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Classic DVD: The Killing (1956)

September 29, 2010 in Film | Permalink

Sterling Hayden's final role was in the 1982 Civil War TV miniseries, "The Blue and the Gray."

Stanley Kubrick’s first great film, The Killing is a 1956 horse-track heist caper that the director co-wrote with pulp legend Jim Thompson. While it has all the earmarks of a hard-boiled tale of grifters, there is also a devious sense of humor that would be one of the common threads in the filmmaker’s amazingly rangy, genre-jumping career.

Johnny Clay (Sterling Hayden) has just done five long years in prison for petty theft and the only lesson he has seemingly learned is to steal larger quantities of cash. He organizes a group of track employees, cops and others, all of whom have personal motivations for a bold theft that could net them hundreds of thousands of dollars each. But the elaborate plan has to go off without a hitch or it’ll be jail all around, And the crew may also have to deal with a few gun-toting opportunists who’ve been tipped off about the job.

One of the best performances is turned in by Timothy Carey, a great character actor and one of the oddest people in Hollywood history. Carey plays Nikki Arcane, a whacked-out, menacing sharpshooter recruited by Hayden to off a horse in the middle of a race. Nikki is a talented, off-kilter professional who truly relishes the sinister side of his work–which was also an appropriate description of Kubrick. (Available from Netflix and other outlets.)

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