Killer’s Kiss, The Killing
PRESIDENT ROOSEVELT DIED on April 12, 1945, nine months before Stanley Kubrick graduated from high school. The next day Stanley walked past a news kiosk displaying the headline FDR DEAD. Stanley coached the newsdealer into a dejected posture and snapped a photo, which he promptly brought to the offices of Look magazine. Look’s photo editor, Helen O’Brien, took a chance on young Kubrick, and before long he was a staff photographer.
Still only seventeen, Kubrick had snagged what he later called a “fantastically good job” at Look, and he would stay there for the next four years. Meanwhile, he was having trouble getting into college. “My father, who was an alumni [sic] of NYU uptown, took me to see the Dean. . . . Nothing worked,” Kubrick remembered. But skipping college turned out to be a huge plus. Photography “gave me a quick education in the way things happen in the world,” Kubrick later said.1
Look, unlike its more wholesome rival Life, specialized in the gritty and pessimistic. Spurning Life’s feel-good stories, it often featured grim cityscapes. The magazine was full of “unemployment, alcoholism, juvenile delinquency, divorce,” notes the journalist Mary Panzer.2
In his photos for Look, Kubrick loved depicting limbolike places: a dentist’s waiting office, a subway platform. Sometimes the pallid, confrontational feel of the photos echoes Diane Arbus, as when Kubrick photographs a row of artificial limbs at Walter Reed hospital. A stolid man stares straight into the camera, his pencil behind his ear, while a soldier on crutches haunts the background. In one Kubrick photo a boxer down for the count, foreshortened like Mantegna’s Christ, groans in agony. In another, two young men in ties face the camera, one solemnly adjusting his pompadour, the other staring right at us.
Kubrick also photographed stars for Look. He profiled Leonard Bernstein in August 1949. Here’s Lenny clowning in swimming trunks, making a Hitler moustache with one hand and heiling with the other; sitting in his bathrobe, abstracted; pensively holding a book by Erich Fromm. In March 1949 Kubrick showed Monty Clift, then twenty-eight, in his New York apartment, sitting blankly in front of a bowl of cereal and a glass of milk, then lying on the floor next to an unmade bed, legs splayed, pretend-drinking from a wine bottle. Kubrick also shot Frank Sinatra and Rocky Graziano, George Grosz and Jacques Lipchitz, and the radio star Johnny Grant, “Johnny on the spot.” (Not all those photos made it into print.)
In his work for Look, Kubrick used canted camera angles and, often, artificial lighting. He brought lights into a Central Park West subway stop for a noirish shot of an embracing couple. In 1947 he photographed the shooting of Jules Dassin’s The Naked City. Dassin’s film was deadpan and evocative, and a clear influence on Kubrick’s noir films of the fifties.
Kubrick’s photographic style is stark and clean, foreboding in its precision. But it also had room for drama. He did a series on the socialite Betsy von Furstenberg, featured in the May 1950 Look. In one shot she is lolling, fashionably bored, on a couch with a young man in a tuxedo, with Picasso’s painting of Angel Fernández de Soto staring out at us from the wall above. Betsy in shorts, sitting in a window with a script—she was an aspiring actress—looks like Lolita’s Sue Lyon. She does an impression of rapture while clutching the script to her chest, absently scratching a cat’s head with one hand, her painted toenails curling.
In June 1946 Kubrick shot another dramatic photo spread showing what goes on at a handwriting analysis booth. In just six images, he gives us a full-fledged encounter, with emotions that run the gamut. He focuses on a young serviceman and a woman handwriting analyst who seem to be heading toward a first date: we see their rhythm of shy flirtation, averted eyes, fervent appeal, indecision. (Look published only one of these photos, the following summer.)
Kubrick the photographer liked visual parables: people raptly gazing into a monkey house, with the monkeys off-camera. There is something parabolic, too, about a shot from his series on student life at the University of Michigan: outlined by the stark artificial lighting that Kubrick liked to use, a woman lights a man’s cigarette. Above all, Kubrick knew how to convey a sense of closed-off emotional turmoil. For a photo essay called “First Loves of Teenagers” he shot a girl with her back to us, her face hidden. She has just scrawled I HATE LOVE! in lipstick on a wall, and the hand holding the lipstick droops in defeat.
