Stanley Kubrick’s Most Influential Movie

T he spoofs of, and homages to, Stanley Kubrick films are so ubiquitous in our culture (see, for instance, the scores of callbacks in The Simpsons alone) that it’s surprising that his most profound influence is almost wholly unrecognized and derives from one of his least-known films.

The legacy of The Killing (1956), Kubrick’s first accomplished movie (following the experimental Fear and Desire and the prosaic Killer’s Kiss), is these days omnipresent in prestige television, which routinely mimics Kubrick’s then-unfamiliar technique of chopping up the story and telling it out of order, leaving the viewer to do the work of assembling a jigsaw puzzle in his mind.

A quarter of a century went by until Quentin Tarantino revived the idea in his overt homage to The Killing, 1992’s breakthrough Reservoir Dogs, which at the time was little seen (grossing less than $3 million) and might have been forgotten had it not been for what followed it. But after Tarantino repeated the trick, in a breathtakingly clever way, in Pulp Fiction two years later, nonlinear storytelling took off.

The Killing, which runs a taut 84 minutes, isn’t on the major streaming services at the moment, but you can see it free anyway on both Kanopy and Hoopla, two streamers that you may be able to access with your library card (not all libraries participate, but many do) or with commercials via another streamer, Pluto.

The film is remarkably fresh today, not only for the way it demands active engagement from the viewer but for its hard-boiled cynicism. Sterling Hayden — today probably best known for being the corrupt cop shot by Michael Corleone and the demented General Jack D. Ripper in Kubrick’s own Dr. Strangelove — plays a hardened career criminal who plans to retire after pulling off one last job, a $2 million score of all the receipts at a major racetrack. Kubrick (very uncharacteristically for the time, when movies were overtly and shamelessly phony in nearly every way) establishes the film’s you-are-there realism at the outset with documentary footage of horses at Bay Meadows Racetrack near San Francisco.

Kubrick had a most unusual background for a filmmaker: He started as a still photographer, hence his (later) preternatural mastery of composition. Shot in black-and-white, The Killing has a sordid, soiled feel, choking on the airlessness of dingy tenements and squalid bars, but without the attention-grabbing gorgeous compositions of Kubrick’s later work.

Most of the film is told in sequence. But at the climax, Kubrick begins breaking up time, stopping the story to back up, then branching off with a different member of the gang. One by one, each of his morally toxic crew runs into unexpected misfortune or is repaid horribly for his various failings. Fate seems determined to stop these hoods from succeeding. As in Reservoir Dogs, there’s a shootout that becomes a bloodbath. As in Tarantino’s film, popular music gets used for ironic effect: Peppy jazz plays on a radio as Kubrick’s camera surveys the carnage.

In a wry bit of meta-commentary that was equally ahead of its time, Kubrick even has the narrator give us a hint at the start of how we are to watch the movie:

He began to feel as if he had as much effect on the final outcome of the operation as a single piece of a jumbo jigsaw puzzle has to its predetermined final design. Only the addition of the missing fragments of the puzzle would reveal whether the picture was as he guessed it would be.

A few movies before The Killing had non-linear narratives, notably The Bad and the Beautiful (1952) and Citizen Kane (1941). Both explore a celebrated man’s character via various acquaintances’ memories of him, but the way Kubrick deployed the technique to underscore how different characters were ignorant of previous critical incidents was an ingenious way to create layers of suspense in a crime drama. Tarantino took matters much further when he shockingly used the second scene of Reservoir Dogs to jump to near the end of the story, after the failed heist, with one character in extremis after being shot and struggling to survive.

Tarantino also advanced the technique by omitting Kubrick’s audience-placating tactic of having a narrator introduce scenes by explaining exactly where we are in the timeline. A 1956 audience would perhaps have been lost without this guidance, but by 1992 Tarantino could trust viewers to figure out where the story was in time without being told. Today, top-shelf TV shows — Better Call Saul, True Detective, Watchmen — routinely create temporary puzzles in which you may not know where the pieces fit until the end of the hour or even the end of the season. The technique requires a lot of attention on the part of the audience, which is why these types of shows (Lost and Westworld being among the best examples) tend to connect best with fanatical devotees who relish the challenge. And they’re all traceable to what Stanley Kubrick was doing with a microscopic budget in his dirty little ’50s noir.