Films etc.

Which one of these Gatsbys would you rather see? Based on the poster for the Alan Ladd version (1949), which appears to recast the F. Scott Fitzgerald novel in noirish gangster terms, it’s no contest, that’s the one for me. But I haven’t seen it, so I could be wrong. It might be as much of a misfire as the Robert Redford (1974) and Leonardo DiCaprio (2013) versions. Though I’ll bet it doesn’t try to pass itself off as a classic, and therefore might be more entertaining (though Leonard Maltin’s movie guide calls the film “Too talky and much too literal minded,” so I’m obviously guessing as to its possible merits).

The 1949 Great Gatsby was directed by Elliott Nugent, who directed Bob Hope in three features, and co-written by Richard Maibaum, who would go on to write thirteen James Bond films. In this version, Alan Ladd as Gatsby has acquired his fortune as a bootlegger. To be fair, his bootlegging past is mentioned several times in the novel (as well as the rumor that he had “killed a man”), though a trailer fragment I found shows Gatsby in a shootout, blasting away at gunmen in another car as they pursue him through city streets at night, so I’m thinking they play up this aspect. This may not be the tone Fitzgerald was after, but as I learned from reading a synopsis at the Turner Classics Movies website, the film does follow the basic plot of the novel, as do the 1974 and 2013 versions.

Other than the fact that the 1949 film turns him into more of a tough guy than Fitzgerald probably intended, I have the feeling that Alan Ladd could make a fairly credible Gatsby. His slight stature (5′ 6″ is the most commonly reported height) and vulnerable smile seem appropriate to the character, at least as far as looks go. Again, I haven’t seen this version, which is currently unavailable on home video (I’m hoping it will turn up on TCM), but I think the following brief clip gives a sense of what this Gatsby might be like.

It’s also interesting to see the ways the studio marketed this film, taking the beefcake route in this particular presentation of Alan Ladd, as seen in the poster at left and the movie tie-in paperback cover at right. Again, I’m assuming this is probably not what Fitzgerald had in mind, though it does put an intriguing spin on things.

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The first film version of The Great Gatsby was made in 1926, just one year after the novel was published. The book received mixed reviews and sold only 20,000 copies in its first year (when Fitzgerald died in 1940, he was certain he’d been a failure). Despite this, a successful stage adaptation opened on Broadway within a year, followed by this silent version, starring Warner Baxter as Gatsby and Neil Hamilton (better known now as Commissioner Gordon on TV’s Batman series in the 60s) as Nick Carraway. It is by all accounts a lost film, though I did find the following trailer. Note the hyperbole of the on-screen description that refers to Gatsby as a “record-selling novel.”

I also ran across an interesting review of the 1926 Gatsby (I don’t know where it appeared or who wrote it — other than the initials “E. G.”) What strikes me about the review is that it could just as well be talking about the new Baz Luhrman version, which has received many of the same criticisms (and quite a few more).

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I had reasonably high expectations for the 1974 Gatsby, which I haven’t seen since its initial release, but remember finding it flat and turgid. This was disappointing, since the cast and filmmakers felt right. Robert Redford, 36 at the time, seemed an excellent choice, maybe an obvious one, to play Jay Gatsby. He was extremely popular, and his golden looks were thoroughly American. He was a good fit for the part. And as I recall,  he said “old sport” as well as anyone is likely to get away with. I also liked Jack Clayton’s work, a British director with strong credentials. His previous films included Room at the Top (1959) with Lawrence Harvey and Simone Signoret; The Innocents (1961) with Deborah Kerr, based on Henry James’ The Turn of the Screw; and The Pumpkin Eater (1964), an extraordinary film with Anne Bancroft, Peter Finch, and James Mason. In retrospect, Clayton wasn’t the right director for The Great Gatsby. I’m not sure who would have been better, though it’s interesting to imagine what might have been had Francis Ford Coppola directed. Coppola wrote the Gatsby screenplay, taking over when the original screenwriter, Truman Capote, was fired. In Capote’s version (per IMDB), Nick Carraway was a homosexual and Jordan Baker a “vindictive lesbian.” This might have brought some needed life to the picture, but we’ll never know.

