The Killing

03/04/2025

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  If almost all films have plots, and many of them are plotted, there are certain genres where the plot isn’t only of paramount importance; it is generated from within the story itself. Characters are involved in the plotting. In this sense, some genres seem less plot-heavy than others. The Western may sometimes have ranchers getting pushed off their land by conniving barons (Shane; McCabe and Mrs Miller, Heaven’s Gate) and the gangster film often shows characters ruthlessly taking advantage of others, but the genres most given to plotting both non-diegetically (outside the story) and diegetically (the plotting of the characters themselves.) are the film noir and the heist film. While Hitchcock once proposed a good story needs a good villain, with the baddie often propelling events the goodies have to try and curtail, we might twist his claim a little and say a good plot often requires a great plan. The heist film is surely the best example of plot as planning, of characters sitting down and finding a way to rob a bank, train or in this instance the takings at a racing track.  

      In The Killing, central character Johnny Clay (Sterling Hayden) is the man with the plan as he lays out the details of the theft to the other key players. Two work at the racecourse (a teller and a barman), a third is a corrupt copper, the fourth the man who can put in some money upfront to pay for a sniper and a wrestler: the first to shoot the favourite horse at the race and to cause a stir; the second to start a fight in the bar so that Johnny can be let into the back of the race course headquarters by the teller without anyone paying attention. 

     Perhaps now is a good time to differentiate from the plan and the plot, just as later we will distinguish between deliberation versus contingency. Partly what makes The Killing complicated isn’t just that there is the planned heist; there is also a plot hatched by the teller’s wife and her lover to steal the money once the heist has been successful. The teller, George Peatty (Elisha Cook Jr), is a weak man besotted by a spouse, Sherry, who despises him and tries to impress her by leaking aspects of the plan, which she then offers to her lover. While the plan is vital to the heist film, the plot is usually a central dimension of the film noir. The triangle of husband, wife and lover is a common enough trope, evident in Double Indemnity, The Postman Always Rings Twice and Body Heat, and in The Killin, itg functions as an important secondary dimension to the story. 

  The dysfunctional relationship between Peaty and his wife is given far more time and space in the film than the functional one between Johnny and his fiancée Fay. Johnny might be our leading man but his fiancée has no function within the story and is there only that the formerly jailed Johnny wants to start his life anew and needs money to do so. Sherry is the femme fatale figure who manages to convince her husband that he means the world to her, all the while determined to shatter it by going off with both her lover and the cash he and the others garner. 

  Near the beginning, the voice-over tells us that for one of the characters: “waiting for the race to become official he began to feel he had as much effect on the final outcome of the operation as a single piece of a jumbled jigsaw puzzle has to its predetermined final design.” It is a good summary not only of The Killing but many a film that is so focused on the story it is telling that any character who doesn’t have a clear role in the development of the tale is narratively surplus to requirements. It is why a supporting character’s wife can be more important than the leading character’s fiancée. The fiancee has no impact on the plan; Sherry does.

    The main stage of the plan works almost perfectly; the only glitch is when the sniper after killing the horse, tries to make a getaway and gets shot as the film begins to hint at the ironies the film will conclude upon. The sniper has been allowed into a closed parking area because a black attendant shows him sympathy after the sniper says he is a paraplegic and fought in the war. The attendant comes over twice and the second time offers him a lucky horseshoe that the sniper tells the attendant to keep as he makes a racial slur. The attendant throws the shoe on the ground. The sniper wants the attendant out of the way so he can shoot the horse, but after he kills it when he reverses his car in a quick escape, he punctures his tyre on the horseshoe, and an officer shoots him dead. The attendant, trying to do a good deed, gets insulted by the sniper and the very deed that was a generous gesture towards the sniper becomes the object that will lead to his demise. The horseshoe was not part of the plan nor part of anybody's to scupper it, but it becomes a perfect obstacle to his escape. 

     This is part of the contingent aspect the film hinges on and the irony that it concludes upon. Johnny and co have a perfect plan that only works if everybody within it plays their designated role. But Sherry becomes part of the problem for malevolently selfish reasons, just as the black attendant becomes so for warm and benign ones as we see the film plays up the plan that sets the film in motion, the plotting that complicates it, and the contingencies that suggest no matter how well laid out one’s intentions, the unexpected shouldn’t be ruled out either. The sniper is the first to die, but by the end of the film almost all of the characters will be dead or arrested. Sherry’s boyfriend and his buddy burst in on three of the gang and as they stand with their hands up, George comes from next door firing, and all except George end up dead. The severely wounded George makes it back to his wife, whom he kills, and then falls down dead himself. 