In May 1948 the twenty-year-old Kubrick married his high school sweetheart, Toba Metz. Kubrick’s friend Gerald Fried, who later wrote the music for his early movies, commented that when Stanley and Toba began their relationship, “they were still in their teens—it almost didn’t count. It was a legal marriage, but they were, like, dating. There was no exchange of any deep affection.”3 The couple moved to Greenwich Village, where Kubrick tagged along with the bohemian intellectual scene. He also sat in on literature classes at Columbia taught by Mark Van Doren and, probably, Lionel Trilling. He got to know some of the Partisan Review crowd, like Dwight Macdonald and James Agee, as well as Weegee and Arbus.
Kubrick’s photo of Aaron Copland and Oscar Levant at a party (Courtesy of Museum of the City of New York)
Kubrick had now plunged into reading literature and philosophy, and after a few years he could give the high-octane New York intellectuals a run for their money. “I spent an interesting three hours with Stanley Kubrick, most talented of the younger directors,” Macdonald wrote in 1959, “discussing Whitehead, Kafka, Potemkin, Zen Buddhism, the decline of Western culture, and whether life is worth living anywhere except at the extremes—religious faith or the life of the senses; it was a typical New York conversation.”4
By 1950 Kubrick was becoming dissatisfied with his job at Look. In four years at the magazine, he pulled in no more than $150 a week. (“They pay lousy salaries, anyway. Off the record,” he told interviewer Robert Ginna years later.) Even apart from the low pay, Kubrick was restless. As a child he had dreamed of being a writer like Conrad, but now he knew he wanted to make films. “For a period of four or five years I saw every film made,” he remembered. “I sat there and I thought, well, I don’t know a god-damn thing about movies, but I know I can make a film better than that.”5 A friend reported that Kubrick sometimes read the newspaper in the movies when he got bored by what was on screen.
The young Kubrick taught himself how to make movies, a rare thing among major directors. He read Pudovkin on film editing and Stanislavski on acting. “In those days there were no film schools,” remembered Gerald Fried. “We had to learn by going to movies. Our discussions after seeing them were primarily listening to Stanley kind of smirking at the tasteless sentimentality of most pictures.”6 As an antidote to Hollywood sentiment, Kubrick had also seen all the foreign films at the Museum of Modern Art, most of them more than once. Now he was ready.
In 1950 the twenty-one-year-old Kubrick made his first movie, Day of the Fight, a 12½-minute newsreel about a boxer named Walter Cartier. Kubrick’s high school friend Alex Singer worked the camera. Kubrick made Day of the Fight for about thirty-nine hundred dollars and sold it to RKO-Pathé for four thousand. This was much less money than he and Singer had expected, but still he was elated.
Day of the Fight still holds up. Cartier’s knockout punch at the end is spectacular, but it seems almost an afterthought. Before that Kubrick grips the viewer with Cartier’s routine in the hours leading up to the fight. He wakes up next to his identical twin brother, goes to morning mass, where he gulps anxiously before he receives the communion wafer, carefully examines his nose in the mirror, and goes to the doctor for his prefight checkup. Kubrick makes tense human drama out of these details. “Time has a way of staring you in the face as it barely moves along,” a voice-over intones as Vince, the twin brother, gives Cartier a rubdown before the fight. Cartier is a twenty-four-year-old kid, hopeful and anxious, the first in Kubrick’s line of young men trying to make their mark: Barry and his stepson Bullingdon in Barry Lyndon, Clockwork Orange’s Alex, Joker in Full Metal Jacket, and finally, that boy in a man’s marriage, Dr. Bill Harford in Eyes Wide Shut.
Nine months after Day of the Fight, Kubrick quit Look, determined to make it as a director. He went on to make another short for RKO-Pathé, The Flying Padre, about a priest in New Mexico who visits his flock by airplane.
Meanwhile, he searched for cash to make a feature film.