Baz Luhrman’s three-ring (3D) circus version of The Great Gatsby came out earlier this year, preceded by much advance hoopla. For me, nearly everything about the film is too much, over the top, inflated, and numbing. This approach worked well for Luhrman with Moulin Rouge (2001), which I loved, but for Gatsby, not so much. The only justification I can see for shooting Gatsby in 3D, other than higher ticket prices, is to render the excessiveness of Gatsby’s lifestyle even more so. The only scene that seemed real to me was set in the Plaza Hotel in New York, with Gatsby, Nick Carraway, Jordan Baker, Daisy and her husband Tom knocking back drinks in the stultifying heat while the tension rises. This is where truth gets told and the knives come out. It has a snap and electricity that I felt nowhere else in the film, and suggests what the film could have been.

For all the glitz and glitter on display, nothing is more excessive than Leonardo DiCaprio’s endless use of the term “old sport” to punctuate nearly every sentence. I realize “old sport” comes from the novel, where it’s used ninety-four times, but DiCaprio says it so frequently here that it just becomes a joke, an awkward affectation. What works on the page doesn’t necessarily work when you hear it spoken.

I’ve always liked DiCaprio as an actor, though I didn’t buy him as J. Edgar Hoover in Clint Eastwood’s J. Edgar (2011), a film that seemed more about prosthetics and makeup than anything else. But he’s been basically incredible in films such as What’s Eating Gilbert Grape (1993), Marvin’s Room (1996), The Departed (2006), and Django Unchained (2012). And he certainly looks right for Gatsby (though maybe not as right as Redford). He was a good choice in 2013, as Redford was in 1974, but he may have been undone by Luhrman’s style of filmmaking (and having to say “old sport” so many times).

There’s much that’s wrong with this Gatsby; the weird framing device of Nick writing the novel in some sort of sanitarium back in the Midwest, for example. Though oddly enough, the anachronistic music choices didn’t bother me at all. In fact, I think Luhrman should have gone all the way and made the film a musical. That might sound like a joke, but the more I think about it, the better it sounds. I’m serious. Or imagine Gatsby directed with this cast by Martin Scorsese. Think about that. He’d be perfect for this. But whatever Luhrman’s Gatsby is or isn’t, it’s never as unwatchable and annoying as a lot of other movies, such as Eat Pray Love (2010), or a film I saw earlier today, the totally meaningless Now You See Me. Baz Luhrman is a director with skill, energy, and imagination, and when his films work, they’re something to see.

There have been six film versions of Gatsby since 1926, including a TV movie in 2000, with Mira Sorvino as Daisy and Paul Rudd as Nick Carraway, which caused barely a ripple from what I can find. G appeared in 2002, with Richard T. Jones, Blair Underwood, and Andre Royo in a more radical interpretation about a hip-hop mogul who moves to the Hamptons in search of his lost love. It, too, was not a success. Maybe films of The Great Gatsby are destined to be made every twenty years or so until someone finally gets it right. Or maybe some books should just be left alone. - Ted Hicks

Burt Lancaster would have been 100 years old on November 2 of this year. The Film Society of Lincoln Center is taking the occasion to show 13 of his 74 feature films. Last Friday I saw one of my favorites, From Here to Eternity (1953). I’ve seen it many times over the years, but can’t remember the last time I saw it on a big theater screen. The film is just as powerful as it ever was, which is saying something. For me, it’s just about perfect from top to bottom, start to finish. Adapted by Daniel Taradash from James Jones’ best-selling novel, From Here to Eternity was nominated for 13 Academy Awards and received eight, including Best Picture, Best Director (Fred Zinnemann), Adapted Screenplay, Supporting Actor (Frank Sinatra), and Supporting Actress (Donna Reed), Best Cinematography, Editing, and Sound Recording. Both Lancaster and Montgomery Clift were nominated for Best Actor, but lost to William Holden in Stalag 17.

