The Killing (Harris-Kubrick Pictures, United Artists, 1956)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

After The Treasure of the Sierra Madre on Saturday, July 11 Turner Classic Movies showed Stanley Kubrick’s The Killing (1956), only his third film and his first for an at least semi-major studio (United Artists). TCM co-host Colson Whitehead joked that one thing the films had in common was they were both about “sweaty white guys.” Kubrick based his film on a thriller novel by Lionel White called The Clean Break, about a meticulously planned robbery of a racetrack (early on we get an opening shot of the nameplate of Bay Meadows, the San Francisco Bay Area track where the racetrack scenes were filmed, but for most of the movie the track bears the fictional name “Landsdowne.”) Kubrick took credit for the script himself, though he hired another writer, noir specialist Jim Thompson, for dialogue. (Later Thompson would work on Kubrick’s next film, the World War I-set anti-war movie Paths of Glory.) The original release posters said, “In all its fury and violence … like no other picture since Scarface and Little Caesar!” Frankly, The Killing owes a lot to John Huston’s The Asphalt Jungle – considerably more than Jules Dassin’s Night and the City, which was frequently compared to it. They’re both movies about a single, elaborately planned crime involving many different people, and they both star Sterling Hayden as the lead criminal. In The Killing the principal crooks are recently released convict Johnny Clay (Sterling Hayden); track cashier George Peatty (Elisha Cook, Jr.); track bartender Mike O’Reilly (Joe Sawyer); corrupt policeman Randy Kennan (Ted De Corsia); and Marvin Unger (Jay C. Flippen), who’s bankrolling the whole scheme in exchange for his share of the proceeds. In addition Clay’s plan involves hiring two other people who won’t be cut in for a share but will be hired for specific tasks relating to the crime. Sharpshooter Nikki Arcane (Timothy Carey) has been told to shoot one of the horses in the middle of the big seventh race, while Maurice Oboukhoff (Kola Kwariani), who’s been hired from a chess and checkers club he runs, has been told to start a fight in the track’s bar that will distract its on-duty police while the robbery takes place.

I hadn’t realized until last night how much Kubrick’s direction of Hayden in The Killing anticipates how he handled Hayden in their later (and much better known) film together, Dr. Strangelove (1964), particularly in the intense need-to-know secrecy with which he surrounds the entire operation. The essence of The Killing is that all the conspirators have mixed motives for participating: Kennan wants to get out from under the loan shark (Jay Adler) who has him by the proverbial balls. Johnny Clay is hoping that the proceeds from the caper will enable him and his partner Fay (Coleen Gray) to live the extravagant lifestyle they’ve always wanted. George Peatty is hoping the money from the robbery will enable him to buy the affections of his faithless wife Sherry (Marie Windsor), who unbeknownst to him is having an extra-relational affair with Val Cannon (Vince Edwards). In fact, Sherry stumbles onto the plot by finding a racetrack ticket with an address on it where the crooks are meeting, and she and Val hatch a plot of their own to hijack the proceeds from the racetrack robbery and use them to run off together. Oddly the film’s most moving scene has almost nothing to do with the main intrigue: it takes place at the racetrack, where Nikki shows up to park his sports car so he can shoot the horse at the exact moment. Only the parking lot he needs to shoot from is not yet open, and he’s informed of that by a Black attendant (James Edwards). The attendant befriends Nikki and thinks at last he’s found a white man who regards him as an equal, only in order to get rid of the man before he screws up the carefully scheduled plot, he pretends to be a racist and calls him the “‘N’-word.”

Eventually the heist happens, but when it comes time to divide up the money Sherry Peatty calls out to “Val.” Her husband hears her call another man’s name and shoots her, while Val shows up and mortally wounds him as well. With the original plot in ruins, as the rather annoying third-person voice-over narrator explains, the fallback plan is that whoever has the money at the end is supposed to hold on to it and notify the others when it’s safe to distribute the proceeds. Johnny Clay has the money, and ironically he drives by the marquee of a burlesque theatre advertising comedian Lenny Bruce (well before Bruce rose out of the confines of burlesque and became a highly acclaimed nightclub comedian and social satirist, only to die of a heroin overdose at age 40 in 1966). He picks up a used suitcase at a pawnshop – the suitcase bears the logo of Las Vegas’s Flamingo Hotel, the pioneering casino notoriously backed by organized crime – stuffs the money into it, and takes a taxi to the airport with the intent of boarding a flight to Boston and taking the money there. Only Johnny and Fay are told that the suitcase is too big to fit inside the passenger compartment, and just as they agree to allow it to go into the baggage claim process, an elderly woman (Cecil Elliott) loses control of her obnoxious dog. The driver of the baggage cart slams on his brakes to avoid running over the dog, and the suitcase with the money falls off the cart. The money spills out all over the place, blown by the draft of the propellers, and Johnny and Fay resignedly accept their fate and are arrested by a pair of plainclothes officers (Charles Cane and Robert B. Williams). The Killing is a quite accomplished film, though to my mind Kubrick’s second film, Killer’s Kiss (also a film noir) is even more dreamlike and hallucinatory. It would attract the attention of mega-star Kirk Douglas to Kubrick and allow him to make Paths of Glory (1957) and Spartacus (1960), though I still think Kubrick’s best films are the near-future trilogy he’d make after Lolita (1962): Dr. Strangelove, 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), and A Clockwork Orange (1971).