Kubrick shot his first feature, Fear and Desire, in southern California in early 1951, after raising ten thousand dollars, mostly from his uncle Martin Perveler, who owned a string of pharmacies in LA. Perveler demanded that Kubrick give him a percentage on all his future films, but when Stanley refused he gave him the money anyway. Paul Mazursky, who acted in the movie, remembered driving with Kubrick to visit Perveler. “He needed another $5,000 to finish the film, and he says, ‘I’m gonna get the money from him no matter what—I can tell you that right now.’ And he spat at the windshield from inside the car. I’ll never forget that. He got the money.”7
Released in 1953, Fear and Desire is a deadly serious Conrad-style tale about four soldiers stranded behind enemy lines in an unnamed war. Years later Kubrick mercilessly derided his first feature film and tried to keep it from being shown. He said to an interviewer, “I wasn’t satisfied to just make an interesting film, I wanted it to be a very poetic and meaningful film. It was a little like the Thurber story about the midget who wouldn’t take the base on balls and decided to swing. . . . It opened at the Guild Theatre in New York and it was pretty apparent it was terrible.”8
Fear and Desire is fatally adolescent, as Kubrick later realized. There is a grandly portentous voice-over, and in one scene a shadowy figure called the General, who topples over into death like one of Welles’s hero-villains. Kubrick wouldn’t give us this kind of hokum again. The movie contains only one memorable scene, when the four soldiers kidnap a girl from the enemy side and tie her to a tree. Sidney (Paul Mazursky) dances around the impassive girl, whose face remains blank, and delivers a demented Bergmanesque monologue referencing Shakespeare’s The Tempest (later the basis for a disappointing film by Mazursky). The girl slips her bonds and runs, and Sidney shoots her dead.
The soldier’s showdown with a silent and implacable woman makes up Fear and Desire’s hot emotional center. It has echoes in some later Kubrick: when Jack in The Shining embraces a nude beauty only to find her transformed into a cackling, pustule-ridden hag, when Joker shoots the teenage Vietnamese sniper in Full Metal Jacket, and when Bill in Eyes Wide Shut faces off against a masked woman at an orgy. Fear and Desire is a hopeless muddle, but even here Kubrick begins working through what men see in and do to women, a frequent theme of his later movies.
Joseph Burstyn, a crucial distributor of foreign films in America, booked Fear and Desire into New York art house theaters like the Guild, on 50th Street near Radio City. It played in a handful of other big cities too. In the sixties Kubrick took the movie out of circulation. When it was screened against his wishes at Telluride and at New York’s Film Forum thirty years later, he announced to the press that it was a “bumbling, amateur film exercise . . . a completely inept oddity, boring and pretentious.”9 Kubrick was right to trash his first feature; only hardcore Kubrick fans will seek it out. Yet the movie gives us some important clues about who Kubrick was.
Toba Metz, dark-haired and pale, with beatnik bangs over her dark eyes, appears briefly in Fear and Desire. Shortly after the film was finished, in late 1951, the couple returned from California to New York, and soon after they separated. Their hand-to-mouth existence no doubt weighed on her. Kubrick had to scrounge for a living, playing chess for quarters in Washington Square Park. He was the fifth- or sixth-best player in the park, he told the journalist Jeremy Bernstein. “It was a whole lot of potzers, and semi-potzers, and people who put up fierce struggles but invariably lost,” Kubrick said.10 While waiting for an answer about a movie, he would arrive at the park at noon and leave at midnight, with quick breaks for meals. Years later Kubrick fantasized that he could have been as great as Bobby Fischer, good enough to beat the Russians, if only he had been able to study chess nine hours a day.
Kubrick met the dancer Ruth Sobotka in 1952 while he was editing Fear and Desire, and the two quickly began an affair. Stanley and Ruth married in January 1955, after living together in the Village for three years. This marriage, like Kubrick’s first, didn’t last long. Stanley and Ruth split the next year, legally separated in 1958, and divorced in 1961. But while they were together Sobotka was a serious intellectual presence in Kubrick’s life. Nearly three years Kubrick’s senior, she was far beyond him in her artistic career. Sobotka had ties to the avant-garde: in 1947 she had appeared in Hans Richter’s film Dreams That Money Can Buy, which contained sequences designed by Calder, Man Ray, Duchamp, Ernst, and Léger.
Ruth had studied with Lee Strasberg and acted on the stage in New York. When Kubrick met her, she was a dancer with George Balanchine’s New York City Ballet, and a designer as well. In 1951 Ruth designed costumes for and danced in The Cage, the sensational Jerome Robbins ballet that depicted a praying mantis–like female devouring her male brood. The dance, hieratic and bloody and as puzzling as Kafka, must have made a strong impression on Kubrick, who no doubt saw it when it was revived by Balanchine’s company.