The role of First Sergeant Milt Warden was a definitive one for Lancaster. As an actor, Lancaster projected great strength, authority, virility, and intelligence, and this role used all of that and then some. Throughout his career he always seemed like the toughest guy in the room, the most capable, and the most dangerous. I’m always struck by his precise diction, the way he bites off his words without any waste, and the way he uses “ain’t” repeatedly in From Here to Eternity and can still sound sharply intelligent.

From Here to Eternity is filled with great film acting, down to the smallest parts. As Private Robert E. Lee Prewitt, a haunted outsider who loves the army but is determined to go his own way, Montgomery Clift also had a definitive role. Prewitt is the moral center of the film; it’s impossible not to empathize with him. Frank Sinatra is equally amazing as Private Angelo Maggio, Prewitt’s friend and a “tough monkey” destined for the stockade and the sadism of Sergeant “Fatso” Judson (Ernest Borgnine). Sinatra had campaigned heavily for the role, which resuscitated a flagging career. All three figure strongly in my single favorite scene in the movie, where Lancaster breaks up a fight between Maggio and “Fatso” Judson in a bar, and says the great line, “Okay, Fatso, if it’s killin’ you want!” It’s a terrific scene that foreshadows much to come for Clift and Sinatra’s characters.

Earlier in the bar scene, before the fight starts, there’s another key moment when Prewitt displays his considerable talent with a bugle, playing with a clarity and passion that  deepens our understanding of and feeling for his character. It’s quite thrilling.

Though without a doubt, the most famous scene in From Here to Eternity has to be Lancaster and Deborah Kerr on the beach. It’s the one that almost everybody knows, even if they haven’t seen the movie. It has a life outside the film. The image, seen in the poster above, is iconic. The scene itself has been referenced, imitated, and parodied in countless films, TV shows, and publications, including Mad magazine (of course).

It’s ironic, considering what the characters go through, that From Here to Eternity is set in Hawaii, an exotic location often seen as a kind of paradise. Lancaster’s Milt Warden, involved in an illicit and illegal affair with the company commander’s unhappy wife, Karen Holmes (Deborah Kerr), is unwilling to take the step of becoming an officer – he hates officers – that would allow them to be together. Clift’s Robert E. Lee Prewitt falls in love with Lorene (Donna Reed), a hostess at a “gentleman’s club” (a brothel in the novel). She loves him, but doesn’t want to marry a career soldier. The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor sets in motion the resolutions to these storylines. No one walks away happy, and some don’t walk away at all, but it all feels right. It’s a wonderful movie, probably a great one.

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Lancaster occasionally played weak characters, such as his roles in Come Back, Little Sheba (1952) and The Rose Tattoo (1955), but those were exceptions. His film debut was the lead in The Killers (1946), adapted from the Ernest Hemingway short story and directed by the underrated Robert Siodmak. It’s interesting, and I think unusual, that Lancaster was the star of the films he was in right from the start. He followed The Killers with a series of exceptional film noirs. These included Jules Dassin’s grim and violent prison drama Brute Force (1947); I Walk Alone (1948), Lancaster’s first pairing with the equally intense Kirk Douglas; Sorry, Wrong Number (1948), with Barbara Stanwyck; the evocatively titled Kiss the Blood Off My Hands (1948); and his second film with Robert Siodmak, Criss Cross (1949), which includes Tony Curtis, in an unbilled bit part, who would later co-star with Lancaster in Trapeze (1956) and the incredible Sweet Smell of Success (1957).

Per the typical film noir template, the characters Lancaster played in these films, while tough and capable, were often victims of forces beyond their control and larger than themselves. Lancaster went on to star in  The Flame and the Arrow (1950) and The Crimson Pirate (1952), swashbuckling adventure films that utilized his training as a gymnast and acrobat. These films featured Nick Cravat, who Lancaster knew from the 1930s when they were an acrobatic duo performing in a circus. Lancaster’s ability to do his own stunts added credibility and authenticity to his films, quite literally in a film like Trapeze. To my knowledge, there was never anything physically clumsy or awkward about the characters he played. Even in roles that didn’t require stunt work, his physicality informed the way he moved, the way he walked across a room, or even just sitting still.

