Following what's more an art-house crime melodrama in KILLER'S KISS, young photographer turned director Stanley Kubrick created a more polished, genuine film noir that -- using a then-rare, non-linear structure -- is also far more complicated... so much that the studio forced one of those docudrama-style narrations throughout...
Working best to map-out the ensemble of criminals who are otherwise everyday workers at the targeted racetrack along with a crooked cop, a wrestler and last but not least, a bonafide hoodlum to shoot a running horse...
Where Timothy Carey plays another teeth-gritting, offbeat character, and his expository with master criminal (and this group's leader) Sterling Hayden perfectly suits pulp-novelist Jim Thompson's hardboiled dialogue...
Yet not everyone's aboard this main heist -- while Hayden's good girl Coleen Gray's second-billed, it's scene-stealer femme fatale Marie Windsor who's technically the most important...
As the wife of wimpy track-teller Elisha Cook Jr., she's part of a double-cross with handsome lover Vince Edwards with a slowburn sidekick in Kubrick three-timer Joe Turkel, soon to join Carey as one of three doomed soldiers in the anti-war classic PATHS OF GLORY, which is deeper and more befitting what would become Kubrick's signature style: including long-takes, mesmerizing wide-shots and slow-pan camerawork,...
Yet THE KILLING is where the iconic auteur ignited fluid characterization, captured within phantom-walled interiors and genuine location exteriors beneath grim, shadowy darkness to brightly exposed sunlight -- visually combining stylish nuance with a severe and gritty, uncompromising edge.
Working best to map-out the ensemble of criminals who are otherwise everyday workers at the targeted racetrack along with a crooked cop, a wrestler and last but not least, a bonafide hoodlum to shoot a running horse...
Where Timothy Carey plays another teeth-gritting, offbeat character, and his expository with master criminal (and this group's leader) Sterling Hayden perfectly suits pulp-novelist Jim Thompson's hardboiled dialogue...
Yet not everyone's aboard this main heist -- while Hayden's good girl Coleen Gray's second-billed, it's scene-stealer femme fatale Marie Windsor who's technically the most important...
As the wife of wimpy track-teller Elisha Cook Jr., she's part of a double-cross with handsome lover Vince Edwards with a slowburn sidekick in Kubrick three-timer Joe Turkel, soon to join Carey as one of three doomed soldiers in the anti-war classic PATHS OF GLORY, which is deeper and more befitting what would become Kubrick's signature style: including long-takes, mesmerizing wide-shots and slow-pan camerawork,...
Yet THE KILLING is where the iconic auteur ignited fluid characterization, captured within phantom-walled interiors and genuine location exteriors beneath grim, shadowy darkness to brightly exposed sunlight -- visually combining stylish nuance with a severe and gritty, uncompromising edge.