A dancer friend remembers Sobotka wearing a voluptuous full-length red bathrobe with a fur collar, “like something out of ‘Anna Karenina.’ She was incredibly beautiful.”11 A Viennese Jew, daughter of a well-known actress, Gisela Schönau, and a famous architect and designer, Walter Sobotka, Ruth had fled Austria with her family after Hitler’s Anschluss in 1938, when she was twelve.
Unlike Toba, Ruth Sobotka was Kubrick’s artistic collaborator. Along with a brief role in Killer’s Kiss (1955), she made storyboards for The Killing (1956), his third movie, and a United Artists press release called her “Hollywood’s first female art director.” Like Kubrick, she was a perfectionist. One friend said that when she married Kubrick, she “learned to play chess with no less commitment to the task than studying ballet or acting.” Gerald Fried said about Stanley and Ruth that “there was a lot of sparring, but I thought they were quite perfect for each other.”12
Ruth Sobotka, emissary from the Mitteleuropäische artistic world, left a lasting mark on Kubrick. She may even have told him about Traumnovelle (Dream Story), by another Viennese Jew, Arthur Schnitzler, a book that obsessed Kubrick for decades before he filmed it as Eyes Wide Shut.
The words “film noir” conjure up muffled gunshots in the dark, rain-drenched city streets, and dizzying, recursive plots. Plus maybe a traumatized ex-con, a hard-drinking detective, or a devilish dame; not to mention the bitter taste of black coffee, and the shadow of the gallows. In film noir tough guys usually get outmaneuvered, shown up as hapless pawns. It’s the flip side of that American icon, the lone hero carving out his destiny.
Kubrick’s first two mature films, Killer’s Kiss (1955) and The Killing (1956), are certainly noir, but they don’t share the genre’s glamorous dark moodiness. His protagonists lack the seductive sheen of most noir heroes. Instead they are busy trying to get a grip—on what, they’re not so sure.
Kubrick sides with noir’s hallucinatory sense that life is a dark illusion even when it seems most real, that the boldest of actions can look passive and dreamlike. In Anthony Mann’s Raw Deal (1948), a character says, “I suddenly felt, I don’t know, big and small at the same time.” Noir draws an ironic frame around our fantasies of significance, and Kubrick appreciated the irony.
Kubrick made Killer’s Kiss in New York in 1954. The shooting took thirteen weeks, a long time for a low-budget picture. There is much that predicts later Kubrick in Killer’s Kiss, starting with the title, which ranks with Full Metal Jacket and Eyes Wide Shut in its poetic snap. (Two earlier versions of the title were Kiss Me, Kill Me and The Nymph and the Maniac.)
Killer’s Kiss begins with two lonely New Yorkers observing each other from the facing windows of their apartments. The woman, Gloria Price, is a taxi dancer (in other words, a prostitute) in a seedy Times Square club called Pleasure Land. The man, Davey Gordon, is a boxer getting ready for what will turn out to be his last bout. They begin a romance, which is threatened by Gloria’s boss, Vinnie Rapallo, a middle-aged brute who wants Gloria for himself.
Killer’s Kiss is about ordinary, minor-scale people. No one is neurotic, demonic, or flagrantly doomed as in some film noir. Jamie Smith, who plays Davey, seems passive yet alert, and as devoid of personality as Keir Dullea, Dave Bowman in 2001. Irene Kane as Gloria is slightly feral and shy. Pursued by Rapallo, Gloria can’t be had, but not for the usual noir reasons. She’s not perverse or deadly, certainly no femme fatale, and not baby-doll girlish either. “Her Soft Mouth was the Road to Sin-Smeared Violence,” screamed the lurid poster for Killer’s Kiss, but this was false advertising. Killer’s Kiss is a remarkably chaste film: Gloria is too jumpy and evasive to be sexy, and Davey too cautious, too stunned by life, to thirst after her. There is something off about them, in the same way there is something off about certain people you know.
Killer’s Kiss has a makeshift quality influenced by New York school photography and cinéma vérité. Gerald Fried’s jittery, jazzy score keeps the audience on edge. Kubrick makes the streets of New York look tawdry and dreamlike, full of gritty urban oddities. He cuts from the flashing neon signs of Broadway to hot dogs on a grill to a toy baby floating in a tub in a dime store window.