Lancaster made four films directed by Robert Aldrich including  Apache and Vera Cruz in 1954, and Twilight’s Last Gleaming (1977). My favorite Aldrich film with Lancaster is the extremely stark and brutal Ulzana’s Raid (1972). I saw Apache and Vera Cruz earlier in the week. They don’t hold up all that well, whereas Ulzana’s Raid, which I saw yesterday, is every bit as good as it ever was. Set in 1880s Arizona, Lancaster plays a scout for the U.S. Army who accompanies a troop of soldiers to track down and capture the Apache warrior Ulzana, who has left the reservation to raid homesteads in the area, torturing and killing everyone they meet. It’s an exceptionally tough-minded film, and you see things you haven’t seen in a Western before.

As much as I love Lancaster in his earlier films, such as Brute Force, Criss Cross, and especially From Here to Eternity, his later films often have greater weight. As he gets older, his energy and strength become, for the most part, more self-contained, but it’s still there. He becomes more of an authority and less of an acrobat. In films such as the corrosive Sweet Smell of Success, Lancaster is a truly menacing figure in his horn-rimmed glasses as a powerful newspaper columnist (based on Walter Winchell) who cuts people to ribbons with his words. In John Frankenheimer’s great political thriller Seven Days in May (1964), he plays an equally threatening figure, an Air Force general engineering a coup d’état against the government (this was also the fifth of seven films he would appear in with Kirk Douglas).

Lancaster made five films directed by John Frankenheimer, including Birdman of Alcatraz (1962), but my favorite has to be The Train (1964). Frankenheimer took over direction of the film from Arthur Penn after Lancaster, who had the clout, had Penn fired. Lancaster plays a French railway yard official during World War II who reluctantly agrees to help stop a Nazi plan (led by an excellent Paul Scofield) to transport French art treasures to Germany by train. Shot in black & white, using little or no special effects (the train smash-ups are the real thing, and you can feel it), the physical production feels tremendously authentic. Once again, Lancaster does his own stunts.

Another favorite Lancaster film of mine is The Professionals (1966), written and directed by Richard Brooks, who had previously directed Lancaster’s Oscar-winning performance in Elmer Gantry (1960). This is a tremendously enjoyable Western set in 1917 with Lancaster and Lee Marvin leading Robert Ryan and Woody Strode on a mission to rescue a wealthy cattleman’s wife, Claudia Cardinale, from Jack Palance, a former Mexican revolutionary who has abducted her. The story may be a bit thin, but Lancaster and Marvin are great together, and the early 20th Century period and advanced weaponry (machine guns and automobiles) set it apart from other Westerns. Three years later, Sam Peckinpah would set The Wild Bunch (1969) in a similar context. The score by Maurice Jarre, who also did the music for The Train, is very effective and does a lot to sell the movie.

In 1978 Lancaster starred in Go Tell the Spartans, a grossly underseen film about U.S. military “advisors” in Vietnam set in 1964. It was one of the first films to critically address U.S. involvement in Vietnam. The Green Berets it is not. It was critically well-received in its limited release, but isn’t that well known today.  Lancaster, 65 at the time, obviously believed in the film and its message to the extent that he put up $150,000 of his own money to cover a short-fall in the budget.

In addition to winning for Elmer Gantry, Lancaster received Academy Award nominations for Best Actor in From Here to Eternity, Birdman of Alcatraz (1962), and Louis Malle’s Atlantic City (1980), for which he received numerous other nominations and awards. It’s a wonderful performance, filled with grace, dignity, and bravado.

Finally, a good way to wrap up this piece is with a brief Turner Classics Movies tribute to Burt Lancaster, narrated by his frequent director, John Frankenheimer. The clips are excellent, and it’s great hearing what Frankenheimer has to say, especially about his  working relationship with Lancaster. - Ted Hicks

All of the films cited are available on home video through Netflix, Amazon, and other sources.

Luchino Visconti’s “The Leopard” – 1963

Last weekend we saw Dont Look Back (1967) at the Museum of the Moving Image, with director D.A. Pennebaker there for a Q&A after. I thought the opportunity to see the film on a big screen with the filmmaker in attendance was too good to miss. (The lack of an apostrophe in the title is deliberate, but despite having seen the film quite a few times over the years, this is the first time I ever noticed it, having been alerted by the Wikipedia entry.)

