumanized mask (one of the few surrealistic touches in The Killing) realize the success of his intricately timed and spaced design, we hear the racetrack announcer’s confusion over the shooting of the horse and his conviction that “exact information” will be forthcoming. Just as Johnny’s plan undermines the authority of the race, so does the narrator of the film command an omniscence far more Olympian than that of the track announcer; but, just as Johnny’s cool and mechanical control turns to frenzy and then despair once it is exposed to a world outside the gameboard of his plan, the narrator plays second fiddle to the subtler themes of Kubrick’s visual narration.

How Kubrick moves to defeat the authority of his “objective,” or overt, film rhetoric is a first exercise in a temporal/spatial aesthetic whose subsequent development will produce a number of intricate and brilliant films. The film combines a series of horizontal tracking shots with repeated vertical compositions to create a spatial grid that suggests both a chessboard and a cage. As the narration impresses us with its temporal dexterity, the film’s visual exposition shows that in the beginning the characters are more synchronized in space than time: The camera moves from left to right with Marv across the racetrack betting area to Mike O’Reilly’s bar, with Randy in the cocktail lounge for a meeting with a loan shark, with Johnny Clay as he walks through the rooms of Marv’s apartment to Fay sitting on the bed, with Mike as he goes to the sickbed of his invalid wife lounging on their bed. From the above account, it’s not difficult to understand why the original working title for the film was Bed of Fear. Kubrick, as in Killer’s Kiss, continues to use the repetitions of camera and mise-en-scene to deepen the emotive and conceptual content of his film. The bed motif slyly circumvents the Legion of Decency and, ironically, develops a far more pervasive sexual implication than is found in the novel. The movements of the camera, with far more subtlety than the narration, outline a world that allows the audience to see the bars of a black and white prison long before the characters admit defeat. As the narrator defines the various human pieces which make up Johnny’s plan, and then as that plan is executed, the horizontal camera movements stay on steady left-to-right course; the film’s characters enjoy, with the audience, a greater sense of spatial than temporal continuity. Once the robbery is over, the camera movements indicate that escape out of the closed structure of the plan and its inevitable consequences will take a right to left course. Naturally, Johnny’s escape from the track moves in that direction, imitating as it does a concept of film continuity as venerable as Muybridge’s experiments with animal locomotion. Interestingly, when Johnny arrives at the airport and moves through the terminal, the camera continues to track with him from right to left; but when he flees from the one thing which might lift him out of his spatial trap, namely the airplane, he and the camera once again traverse a horizontal course from left to right. But this time Johnny retreats into a maze rather than a controlled plan, where far too many factors, interior as well as exterior, interact for a man with his limitations of vision to succeed. Johnny Clay, Kubrick tells us, is not quite a master criminal and not nearly an artist, even though in a conversation with Maurice at the Chess Academy Johnny contends that the best criminal is a kind of artist. In the end, both his success with the plan and his failure with contingency become Kubrick’s sympathetic portrayal of an unsentimental and unheroic human tragedy.

At key junctures, Kubrick employs a vertical camera movement that helps to complete the chessboard/cage metaphor. In three places, the camera moves back in an identical manner as it records Johnny’s movement outside a line of motel cabins. In the first two scenes, Johnny moves with his usual steady resolution to the correct cabin, while in his haste to pick up the money on the third occasion he becomes spatially disoriented (his is 15 minutes behind schedule) and almost goes into the wrong cabin. The vertical camera movement, however, remains the same—it continues to draw the lines of a cage—as the temporal scheme of Johnny’s plan starts to unravel. The only subjective shot in the film moves vertically with George Peatty across a grotesquely disordered room of carnage as his fate comes to resemble the bars of his bettor’s cage and the cage of a parrot that will mock him in death. And in three strategic places, Kubrick creates a composition of three human figures lined up and facing the camera: the cardboard G-men targets pointing guns on Nikki’s firing range; the three gang members (Marv, Mike, and Randy) looking expectantly toward the door through which Val and another man will come and turn the apartment into a shooting gallery with live targets; and finally, the three figures (two plainsclothesmen and, to complete the symmetry, an airline employee) who move toward Johnny in the final shot of the film.

From the visual design of The Killing, in the way it totally encloses the world of the film, we can infer that Kubrick decided to experiment with a temporal definition of space. Besides the moving camera shots and vertical compositions, he also uses source lighting to accent a claustrophobic darkness and an array of objects to suggest psycho/sexual entrapment. Kubrick, however, transcends the novel’s emphasis on the contrary workings of design and disruption by creating a cinematic equivalent for his avowed fondness for games of deception and enigmatic works of literature; he extends the novel’s donnee to include not only the opposition of intellect and passion, design and disorder, but of art and life as well. And yet, the style of The Killing remains deceptively clean and bare, one in which the geometric lines of movement and space are far more evocative than images of density and mass. The tight narrative focus of the novel, with its subordination of psychological depth to complex intersections of plot, offered Kubrick an opportunity to work out a firmer command of film time. And because Clean Break clearly defines its interior world, Kubrick, with the help of a competent cast, was able to move away from the internal probings of Fear and Desire and Killer’s Kiss and develop objective correlatives for a psychological and emotional content. Adaptation, for the first time, provided him with an explicit verbal rhetoric from which he could create a more implicit cinematic one. In the final analysis, The Killing may be nothing more than just that: a cleverly executed exercise, Kubrick’s “plan,” both entertaining, in its action and pace, and revealing in the secrets it tells about a film maker whose conjurations far too often elude our grasp.

---