Kubrick later disparaged Killer’s Kiss, saying that it had a “silly” story and that it was “still down in the student level of filmmaking.” The story was “written in a week,” he told the interviewer Robert Ginna.13 True, there is something crude about the movie, but this lack of polish gives Killer’s Kiss its offbeat charm. From Killer’s Kiss on Kubrick would become increasingly precise in his filmmaking, bearing down on each nuance of lighting, composition, and sound. Killer’s Kiss is the last homemade-looking Kubrick film.
The movie’s ending reprises its first shot, with Davey, who is waiting for Gloria, nervously pacing beneath the cavernous vault of New York’s Penn Station. Then the unexpected happens. In the last minute of Killer’s Kiss Gloria runs to Davey and embraces him.
Kubrick’s second full-length movie is that rare thing, a film noir with a happy ending. The hero gets the girl, but this finale feels tentative rather than celebratory. Kubrick refrains from the usual close-up clinch at the end: the lovers are seen from far off, in the diminuendo of a long shot.
Killer’s Kiss, the first mature Kubrick movie, is the only one until his last, Eyes Wide Shut, that ends with a renewed romantic connection between a man and a woman. In both movies, the connection is exactly as hopeful as it is tenuous.
Killer’s Kiss has a peculiar set piece at its center, showing the crucial place of Ruth Sobotka in Kubrick’s vision. Sobotka dances a pas seul while Gloria’s voice-over tells the story of her doomed sister Iris, who gave up her career as a ballet dancer at her husband’s insistence and then devoted herself to her dying father. In the end Iris killed herself in protest against what her father and her husband had done to her. Gloria throws herself into a degrading job at Pleasure Land, proving that she too can be self-destructive. “Every night I worked in that depraved place, a human zoo,” she says.
It’s hard not to see in Ruth’s Killer’s Kiss dance solo a premonition about the future of her relationship with Stanley. Iris gives up her dancing for her husband’s sake. In 1955, the year after Killer’s Kiss, Ruth left ballet so she could move to Los Angeles with Kubrick. She quickly grew to hate the city. In a newspaper interview she said, “I liked working on a movie, but would not like to live in that city of false values. Success in Hollywood is measured in terms of money or notoriety, and what is important to those people is not what is important to me.” She added that “many dancers I considered good had become slovenly since living in Hollywood.”14
Sobotka was listed as art director on The Killing, as she had been on Killer’s Kiss. But though Ruth dreamed of being Stanley’s full artistic partner, such a collaboration was not to be. When The Killing was being shot, Stanley would often leave Ruth at home while he went to the set.
In Killer’s Kiss Iris remains alien to the drama: a vision intruding from the past, a pure artist who destroys herself. The movie sidelines her much as Ruth Sobotka, who plays Iris, would find herself shunted aside by Kubrick’s burgeoning career. After she performs her lonely virtuoso turn, the movie leaves her behind like a forgotten dying swan. The story of Davey and Gloria shuts out the memory of Gloria’s sister, who lived for art.
In a screenplay treatment called The Married Man from 1954–56, when Kubrick was having marital trouble with Ruth, he wrote,
Marriage is like a long meal with dessert served at the beginning. . . . Can you imagine the horrors of living with a woman who fastens herself on you like a rubber suction cup? Whose entire life revolves around you morning, noon and night? . . . It’s like drowning in a sea of feathers. Sinking deeper and deeper into the soft, suffocating depths of habit and familiarity. If she’d only fight back. Get mad or jealous, even just once. . . . Look, last night I went out for a walk. Right after dinner. I came home at two in the morning. Don’t ask me where I was.15
The anecdote that Kubrick told Douglas, in which he returned home after futilely trying to leave, his suitcase getting heavier and heavier, must have been about his life with Sobotka, one guesses. “Just tell me where my suitcase is, I’m getting out of here,” the husband says in The Married Man.16 His wife (named Alice, as in Eyes Wide Shut), is a “saint,” “practically Mary Magdalene in blue jeans,” and he finds her straitlaced virtue intolerable.