Filmed over 11 days in April and May of 1965 during his U.K. concert tour, Dont Look Back shows us Dylan in the process of evolving out of the role of a more traditional singer/songwriter of protest songs. The half-acoustic, half-electric Bringing It All Back Home had already been released. Later that year Dylan would record the epic “Like a Rolling Stone” and make his third appearance at the Newport Folk Festival, where he would seriously upset a lot of folk purists by unleashing several electric numbers. (Another fascinating film that documents Dylan in the process of becoming “Bob Dylan” is Murray Lerner’s The Other Side of the Mirror: Bob Dylan Live at the Newport Folk Festival 1963 – 1965. It’s well worth seeing.)

Dont Look Back gets your attention right away with a kind of prototype music video. We hear “Subterranean Homesick Blues” on the sound track as Dylan stands in an alley, staring blankly at the camera and discarding cards bearing hand-written words from the song’s lyrics as it plays. There’s a homemade, improvised vibe to this, fresh and funny. This clip of the opening has a DVD commentary from Pennebaker and Bob Neuwirth on how the scene was put together.

Alan Price & Dylan

Seeing Dont Look Back this time, I was struck by how boring and tedious life on the road during this tour must have been. We see Dylan in a seemingly endless series of hotel rooms that are always crowded with the many friends, hangers-on, and sycophants who swarm around him. He’s never alone. Members of his entourage that Dylan seems to take seriously are Joan Baez, who disappears from the film half-way through (this is reportedly when they broke up as a couple), Alan Price (who had recently left The Animals and would later go on to write and perform a great score for Lindsey Anderson’s O Lucky Man [1973]), his manager Albert Grossman, and Bob Neuwirth, Dylan’s constant shadow and yes-man.

I was also struck, once again, by how nasty and unpleasant Dylan could be at times. The  condescending way he takes apart the “science student” (Terry Ellis, later a co-founder of Chrysalis Records in the U.K.) who tries to interview Dylan before a concert is almost painful to see. The poor guy doesn’t stand a chance. Dylan nails him to the wall while strumming his guitar and blowing notes on his harmonica as Alan Price plays piano in the background. But this encounter is almost friendly compared to the way Dylan lays into a Time magazine reporter later in the film. It’s no surprise that he would channel that anger and impatience through songs such as the “Ballad of a Thin Man,” “Idiot Wind,” and the awesome and excoriating “Positively 4th Street.”

I first saw Dont Look Back in San Francisco sometime in ’68. I’d started listening to his music with Bringing It All Back Home (1965). His first four albums, to the extent that I had heard them, were a little too ascetic for my tastes at the time. Dylan needed to go electric to get my full attention, and by the end of a year in which he’d also brought out what might be his greatest album, Highway 61 Revisited, he definitely had it.

Dont Look Back is an incredibly important film, and not just because of its subject matter. It really felt like something new, raw and rough, with scenes caught on the fly, the camera just observing whatever might happen. It was also the first time I’d ever heard anyone say “fuck” in a film (and not just once, but several times). I was startled, alarmed, and a little frightened, like someone had just gotten punched in the face right in front of me. I’d been seeing movies all my life, but this was something new, and it disoriented me. The scene takes place in yet another crowded suite of hotel rooms. Someone has drunkenly thrown a glass out the window to the street below, and Dylan grows increasingly angry trying to find out who did it. It feels like he’s not playing around, that he’s dropped any pretense and we’re seeing something real.

The second part of this scene, after the disruptive mood has become calmer and relaxed, is an equally important one. Donovan is in the room; we see him watching from the sidelines. Donovan had been lately in the news, heralded as a sort of British Dylan. He’s been on Dylan’s radar from the start of the film; earlier we’ve seen Dylan referring to newspaper articles, saying somewhat jokingly that he’s got to meet Donovan. Now he’s here in the room. Almost shyly he begins to sing his song “To Sing for You.” In the midst of singing, Dylan breaks in and says, “Hey, that’s pretty good, man!” When the song is over Dylan takes the guitar from Donovan and launches into “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue,” a devastating performance that leaves no doubt as to who the top dog is. The camera lingers on Donovan’s face for a long time, and we know he knows, too. Here’s the scene:

Dont Look Back certainly gained Pennebaker a wider awareness, but he’d been making films since 1953. His first film of record is Daybreak Express (1953), set to the music of Duke Ellington.

