The KillingSuppose I were to compare Stanley Kubrick's The Killing to the art of making a clock. A clock maker must know how each gear works for the greater purpose, the strengths and weaknesses of each part, and its intent; should one element be an ill fit, or a spring be wound too tight, the whole device would be a failure. Johnny Clay (Sterling Hayden) is an ex-con who recruits a small group of people--who are crooked, but not all professional criminals--to facilitate the heist of a racetrack. Everything is planned to the minute, and Johnny has it all worked out...well, almost all...
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The thing is that no caper is perfect, but Johnny tries his best after having spent five years up the river for some crime which goes undisclosed, but we can surmise is related to the kind of racket which Johnny has a penchant for. And exactly what "penchant" had Johnny a talent for? Well, that of larceny, of theft, of the kind of easy way to make big bucks without putting in the schmuck hours of other poor dopes. Johnny's got it all figured: find a score, get enough guys who are sick of taking in pennies when they should be taking in dollars, and make the deal before the fuzz gets wise. But Johnny Clay ranks far above the average street-level thug, condemned to raking in small change from the minor grift and the like. No, Johnny is a high-level strategist, and his game is to overthrow the racetrack during a one-hundred thousand dollar race, which will actually net him and his accomplices a cool two million. Johnny's approach is complex, yet reasonable, and orchestrated to the point that no minor setbacks should occur, and that he remains in control every step of the way. But the problem with perfect plans is that they tend to not be all that interesting in and of themselves, and require some kind of setback to keep our attention rapt. It might be a little hard to say just where the caper goes south for sure...maybe it is with George's wife, Sherry (Marie Windsor), who butts in to discover just what her mousy husband has been at all these late nights when he hasn't been at home with her...and she has been out with another man. Or maybe it has been with George (Elisha Cook, Jr.) all along, the very same mousy husband who lets it slip about his big job to his opportunistic broad of a wife. Truth is, maybe it was always Johnny, since it might just be that this is a tale of "crime doesn't pay", and Johnny has to be the fall guy in the grand scheme of things, so he audience can sleep well at night. Anyway, Johnny's best efforts amount to a hill of beans when for all the best intentions, for all the best efforts to ensure that the heist goes perfectly and according to play, Johnny learns a desperate lesson about how the forces greater than him conspire to ensure that his crime does not go unpunished.
Johnny Clay is a pragmatist, a man who understands that the events which are necessary to facilitate his operation do not just happen magically. Johnny employs a couple of goons alongside the core group to ensure that their endeavor is not an amateur endeavor, and that their actions have meaning. Among the goons which Johnny employs are a barely-intelligible Russian chess master who happens to possess the physique of a professional wrestler, and Johnny pays him handsomely to start a barroom brawl at the track to deter and distract the armed guards from intervening in Johnny's caper. Also, Johnny recruits a thug with a penchant for rifles, to snipe and assassinate the lead horse in the race, for the purpose of creating dissent and chaos on the track, which in turn leads to a safer and easier effort for him to rob the track of the collected gamblers' winnings, the collected dreams and hopes of the destitute which pray for those hundred-to-one odds of capitalism. Johnny collects Maurice (Kola Kwariani) to start the brawl, and Nicky (Timothy Carey) to shoot the horse as flat-rate jobs, but how does he manage to recruit a collection of key individuals to assist him in pulling this heist on the racetrack? What is understood is that Johnny is so charismatic that over time he has managed to encourage these minimum-wage flunkies to abandon their loyalties to their day jobs in the service of a greater good, the Almighty Dollar. These accomplices find salvation in the promise of a better life at the expense of an employer which does not truly value their contributions, and they end up in a place where they can care for their sick wife, help a down-and-out achieve something better, pay off a loan to a loan shark, or even prove to a manipulative wife that he loves her. Here I am speaking of George's wife, Sherry, and her burning desire to get a piece of this luscious apple pie; problem is, Sherry draws her lover into the mess, and encourages him to take action in her stead, and well, things always go a little wrong. But The Killing operates on such a strict time table--literally--that Johnny cannot deviate from it; it is not that Johnny is incapable of adjusting his plans around a setback, but that he is so set in its execution that he cannot really react to any sense of disorder. Ultimately, Johnny's real weakness is that he is incapable of improvisation, of flexibility beyond the pre-scripted moments in his little drama. When things finally start to disintegrate for his time table--due to traffic at first, of all things, he begins to play out actions which seem amateur and foolish, leading to the smiting conclusion which is poetically bleak and appropriately nihilistic. In almost any other movie, Johnny might have been the charismatic protagonist of virtue and intelligence we all want him to be; in The Killing, he is a criminal obsessed by detail, and convinced that as long as everything runs according to schedule, nothing can go wrong...but what happens when something does go wrong? Simply put, Johnny feels the walls closing in, as he makes tactically unsound decisions. When the final moment arrives, his reaction is one of apathy...not because he doesn't care about the outcome, but because he has finally lost, and he has given up hope.