Two other treatments by Kubrick from the same years, Jealousy and The Perfect Marriage, are about desperate, discontented spouses like Kubrick himself. In Jealousy, a husband, convinced his wife is unfaithful, “meets a trampy looking girl and eventually winds up at her apartment. There is a sexy scene of some sort which is climaxed by the man walking out”—just as Bill Harford will do several times in Eyes Wide Shut. In The Perfect Marriage, the husband holds his wife’s “wild” past against her, and claims that he’s faithful, but “she asks about recent trips when he didn’t answer [the] room phone.” Kubrick sketched out a series of notes about the couple’s catastrophic fight: “YOU’LL BE SORRY . . . HYSTERIA VENOMOUS . . . ADMIT INFIDELITY. LOUSY LOVER. SCREAMING[.] HUSBAND LEAVES.” Kubrick also drew up a scene in which the wife abandons her husband, who “sobs like a frightened child” and then calls his mother. Outlining another movie idea, under the title The Famished Monkey, Kubrick writes, “The development of this marriage should be a kind of sado-masochistic Dostoyevskian set up” in which the husband wants “to humiliate the worshiping girl and as a result lacerate him self.” This outline’s scene titles convey marital trauma: “Fuck or fight,” “Colored girls,” “Trapped and bored after a screw.”17
Kubrick expressed his discontent more subtly in Killer’s Kiss, where Ruth plays the doomed figure of Iris, dancing her pas seul and then giving up her career for a man, as Ruth did for Stanley. Ruth is outstripped by the mature romantic couple who have a future because their relations are still tentative, in marked contrast to the self-sacrificing Iris.
Shortly after making Killer’s Kiss, Kubrick encountered the creative partner he was looking for and hadn’t found in Ruth Sobotka. In 1955 Kubrick met James B. Harris, known as Jimmy, an army friend of his high school buddy Alex Singer. Harris wanted to produce movies, and he was impressed with Kubrick’s first two features. So the two men formed Harris-Kubrick Productions.
Harris had a languid, stylish handsomeness that contrasted with Kubrick’s careless bohemian look. They became close buddies. “He was, above all, my friend,” Harris remembered. “We loved to play football and poker together. . . . We shared the same troubles in our lives and the cinema was an outlet, a reason for being and a means of escape.”18 Kubrick had played drums in high school, and Harris was also a jazz drummer, who had studied at Juilliard. Both were Jewish, and both from New York. They were the same age, too, born just eight days apart.
There was no love lost between Jimmy Harris and Sobotka. Harris said, “Ruth was an over-the-hill ballet dancer who wanted to be an art director. So Stanley indulged her in that stuff. She couldn’t understand why her name wasn’t on the door of our office because Stanley’s and my name were on there. They split up and he left. We left our wives together. He was rehearsing me on how to break the news.”19 By December 1956 Ruth was back in New York, where she returned to the New York City Ballet.
Both before and after the split with Ruth, money was tight. Every Friday afternoon Kubrick shut down production on Killer’s Kiss so he could go to the unemployment office and pick up his check. The crew and actors grumbled at the low pay, but Kubrick was under financial pressure. He took no salary for himself on Killer’s Kiss, and he wouldn’t on his next movie either. He survived on those unemployment checks, and on loans from Jimmy Harris.
Harris had come across a novel called Clean Break (1955) by Lionel White, about a plan to rob a racetrack. He optioned the story for ten thousand dollars, thinking it could be Harris-Kubrick’s first movie. Harris and Kubrick rechristened it The Killing and got to work. The Killing was another Kubrick adventure in noir, smoother and more assured than Killer’s Kiss.
The Killing is an intellectual puzzle akin to a chess game. The idea is simple: a criminal’s plan to knock over a racetrack gradually explodes. There is no thrill in the heist, only the constant twitch of anxiety. No wily antagonist dooms the hero, as in Double Indemnity or Out of the Past or Gilda, to name a few of the canonical noir movies. Bad luck and a little loose talk are all it takes for the scheme to fall to pieces. The director sacrifices his criminals like pawns for his final combination, when Johnny Clay, the gang’s leader, stands hopelessly checkmated.
The poster for The Killing boasted, “Like No Other Picture since Scarface and Little Caesar!” But The Killing is no gangster movie with a flashy bad-guy hero. Instead it shows how a criminal scheme swirls slowly down the drain. The heist itself, rather than the characters, takes center stage.
To help write the screenplay Kubrick recruited Jim Thompson, the pulp novelist who had created some of the most disturbing noir fiction, including The Killer Inside Me (1952), a Kubrick favorite (in a blurb, Kubrick called Thompson’s novel “probably the most chilling and believable first-person story of a criminally warped mind I have ever encountered”). In The Killer Inside Me the hero is a perverted romantic Satan, captivating and appalling by turns. The Killing’s Johnny Clay is just the opposite, the criminal as ordinary Joe, and the men he looks for to join his heist are just as undistinguished. “None of these men are criminals in the usual sense. . . . They all live seemingly normal, decent lives,” he tells his girlfriend Fay.