      The plot has ruined the plan. But there is also a further moment of contingency after Johnny and Fay prepare to take off on the plane. Johnny’s recently purchased suitcase, specifically large enough to store the £2m stolen is too big to take as carry-on luggage. After some wangling, Johnny accepts he can’t persuade the airport staff to let him take it on board, and it goes with the rest of the big luggage to be stored in the hold. We have earlier seen, when Johnny transfers the cash from a bag to the suitcase, that it isn’t the best quality: the locks are weak. It wouldn’t take much to burst open, and sure enough, when a lady’s dog in a moment of lax security that might make you yearn for the days when getting on a plane wasn’t quite so hindering, the driver of the luggage carrier swerves out of the way and the bag spills open. The cash swirls around as the plane’s propellers whip it up in the air and Johnny looks on as if “the best laid schemes o' mice an' men gang aft a-gley.” 

   One of the dangers with contingency is that it can seem random, and a film’s purpose is to appear engineered. How does a filmmaker justify chance while insisting it fits into the careful creation of an aesthetic object? The answer resides in the circumstances that lead to the contingent that could have been avoided if it weren’t for earlier character-motivated decisions. If George hadn’t alluded to the robbery, and if his wife weren’t in an affair with a criminal who she then tells, then Johnny wouldn’t have been left alone with the money. As the narrator says, it was only in the event of an emergency that whoever had the fortune at the time should look after it without any consideration for the others. If the others hadn’t been killed, Johnny wouldn’t have been likely to take off from California with the cash to Boston. 

  In an excellent piece on the heist film, Julian Hanich says that “…burglars work with surgical precision, breaking only the most necessary things. Watching heist films has a lot to do with the pleasure derived from observing people act with expertise and in skilful ways.” (The Heist film as Pleasure) Yet in The Killingt, this takes care of the plan, but The Killing is also about the plot, and chance as well. It isn’t unusual for a heist to go wrong and for the criminals to end up dead, The Red Circle, Reservoir Dogs, Heat, Before the Devil Knows Your Dead, Wanda, Crimson Gold: in mainstream films or otherwise it isn’t uncommon for a heist to go awry. While the caper film is predicated on success as it usually needs a happy ending; the heist film absorbs far more pessimism and can show, whatever the brilliance of the criminals, that greed and bad luck can ruin even the most effectively thought-through plan. Those in caper films like How To Steal a Million, The Thomas Crown Affair and The Hot Rock won’t be any more competent than the main figures in The Red Circle, Heat and The Killing, but, in Ancient dramatic terms, the heist is often close to tragedy; the caper to comedy. The latter demands happy endings; the former does not. 

     The Killing was of course, an early Stanley Kubrick - his third feature and made before the name Kubrick would have the meaning it now possesses. For all the director’s reputation as a demanding auteur, keen to challenge audiences, he wasn’t only a narrative filmmaker but also a genre one - most of his films fit into a recognisable genre that then works its way out of its contours: war movies, horrors, comedies, period epics and science fiction. However, by the time of The Shining, Kubrick wasn’t making a horror; he was speaking of horror and containing it within the broadest of generic parameters so that it would reveal a theme rather than be contained by the story. “…the object of the thing is to produce a sense of the uncanny,” Kubrick said, and in the same interview reckoned the important thing isn’t to compromise “…the inner truth of the story, you know, the theme and everything else…” (Cinephelia and Beyond) 

      Kubrick was always a director drawn more to tragedy than comedy (even if he worked with Peter Sellers on Dr Strangelove and Lolita), as though the theme he was seeking to elaborate was a pessimistic awareness that we are far less in control of our destiny than we might wish to believe. In The Killing, he is fascinated by the meticulously planned and executed robbery, and interested too in the plot that develops with the wife and lover. But what we remember most from the film is the little dog running onto the runway and the dispersed cash as the suitcase breaks open. 

  Even the film’s structure reflects a feeling for perspective as much as narrative momentum. The film offers the heist by rejecting the commonly used cross cut to show instead each heist member involved from the start of their involvement on the day to the completion of their role in the robbery. It gives to the film the sort of clever narrative form that Quentin Tarantino would make much of in Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction and Jackie Brown, but rather than leaving the viewer aware of the witty control of the direction, we are more inclined to see the pieces of a jigsaw that can become descrambled very easily indeed. Kubrick’s skill lies in starting from the plan, acknowledging the counter-plot and seeing that terrible chance can turn the immaculate conception into an abortive endeavour. The Killing isn't only proposing crime doesn’t pay, which many a crime film will do as it allows the cops to catch the robbers, but more broadly to say that planning the future isn't the same as arriving at it. For that, you must rely on the successful contribution of others, trust as well, and hope that contingency doesn’t mess everything up. The gang do their job but George is married to a greedy woman who doesn’t love him,  a dog that might have no interest in money but has an enthusiastic energy that leads to Johnny losing a fortune.  Johnny will also no doubt lose his freedom, as he will end up once again in the prison system he has, at the beginning of the film, only just escaped. 

