The Killing is one of the most hilariously morbid heist movies of all time, featuring a large cast of interesting characters and a superbly funny conclusion. The film is told with heavy narration and a timeline that overlaps upon itself from different perspectives, an idea that probably influenced a great many future filmmakers, including Quentin Tarantino and Christopher Nolan. Although it has a low budget and doesn’t have any big-name stars, the film is incredibly fast-paced with no unnecessary padding and, thanks to Stanley Kubrick’s sharp direction and writing, is thrilling, dark, unique and wholly entertaining.

It’s September when Marvin Unger (Jay C. Flippen) arrives at the racetrack with absolutely no interest in horseracing; and even a lifelong disdain for gambling (as explained by the narrator with a deep, noirish voice). His presence is simply to deliver a note for a meeting location to several carefully selected people, each one chosen to participate in an elaborate and clever heist of the racetrack office’s receipts. Some are employees, others are gunmen, but each has their own motivations for a cut of the potential $2,000,000 robbery.

In another part of town, policeman Randy Kennan (Ted DeCorsia) reveals his influences to partake in the caper, while the third part of the puzzle, Johnny Clay (Sterling Hayden) is introduced talking to his girlfriend Fay (Coleen Gray) about his having been locked up for 5 years; it didn’t deter him enough, however, as he’s immediately back to rustling up a crime. Meanwhile, Mike O’Reilly (Joe Sawyer) the track bartender comes home to his sick wife Ruth, and George Peatty (Elisha Cook) the track cashier comes home to his cruelly sarcastic and unfaithful wife Sherry (Marie Windsor). She’s the catalyst for complications (described as someone who would sell out her mother for a piece of fudge) when she spills details about the job to her secret lover Val (Vince Edwards), who gets greedy. The final two crooks are hired for specific jobs for a flat price: Maurice, a muscular foreigner with a nearly unintelligible accented speech, is supposed to start a fight at the bar, and the other, Nicki (Timothy Carey), is a sniper assigned to shoot the lead horse Red Lightning, both as distractions from the real crime.

With so many characters, it’s one of the few times that a narrator feels absolutely essential, initially, even when it isn’t.  But the omnipotent speaker continues to butt in to comment on exact times and locations (such as “he reached the bus station at 8:45” or “at 12:10, as was his custom, he arrived at the track”) that we can not only see for ourselves but also has little impact on the grand scheme of things. As the movie wears on, it actually gets fairly annoying. Toward the conclusion, the narrator even explains conditions of the heist that were never discussed previously, as if he overheard the plotting men deliberate before the movie started. Outside of that single aspect, The Killing is top-notch entertainment with intelligent characters, a singular plot, and a perfect ending, and is a brilliant early entry for one of cinema’s most influential directors.

- Mike Massie

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