Kubrick was a little wary around Thompson, a hard drinker who invariably pulled a bottle of liquor out of a paper bag before sitting down at his typewriter. Kubrick and Thompson spent their writing days in a tiny office on West 57th Street in Manhattan, and Kubrick, with his sloppy jacket and drooping white socks, sometimes went to Thompson’s two-story home in Flushing, Queens, for dinner. Thompson’s daughter Sharon said, “Stanley came out to our place and just drove us all insane. He was a beatnik before beatniks were in. He had the long hair and the weird clothes.”20
Kubrick and Harris ran into one problem with The Killing: no racetrack wanted to be the setting for a film about robbing a racetrack. For the initial footage of the racehorses, Alex Singer lay down with his portable Eyemo Mitchell camera in the middle of the track at San Francisco’s Bay Meadows just as the horses left the starting gate. When track employees spotted him, the race was stopped. But Singer, who somehow escaped being arrested, had his footage.
Otherwise, the shooting went smoothly. The Killing was shot in twenty days, mostly on the studio lot. Kubrick and Harris handled postproduction together, with Kubrick calling the shots. (“I was always right next to him in the editing room,” Harris said.) The film cost $330,000, but UA supplied only $200,000, so Harris made up the difference. “At the time, [Kubrick] didn’t really know how to find money. I did,” Harris remembered.21
Harris and Kubrick needed a star, and they found one in Sterling Hayden. The tall, rugged, and rambling Hayden came to acting late. He was working as a fisherman off the coast of Massachusetts when a local newspaper photographed him: “Gloucester Fisherman Looks Like Movie Idol,” the caption said. In 1933, when he first came to LA, Hayden lived in San Pedro on a schooner. Then he served in the Second World War: “I was in Yugoslavia with Tito’s partisans, and I liked everything I saw,” Hayden remembered decades later. He made “ten-day westerns,” then hit it big in 1950 with The Asphalt Jungle, John Huston’s meticulous heist flick. A few years later Hayden’s agent told him, “There’s some weirdo out from New York who’s supposed to be a bloody genius.”22 And so Hayden agreed to star in The Killing, for a salary of $40,000.
“What did Kubrick see in you?” an interviewer once asked Hayden, who gave a loaded response: “Why is a man a two-bit hood . . . maybe the weakness?” When Hayden was called up in 1951 before the House Un-American Activities Committee to testify about Communists in Hollywood, he named names. “I was a rat,” he admitted.23 Hayden’s shame at giving in to HUAC comes through in the character of Johnny Clay, who remains insecure beneath his brusque armor.
We first see Hayden as Johnny Clay in a remarkable tracking shot that Kubrick would use again in Lolita. The camera, following Johnny, sweeps through the rooms of his apartment as if they had no walls. Hayden, his long stride eating up the space in front of him, looks utterly confident, but this soon fades. The moment he launches his plot, the net starts to close around him. Without exactly knowing how, we sense that he will lose this one.
Johnny and his girlfriend Fay echo the pair played by Hayden and Jean Hagen in The Asphalt Jungle. In Huston’s movie Hayden snaps at the pliable Hagen, “Shut up and get me some bourbon.” In the first scene of The Killing Fay, similarly obedient, reminds Johnny matter-of-factly, “I’m not pretty and I’m not very smart.” Kubrick gives Johnny no reaction shot: she doesn’t register with him, not even as an annoyance.
Johnny and Fay might also put us in mind of Stanley and Ruth. It’s hard not to see an image of Kubrick’s wish to escape his marriage to Ruth when Johnny shrugs off his girlfriend so he can plan the heist along with his men-only team.
Johnny cooks up the racetrack robbery as a get-rich-quick scheme. He wants to “have it made,” but the phrase sounds empty in his mouth. He is joined by a ragtag band of partners, including Elisha Cook Jr., well known to moviegoers as the clumsy, cheap hood Wilmer in The Maltese Falcon. In The Killing Cook plays George, a milquetoast husband hounded by his wife, who is having an affair with the hunky Val (played by Vince Edwards, one of Kubrick’s poker buddies).
