The Killing (1956)

[Harold Hallikainen]

We saw this as part of the Hollywood Classics series at the Loft Cinema in Tucson yesterday. It is one of Stanley Kubrick's early films and is great! The movie is about a complex heist at a horse racing track. We see it being planned, then executed almost perfectly, then stuff goes wrong. It all goes wrong because the wife of one of the characters convinces him to tell her a bit of what's going to happen claiming that he can surely trust her (not). The film cleverly demonstrates several things happening simultaneously by showing an image of the racetrack PA speakers with the announcer once again announcing the start of the seventh race. A narrator also explains with "meanwhile...". I hear that the narration was added later so audiences would not be confused.

There is a nice summary of the film at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Killing_(film)

Many films of that time period seem very dated and dumb. This film is not dumb! Seei it on the big screen if you can.

[Leo Enticknap]

It's one of my favorites from the '50s, too (especially the final scene in the airport terminal, which I won't give away). A lot of low budget B-noirs from that period have very predictable plots and characters (guy down on his luck is seduced by femme fatale into taking part in a criminal enterprise, then wackiness ensues) and not enough skill or money for production values to make up for them. The Killing is very much one of the exceptions for me, too, along with The Killer that Stalked New York (a mashup of a typical noir crime thriller and a docu-drama about the 1948 smallpox outbreak, including a remarkably topical sub-plot involving anti-vax activists), Drive a Crooked Road (a rare example of Mickey Rooney in a serious role, and he knocks it out of the park) and Odds Against Tomorrow (amazing use of locations and suspense scene directing by Robert Wise proving that he could handle smaller scale movies as well as blockbusters, making up for an average heist plot and Harry Belafonte's performance being wooden and totally out of his depth for the role).