© Tony McKibbin

Tony McKibbin

The Killing

  If almost all films have plots, and many of them are plotted, there are certain genres where the plot isn’t only of paramount importance; it is generated from within the story itself. Characters are involved in the plotting. In this sense, some genres seem less plot-heavy than others. The Western may sometimes have ranchers getting pushed off their land by conniving barons (Shane; McCabe and Mrs Miller, Heaven’s Gate) and the gangster film often shows characters ruthlessly taking advantage of others, but the genres most given to plotting both non-diegetically (outside the story) and diegetically (the plotting of the characters themselves.) are the film noir and the heist film. While Hitchcock once proposed a good story needs a good villain, with the baddie often propelling events the goodies have to try and curtail, we might twist his claim a little and say a good plot often requires a great plan. The heist film is surely the best example of plot as planning, of characters sitting down and finding a way to rob a bank, train or in this instance the takings at a racing track.  

      In The Killing, central character Johnny Clay (Sterling Hayden) is the man with the plan as he lays out the details of the theft to the other key players. Two work at the racecourse (a teller and a barman), a third is a corrupt copper, the fourth the man who can put in some money upfront to pay for a sniper and a wrestler: the first to shoot the favourite horse at the race and to cause a stir; the second to start a fight in the bar so that Johnny can be let into the back of the race course headquarters by the teller without anyone paying attention. 

     Perhaps now is a good time to differentiate from the plan and the plot, just as later we will distinguish between deliberation versus contingency. Partly what makes The Killing complicated isn’t just that there is the planned heist; there is also a plot hatched by the teller’s wife and her lover to steal the money once the heist has been successful. The teller, George Peatty (Elisha Cook Jr), is a weak man besotted by a spouse, Sherry, who despises him and tries to impress her by leaking aspects of the plan, which she then offers to her lover. While the plan is vital to the heist film, the plot is usually a central dimension of the film noir. The triangle of husband, wife and lover is a common enough trope, evident in Double Indemnity, The Postman Always Rings Twice and Body Heat, and in The Killin, itg functions as an important secondary dimension to the story. 

  The dysfunctional relationship between Peaty and his wife is given far more time and space in the film than the functional one between Johnny and his fiancée Fay. Johnny might be our leading man but his fiancée has no function within the story and is there only that the formerly jailed Johnny wants to start his life anew and needs money to do so. Sherry is the femme fatale figure who manages to convince her husband that he means the world to her, all the while determined to shatter it by going off with both her lover and the cash he and the others garner. 

  Near the beginning, the voice-over tells us that for one of the characters: “waiting for the race to become official he began to feel he had as much effect on the final outcome of the operation as a single piece of a jumbled jigsaw puzzle has to its predetermined final design.” It is a good summary not only of The Killing but many a film that is so focused on the story it is telling that any character who doesn’t have a clear role in the development of the tale is narratively surplus to requirements. It is why a supporting character’s wife can be more important than the leading character’s fiancée. The fiancee has no impact on the plan; Sherry does.

    The main stage of the plan works almost perfectly; the only glitch is when the sniper after killing the horse, tries to make a getaway and gets shot as the film begins to hint at the ironies the film will conclude upon. The sniper has been allowed into a closed parking area because a black attendant shows him sympathy after the sniper says he is a paraplegic and fought in the war. The attendant comes over twice and the second time offers him a lucky horseshoe that the sniper tells the attendant to keep as he makes a racial slur. The attendant throws the shoe on the ground. The sniper wants the attendant out of the way so he can shoot the horse, but after he kills it when he reverses his car in a quick escape, he punctures his tyre on the horseshoe, and an officer shoots him dead. The attendant, trying to do a good deed, gets insulted by the sniper and the very deed that was a generous gesture towards the sniper becomes the object that will lead to his demise. The horseshoe was not part of the plan nor part of anybody's to scupper it, but it becomes a perfect obstacle to his escape. 

     This is part of the contingent aspect the film hinges on and the irony that it concludes upon. Johnny and co have a perfect plan that only works if everybody within it plays their designated role. But Sherry becomes part of the problem for malevolently selfish reasons, just as the black attendant becomes so for warm and benign ones as we see the film plays up the plan that sets the film in motion, the plotting that complicates it, and the contingencies that suggest no matter how well laid out one’s intentions, the unexpected shouldn’t be ruled out either. The sniper is the first to die, but by the end of the film almost all of the characters will be dead or arrested. Sherry’s boyfriend and his buddy burst in on three of the gang and as they stand with their hands up, George comes from next door firing, and all except George end up dead. The severely wounded George makes it back to his wife, whom he kills, and then falls down dead himself. 