Primary, a film he made in 1960 with Robert Drew, Richard Leacock, and Albert Maysles was key to the development of Direct Cinema (or Cinéma vérité). The film, covering John F. Kennedy and Hubert Humphrey’s campaigns in the 1960 Wisconsin Democratic Primary, was a breakthrough in its use of smaller, mobile cameras and lightweight sound equipment, which allowed filmmakers to be relatively unobtrusive and get in closer than they ever had before.

Along with filmmakers Frederick Wiseman and the Maysles Brothers, D.A. Pennebaker was instrumental in creating a style of documentary that didn’t use voice-over narration or interviews, and was more observational. In a 1971 interview Pennebaker said, “…it’s possible to go to a situation and simply film what you see there, what happens there, what goes on, and let everybody decide (what) it tells them about any of these things. But you don’t have to label them, you don’t have to have the narration to instruct you so you can be sure and understand that it’s good for you to learn.” We see this method in the extreme in the films of Frederick Wiseman. Wiseman makes films about institutions, as reflected in titles such as High School (1968), Basic Training (1971), Welfare (1975), Public Housing (1997), and Domestic Violence (2001). The Maysles Brothers, Albert and David, started making films in 1962. Their best-known films are probably What’s Happening! The Beatles in the USA (1964), Gimme Shelter (1970), and the mesmerizing Grey Gardens (1976). David died in 1987, but Al continues to work and has not slowed down much.

Pennebaker has made many films about musicians over the years, including John Lennon, Little Richard, Jerry Lee Lewis, and David Bowie. In 1967 he filmed the Monterey Pop Festival. Released in 1968, Monterey Pop basically invented the rock concert film as we know it. This was also a time when music had a strong connection to the counterculture. Monterey Pop showcased powerful performances from many artists, including this one from Janis Joplin with Big Brother and the Holding Company (I especially like the cut to Mama Cass Elliott in the audience at the end of the number mouthing “Oh wow!” in reaction). Notice how effectively this clip is edited.

Since 1976 Pennebaker has worked in partnership with Chris Hegedus, co-directing, shooting, and editing films together through their company Pennebaker Hegedus Films. They were married in 1982. It happens that their offices are a block away from where we live on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. For several years now I’ve gotten a kick out of seeing Pennebaker on the street, walking a dog or pushing a cart in our local Fairway grocery store, and having an occasional conversation with him about this or that film. It knocks me out to think of how important he is historically to documentary filmmaking, and at the same time I can see him carrying a bag of groceries. At nearly 88 years of age, and not looking anywhere near it, Pennebaker is still making films, the latest being The Kings of Pastry (2009), which follows French pastry chefs during a 3-day competition to win the prestigious Meilleur Ouvrier de France (Best Craftsman in France) award. It may not have as much resonance as some of the earlier films, but it’s impeccably made and extremely  entertaining. The Kings of Pastry showed me something new that was fun to learn and also made me quite hungry for pastries.

This year D.A. Pennebaker received an honorary Academy Award, a well-deserved recognition of his extraordinary body of work and a life dedicated to filmmaking. It’s impossible to overestimate his importance in this regard. He helped to change the landscape.

Donn Alan “D.A.” Pennebaker

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All of the films cited in this piece are available on home video from Netflix and/or Amazon. Of special note is The Criterion Collection DVD edition of The Complete Monterey Pop Festival, a 3-disc set including the feature Monterey Pop (with commentary track by D.A. Pennebaker), Jimi Plays Monterey and Shake! Otis at Monterey (the complete performances of Jimi Hendrix and Otis Redding at Monterey), and 123 minutes of outtake performances. - Ted Hicks

The IFC Center in New York recently ended a week’s run of Stanley Kubrick films. I saw a double feature of two of my favorites, The Killing (1956) and Paths of Glory (1957), then topped that off the next day with the always awesome 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). In terms of style, technique, acting, and story, The Killing, made when he was 28, is a huge advance on his first two features, Fear and Desire (1953) and Killer’s Kiss (1955). In it we see him becoming Stanley Kubrick. And it’s one of the best film noirs ever.