Recommended for: Fans of a riveting crime caper, where the heroes are intelligent, yet led into temptation, and the cops do little more than stand around to harass harmless citizens. It is a cynical movie where crime is ubiquitous; but if crime was so hard to come by, I suppose our entertainment level would be diminished.
Johnny Clay is a pragmatist, a man who understands that the events which are necessary to facilitate his operation do not just happen magically. Johnny employs a couple of goons alongside the core group to ensure that their endeavor is not an amateur endeavor, and that their actions have meaning. Among the goons which Johnny employs are a barely-intelligible Russian chess master who happens to possess the physique of a professional wrestler, and Johnny pays him handsomely to start a barroom brawl at the track to deter and distract the armed guards from intervening in Johnny's caper. Also, Johnny recruits a thug with a penchant for rifles, to snipe and assassinate the lead horse in the race, for the purpose of creating dissent and chaos on the track, which in turn leads to a safer and easier effort for him to rob the track of the collected gamblers' winnings, the collected dreams and hopes of the destitute which pray for those hundred-to-one odds of capitalism. Johnny collects Maurice (Kola Kwariani) to start the brawl, and Nicky (Timothy Carey) to shoot the horse as flat-rate jobs, but how does he manage to recruit a collection of key individuals to assist him in pulling this heist on the racetrack? What is understood is that Johnny is so charismatic that over time he has managed to encourage these minimum-wage flunkies to abandon their loyalties to their day jobs in the service of a greater good, the Almighty Dollar. These accomplices find salvation in the promise of a better life at the expense of an employer which does not truly value their contributions, and they end up in a place where they can care for their sick wife, help a down-and-out achieve something better, pay off a loan to a loan shark, or even prove to a manipulative wife that he loves her. Here I am speaking of George's wife, Sherry, and her burning desire to get a piece of this luscious apple pie; problem is, Sherry draws her lover into the mess, and encourages him to take action in her stead, and well, things always go a little wrong. But The Killing operates on such a strict time table--literally--that Johnny cannot deviate from it; it is not that Johnny is incapable of adjusting his plans around a setback, but that he is so set in its execution that he cannot really react to any sense of disorder. Ultimately, Johnny's real weakness is that he is incapable of improvisation, of flexibility beyond the pre-scripted moments in his little drama. When things finally start to disintegrate for his time table--due to traffic at first, of all things, he begins to play out actions which seem amateur and foolish, leading to the smiting conclusion which is poetically bleak and appropriately nihilistic. In almost any other movie, Johnny might have been the charismatic protagonist of virtue and intelligence we all want him to be; in The Killing, he is a criminal obsessed by detail, and convinced that as long as everything runs according to schedule, nothing can go wrong...but what happens when something does go wrong? Simply put, Johnny feels the walls closing in, as he makes tactically unsound decisions. When the final moment arrives, his reaction is one of apathy...not because he doesn't care about the outcome, but because he has finally lost, and he has given up hope.
Recommended for: Fans of a riveting crime caper, where the heroes are intelligent, yet led into temptation, and the cops do little more than stand around to harass harmless citizens. It is a cynical movie where crime is ubiquitous; but if crime was so hard to come by, I suppose our entertainment level would be diminished.