      The plot has ruined the plan. But there is also a further moment of contingency after Johnny and Fay prepare to take off on the plane. Johnny’s recently purchased suitcase, specifically large enough to store the £2m stolen is too big to take as carry-on luggage. After some wangling, Johnny accepts he can’t persuade the airport staff to let him take it on board, and it goes with the rest of the big luggage to be stored in the hold. We have earlier seen, when Johnny transfers the cash from a bag to the suitcase, that it isn’t the best quality: the locks are weak. It wouldn’t take much to burst open, and sure enough, when a lady’s dog in a moment of lax security that might make you yearn for the days when getting on a plane wasn’t quite so hindering, the driver of the luggage carrier swerves out of the way and the bag spills open. The cash swirls around as the plane’s propellers whip it up in the air and Johnny looks on as if “the best laid schemes o' mice an' men gang aft a-gley.” 

   One of the dangers with contingency is that it can seem random, and a film’s purpose is to appear engineered. How does a filmmaker justify chance while insisting it fits into the careful creation of an aesthetic object? The answer resides in the circumstances that lead to the contingent that could have been avoided if it weren’t for earlier character-motivated decisions. If George hadn’t alluded to the robbery, and if his wife weren’t in an affair with a criminal who she then tells, then Johnny wouldn’t have been left alone with the money. As the narrator says, it was only in the event of an emergency that whoever had the fortune at the time should look after it without any consideration for the others. If the others hadn’t been killed, Johnny wouldn’t have been likely to take off from California with the cash to Boston. 

  In an excellent piece on the heist film, Julian Hanich says that “…burglars work with surgical precision, breaking only the most necessary things. Watching heist films has a lot to do with the pleasure derived from observing people act with expertise and in skilful ways.” (The Heist film as Pleasure) Yet in The Killingt, this takes care of the plan, but The Killing is also about the plot, and chance as well. It isn’t unusual for a heist to go wrong and for the criminals to end up dead, The Red Circle, Reservoir Dogs, Heat, Before the Devil Knows Your Dead, Wanda, Crimson Gold: in mainstream films or otherwise it isn’t uncommon for a heist to go awry. While the caper film is predicated on success as it usually needs a happy ending; the heist film absorbs far more pessimism and can show, whatever the brilliance of the criminals, that greed and bad luck can ruin even the most effectively thought-through plan. Those in caper films like How To Steal a Million, The Thomas Crown Affair and The Hot Rock won’t be any more competent than the main figures in The Red Circle, Heat and The Killing, but, in Ancient dramatic terms, the heist is often close to tragedy; the caper to comedy. The latter demands happy endings; the former does not. 

     The Killing was of course, an early Stanley Kubrick - his third feature and made before the name Kubrick would have the meaning it now possesses. For all the director’s reputation as a demanding auteur, keen to challenge audiences, he wasn’t only a narrative filmmaker but also a genre one - most of his films fit into a recognisable genre that then works its way out of its contours: war movies, horrors, comedies, period epics and science fiction. However, by the time of The Shining, Kubrick wasn’t making a horror; he was speaking of horror and containing it within the broadest of generic parameters so that it would reveal a theme rather than be contained by the story. “…the object of the thing is to produce a sense of the uncanny,” Kubrick said, and in the same interview reckoned the important thing isn’t to compromise “…the inner truth of the story, you know, the theme and everything else…” (Cinephelia and Beyond) 

      Kubrick was always a director drawn more to tragedy than comedy (even if he worked with Peter Sellers on Dr Strangelove and Lolita), as though the theme he was seeking to elaborate was a pessimistic awareness that we are far less in control of our destiny than we might wish to believe. In The Killing, he is fascinated by the meticulously planned and executed robbery, and interested too in the plot that develops with the wife and lover. But what we remember most from the film is the little dog running onto the runway and the dispersed cash as the suitcase breaks open. 

  Even the film’s structure reflects a feeling for perspective as much as narrative momentum. The film offers the heist by rejecting the commonly used cross cut to show instead each heist member involved from the start of their involvement on the day to the completion of their role in the robbery. It gives to the film the sort of clever narrative form that Quentin Tarantino would make much of in Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction and Jackie Brown, but rather than leaving the viewer aware of the witty control of the direction, we are more inclined to see the pieces of a jigsaw that can become descrambled very easily indeed. Kubrick’s skill lies in starting from the plan, acknowledging the counter-plot and seeing that terrible chance can turn the immaculate conception into an abortive endeavour. The Killing isn't only proposing crime doesn’t pay, which many a crime film will do as it allows the cops to catch the robbers, but more broadly to say that planning the future isn't the same as arriving at it. For that, you must rely on the successful contribution of others, trust as well, and hope that contingency doesn’t mess everything up. The gang do their job but George is married to a greedy woman who doesn’t love him,  a dog that might have no interest in money but has an enthusiastic energy that leads to Johnny losing a fortune.  Johnny will also no doubt lose his freedom, as he will end up once again in the prison system he has, at the beginning of the film, only just escaped. 


© Tony McKibbin