Based on the novel Clean Break by Lionel White, The Killing was written by Jim Thompson, author of tough novels with terrific titles, such as The Killer Inside Me and A Hell of a Woman, mostly original paperbacks with lurid covers. Kubrick was impressed with The Killer Inside Me, and thought Thompson would be right to adapt Clean Break, though in the end Kubrick claimed the screenplay for himself, giving Thompson a “dialogue by” credit. This greatly upset Thompson, who nevertheless worked on the screenplay for Kubrick’s next film, Paths of Glory. I read a lot of crime fiction, and Thompson figures high in  the hard-boiled pantheon. None of his books were in print when he died in 1977, but have been subsequently re-printed and re-discovered. His books, grubby and violent, written in a point-blank style, were perfect for neo-noir adaptations. Films from his books include The Getaway (filmed twice, first by Sam Peckinpah), The Killer Inside Me (also filmed twice), Stephen Frears’ The Grifters, and After Dark, My Sweet.

The Killing is about a complex race-track robbery, filmed in a semi-documentary style. The structure of the film is equally complex, presenting the story out of chronological order. An omniscient, totally objective narrator (an uncredited Art Gilmore, who narrated 156 episodes of the Broderick Crawford TV series Highway Patrol and documentary films during the ’50s and ’60s, making him perfect for this) introduces the characters and action, and keeps the time sequence clear by linking scenes with phrases such as “About an hour earlier, that same Saturday afternoon in September, in another part of the city…” Kubrick frequently used narration in his films. In discussing Barry Lyndon (1975) with French critic Michel Ciment, Kubrick says “A voice-over spares you the cumbersome business of telling the necessary facts of the story through expositional dialogue scenes which can become very tiresome and frequently unconvincing… Voice-over, on the other hand, is a perfectly legitimate and economical way of conveying story information which does not need dramatic weight and which would otherwise be too  bulky to dramatize.” More importantly, in The Killing, the voice-over narration is crucial in keeping the audience situated in time and place, as well as building tension and suspense.

Interestingly, the film’s narrative structure was not even mentioned in the original New York Times review (May 21, 1956) when The Killing opened. The source novel, Clean Break, employs the same fragmented chronology, which is reportedly what interested Kubrick in the book in the first place. In a 1973 interview with Kubrick, Gene Phillips writes, “Kubrick was confident that his method of telling the story by means of fragmented flashbacks would work as well on the screen as they did in the novel. ‘It was the handling of time that may have made this more than just a good crime film,’ Kubrick said.”

Flashbacks had been frequently used in films up to this time, especially in film noir, notably in films such as The Killers (1946) and Out of the Past (1947), but what The Killing did with time hadn’t been done quite this way before, as far as I’m aware. The Killing‘s circular chronology must have influenced Quentin Tarantino’s use of time in Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction, and Jackie Brown. I’d be amazed if he hadn’t seen it.

The following clip of the beginning of The Killing quickly gives a sense of the look and feel of the film, the fragmented editing structure, and the narration that sets up the plot and introduces five key characters in the first 8 minutes 30 seconds. The music by Gerald Fried gives an urgency and importance to the scenes, but is not overdone or used to excess. Fried went to high school with Kubrick and did the music for his first four features.

Of particular note in this clip is the scene that starts at the 6:36 mark, with the narrator telling us, “At 7:00pm that same day, Johnny Clay, perhaps the most important thread in the unfinished fabric…” The camera follows Clay in a low-angle, lateral tracking shot from screen left to right as he opens a bottle of beer in the kitchen and walks through at least three rooms. As he walks he explains the robbery plans to someone we don’t see until he reaches the living room. We see Clay from behind furniture in the foreground of the shot. The effect of moving past foreground objects seen between us and Clay creates an almost 3D effect, and gets my attention every time I view the film. Take a look. The shot is much more elegant than I can describe.

