The Killing dvd movie.|
The Killing cheap dvd videos, dvd movies for sale |
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List Price: $14.98 Our Price: $7.99 You Save: $6.99 Features • Black & White • Dolby • DVD-Video • NTSC In Theaters : 06 June, 1956 DVD Release : 29 June, 1999 |
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The Killing description Stanley Kubrick's third feature, and first screen classic, is one of the great crime films of the 1950s. The Killing was written in collaboration with Jim Thompson, who penned pulp novels like The Grifters, The Killer Inside Me, and Pop. 1280, all of which were made into classic films. This time writing directly for the scre ... review details |
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| ♥♥♥♥♥ | Kubrick makes a real killing |
| You can't help wondering if Sterling Hayden didn't get the feeling that he was just rehashing his biggest hit The Asphalt Jungle when he starred in heist movie The Killing six years later, but today Kubrick's shoestring production holds up much better than its big studio predecessor. Only three films into his career and Kubrick was already setting out his big theme - society's need to break individuals that threaten it into manageable cogs in the machine, aided in its task by their own character flaws. He even has Kola Kwariani spell it out in so many words: "You have not yet learned that in this life you have to be like everyone else. The perfect mediocrity. No better, no worse. Individuality is a monster, and it must be strangled in its cradle to make our friends feel comfortable. You know, I often thought that the gangster and the artist are the same in the eyes of the masses. They're admired and hero-worshipped, but there is always present underlying wish to see them destroyed at the peak of their glory."
The individual in question is Hayden's crook planning the biggest heist of the century with the help of a corrupt cop, a bartender and a racetrack cashier, bankrolled by Jay C. Flippen's moneyman, who clearly has a crush on him and goes straight to the bottle when he realises it's not mutual. The film's big gimmick at the time was the film backtracking to follow each member of the gang as they carry out their part in a vicious but ingenious and perfectly planned-to-the-second racetrack heist. But perfect plans, like computers or Marine recruits, have a tendency to break down due to a human error in the programme, and in this case the human error is Elisha Cook Jr., or more precisely his wife Marie Windsor in a double-crossing downmarket femme fatale role that would have been played by Gloria Graham in a bigger budgeted picture and who delivers a performance that seems the template for Joan Collins' entire career. Desperate to keep her even though she's cheating on him with Vince Edwards' punk (who in turn is cheating on her), he gabs a little too much about the plan... Hayden gets probably the best role of his career, his fast-talking no-nonsense totally in control delivery giving the film an urgency even when it's just men sitting in dark rooms talking, and when he delivers his forlorn last line it's as if the man really has had all the humanity drained out of him. Yet good as he is, the standout in the cast is Elisha Cook Jr in what may well be the his very best performance as the "joke without a punchline" clerk, a man who loses control the more he tries to display it. There's some fine black and white camerawork from Lucien Ballard boasting alternating stark, almost reportage-style rough-and-ready shots with some strikingly controlled long tracking shots that Kubrick later revised into a visual trademark, and there are a few other pointers to Kubrick's future work as well - seen with hindsight, Hayden's clown mask looks remarkably Droog-like, while two of the doomed soldiers in Paths of Glory, Timothy Carey (a man who could look sleepily menacing even when stroking a puppy) and, briefly, Joseph Turkel (best remembered as the ghostly bartender in The Shining) turn up in supporting roles. The Dragnet-style narration can be excessive at times, but does help immensely in the heist finale as the narrative constantly doubles-back on itself and the film's timeframe, and there's some terrific dialogue courtesy of the great Jim Thompson ("You like money. You have a great big dollar sign there where most women have a heart."). It's still tied to the crime-must-not-pay morality of its day, but it executes it with startling immediacy and a great "What's the difference?" ending. The only extra is the original trailer. |
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