Marie Windsor plays Sherry, wife of the hapless George, with a viperish contempt. Kubrick had seen Windsor in The Narrow Margin (Richard Fleischer, 1952), where she gets called a “60 cent special, cheap, flashy, strictly poison.” In The Killing as in The Narrow Margin, Windsor is some kind of a dame, hard as nails, a jarring, unquiet spirit. She has a touch of Joan Crawford about her, and she can remind you of Lana Turner when her almond-shaped eyes slide slowly, like billiard balls, to the bottom edge of the screen. But unlike those doyennes Windsor remains a bit player. She lacks Turner’s intimacy with fate, or the alien force of Crawford’s stark, staring rage.
Windsor’s Sherry gets The Killing’s snazziest dialogue, no doubt courtesy of Jim Thompson. When she tells her boyfriend Val that her wimp of a husband will be their road to riches, he sneers, “That meatball?” “Meatball with gravy, Val,” she snaps. In the end, Sherry turns the heist into a disaster by spilling the beans and then gets herself spectacularly killed, which might be Kubrick’s revenge on Ruth for inserting herself into her husband’s filmmaking, here analogous to Johnny’s crime scheme. Women spell trouble, is this picture’s implication. With Harris and Kubrick at the helm, your project comes off perfectly; if you let Ruth meddle, you risk catastrophe.
Early on in The Killing, the burly Kola Kwariani, one of Kubrick’s chess buddies, tells us why Johnny is not the existential hero of noir but instead a walking emptiness. At a midtown chess and checkers club, Kwariani, playing a character named Maurice, brushes off a bad chess player with “Shut up, potzer.” Then he tells Johnny,
I have often thought the gangster and the artist are the same in the eyes of the mass. They are admired and hero-worshipped, but there is always present underlying wish to see them destroyed at the peak of their glory.
This speech, riffing on New York intellectual Robert Warshow’s famous essay on gangster movies, goes right over the confused Johnny’s head. He is not the glorious artist-gangster but instead a mediocrity. His blankness finds an echo in some later Kubrick heroes: Dave in 2001, Barry Lyndon, Bill Harford. In this crew only Dave has native intelligence. Kubrick liked his protagonists baffled and beaten, and not overly smart.
The Killing’s denouement arrives quickly. After a chaotic shootout, only Johnny is left alive from the gang, and he has a suitcase full of money. And now Kubrick makes something brilliantly calamitous happen. In a Hitchcockian touch, an airport luggage cart carrying the million-dollar suitcase gets overturned by a middle-aged lady’s yapping poodle, and Johnny watches all those dollars swirl through the air like a leaf storm. Johnny’s plot has come to a dead end, as we suspected it would.
With the spectacular ending of The Killing, as in its fight scene where the bare-chested Kwariani struggles with eight cops, Harris and Kubrick stole a page from Huston’s Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948), one of Kubrick’s favorite movies. Like Johnny Clay’s dollars, the gold that Huston’s Fred C. Dobbs (Humphrey Bogart) thirsts for gets blown away in the wind, gone forever. But Johnny is no Dobbs. Bogart turns Dobbs into an allegorical figure of avarice, a hunched-over gargoyle chortling madly. Johnny has none of Dobbs’s aggressive quirks: he is more or less a dud, as Kubrick intended him to be. The noir films most similar to The Killing have inconspicuous, muddled heroes: think Edgar Ulmer’s Detour (1945) or Jules Dassin’s Night and the City (1950).
The Killing is a comic film, though it’s not very funny: Kubrick doesn’t enjoy absurdity the way Hitchcock does. The movie employs a complex recursive time scheme that forecasts Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction, and, like many Kubrick films, a voice-over. In Killer’s Kiss the longed-for escape from the urban trap actually took place, but in The Killing, Kubrick obeys the laws of his chosen genre. In noir the quest for freedom must fail, and irony rules.
The Killing ends with a flat hopelessness. The money has just blown across the airport runway. “Johnny, you’ve got to run,” Fay says to him. “Ah, what’s the difference,” he groans. Two cops wait for him, symmetrically framing the screen, the caryatids of Johnny’s commonplace doom. There they are with guns drawn facing Johnny, and facing you, the viewer. Then comes the signature: “A Harris-Kubrick Production.”