The Killing stars Sterling Hayden as Johnny Clay, ex-con and architect of the scheme to rob the race track, a character similar in appearance and manner to Dix Hanley, who he played in John Huston’s great The Asphalt Jungle (1950), also a film about the careful planning and eventual failure of a robbery. Hayden has always been a favorite of mine. He was best at playing strong, imposing figures (being 6’5″ and muscular helped), such as a cop in the little-seen and underrated Crime Story (1954); an insane Air Force general who starts a nuclear war in Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove (1964); a corrupt police captain who famously gets his brains blown out by Al Pacino in The Godfather (1972); and an alcoholic writer in The Long Goodbye (1973), Robert Altman’s revisionist take on Raymond Chandler’s novel.

In addition to Hayden, Kubrick assembled an excellent cast for The Killing,  with Timothy Carey being a standout. Carey plays Nikki Arcane (great name), a marksman hired by Johnny Clay to shoot a horse at the race track to create a diversion from the actual robbery. With his bizarre line readings and facial expressions, Carey was an eccentric screen presence throughout his career. He would appear to great effect in Kubrick’s next film, Paths of Glory. The following clip shows Johnny Clay explaining the job to Nikki. I love that Nikki cradles a puppy in his arms throughout this scene.

A fascinating piece of casting in the film is that of Kola Kwariani, a professional wrestler and chess player from Russia, who plays Maurice, hired by Clay to start a fight at the race track to create yet another diversion at the time of the robbery. Besides having a wonderful name, Kwariani and Kubrick knew each other from the New York chess world. He brings an unusual presence to the film, both in appearance and in the way he speaks. The following scene shows Clay speaking with Maurice in a chess club, explaining what he needs from him. The dialogue is great.

And here’s the brawl Maurice initiates.

A pivotal character in the film is George Peatty (a perfect name for this nervous, henpecked little man), played by Elisha Cook Jr. at his twitchiest. Cook was a familiar presence in films of the ’40s and ’50s, anxious and bug-eyed in most of his roles, or acting tougher than he was. Memorable parts include the gunman Wilmer Cook, sold out by his boss Sidney Greenstreet in The Maltese Falcon (1941); the doomed Harry Jones in The Big Sleep (1946); and as hotheaded farmer Stonewall Torrey, shot down in the mud by hired gun Jack Palance in Shane (1953). As Johnny Clay tells his girlfriend Fay (Coleen Gray), none of the men he’s recruited for the robbery are criminals in the usual sense. Cook’s character, George Peatty, is a betting-window teller at the race track whose sole function in the heist is to open a locked door for Johnny Clay at a crucial moment. George’s wife Sherry (Marie Windsor), brassy and manipulative, knows something is up and pressures him to tell her. She gets enough out of him to interest her lover, Val Cannon (another great name), played by a thuggish Vince Edwards before he gained fame as Ben Casey on television.

A staple of most crimes films is the carefully planned job that goes south, and The Killing is no exception. Johnny Clay has put together a plan that requires interlocking precision and adherence to an exact time table by all participants. In retrospect it may seem odd that he didn’t get a whiff of George Peatty’s basic weakness, but Clay obviously wasn’t quite as smart as he thought he was. When Val Cannon’s attempt to horn in on the take forces Clay to improvise, we see what all that precise planning was worth. But by then things were already coming apart. Author Alexander Walker, in his book Stanley Kubrick Directs, points out that what attracted Kubrick to Lionel White’s novel, besides the fragmented structure, is that “the novel touches on a theme that is a frequent preoccupation of Kubrick’s films: the presumably perfect plan of action that goes wrong through human fallibility and/or chance.” Both are at play in an ending that recalls that of Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948), rich in irony and resignation. - Ted Hicks

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An excellent documentary, Stanley Kubrick: A Life in Pictures, directed by long-time Kubrick associate Jan Harlan, is well worth seeing. Take a look.