If you are an avid fan of Stanley Kubrick then you probably have picked up on a thematic motif, or an aesthetic motif of his filmmaking in that many of his films function mechanically, detached from any sort of sentimentality or emotion (I always regard him as, respectfully, the most inhuman filmmaker there ever will be). It is first made prominent in Dr. Strangelove and afterwards expanded upon. Now I won't be delving deep into this motif across his body of work but I will talk about one of his earlier features, regarded as his first major film, The Killing. Made in 1956, Kubrick teamed up with pulp novelist Jim Thompson to adapt a heist book into a gritty film noir. Here is a film that sets itself up a standard array of characters in any heist film but does so in a way that uses programmed logic that will be stripped away through all of the narrative's irony.
The film is a very calculating film. The main character, Johnny Clay, played by Sterling Hayden, is a very calculating, cold, and factual character. He is also the mastermind of the whole racetrack robbery, seeming to articulate a perfect plan made sure by the perfection of his partners' execution. After viewing this film I read two essay on it, one by Roger Ebert, who added the film to his 'Great Movies' list, most deserving. The other was included with the Criterion set, written by Haden Guest. Guest uses the motif mentioned earlier as his basis for analyzing many of the juxtapositions that develop serious cases of irony. Here is an excerpt as he describes the significance of doors in the film:
The synchronized, semaphorelike movement of the doors throughout The Killing suggests some sort of mysteriously vast machine, an intricate apparatus vaguely built around the horse race itself, whose very signal to begin is, after all, the precision opening of the multiple gates that simultaneously release the horses and trigger the robbery.
Since machinery is simply programming, there is logic that is applied to both. Games have logic applied to it, as well. Ebert makes an intriguing analysis of chess as intricate element in the film's structure:
Perhaps a motif can be found in the movie's storefront chess club which, I learn, Kubrick frequented as a kid. His gang leader Johnny Clay (Sterling Hayden) goes there to meet a professional wrestler named Maurice, played by a professional wrestler named Kola Kwariani. Maurice is big and strong and is needed to start a fight at the race track bar to divert attention during the heist. Like all the members of Johnny's team, he has no idea of the overall plot. He just knows his role and his payoff, and knows Johnny enough to trust him.
The game of chess involves holding in your mind several alternate possibilities. The shifting of one piece can result in a radically different game. Johnny Clay has devised a strategy seemingly as flawless as Bobby Fischer's "Perfect Games," but it depends on all the players making the required moves on schedule. If a piece shifts, everything changes, a possibility Johnny should have given more thought to.
So, I figured that combining these two insights I have my interpretation of the film. It is a game of chess, essentially. There is always a set of possible moves in relation to the present state of the board. Clay has planned out his own program for winning at the game and coming out as a rich man. His pieces, himself included, all have their own predetermined paths they must take, just like a rook, a knight (who can be said to the horse, Red Lightning, if you want to get literal), and a bishop have their own limitations of movement. This is brilliantly expressed through the, well, calculating cinematography. Most notably, the introduction to the main players of the robbery. Here, there is a repetition of the tracking shot, which smoothly follows each character with a cross section of their surroundings. Here, lets take a look at all of them, why don't we?
Top Left: Marvin. Top Right: Randy. Bottom Right: George. Bottom Left: Clay
(Note: I put only one shot of George's tracking shot because it was the shortest.)
Of course, it's easier to see when it is in motion, but bear with me. These shots, all appearing in consecutively, play like each characters' first moves. There is this flatness to each shot since we are looking at the character in a perpendicular manner and most of the movement is linear, although Policeman Randy Kennan's path is more 'L'-shaped and it is the the most three dimensional tracking shot of the four. Nevertheless, their movements feel limited and, again, predetermined and the environment adds to this limitation, as if these spaces were design for such movement, like a chessboard.
This is not the only time this happens. The robbery is the game, so many of the shots are tracking shots of the characters to emphasize their predetermined movements. Even when the muscle, Maurice, enters, it is photographed in the same way as Marvin's tracking shot at the beginning of the film. Some of them are more complicated, like the shots of Randy calling his chief, getting into his police car, and driving off and ignoring the woman in distress. There is also a tense scene in the racetrack locker room involving the bartender and George, who cross paths, note how the lockers seem to function as spaces or partitions and the most tense moment comes when they are in the same space, the same function I feel the doors that Guest was explaining perform in terms of separating spaces. The multitude of tracking shots throughout the film reflects the precise movements of Clay's robbery plan, his plan for checkmate.
So what does this all mean in the totality of the story. The demise of the characters is motivated by essentially random and ironic events, yet these are the justifiable moments that can devastate a calculating plan or a calculating person. Like I said before, Clay had his explicit plan laid out in perfection, but that perfection was bent on the perfection of his players, the pieces, in that if one screws up slightly, it throws off all the gears in the machine. The first twist was brought to us at the beginning of the film, a piece thrown into the game as the true lover of Sherry. This ignites the brutal climatic scene in which even though we were expecting the lover to interject at some point, the result is almost randomly surprising. This, though, does not compare to the sense of irony Clay must shamefully face at the end of the film, who seems to be upended by a poodle, seeming in revenge of the fallen horse earlier. This is followed by the wonderfully shot scene of the money dissipating into the air while the screams of the jets only solidify the helplessness of the main character.
Ebert makes a note that the pinnacle scene is when Clay visits Maurice at the chess center, one that Kubrick actually frequented. And there is a moment in that scene where Maurice explains to one player how he could have gotten checkmate as he recites the series of moves necessary. It is an echoing foreshadow to the demise of Clay's plan, stating that, "You should have done this and this and this for checkmate." In fact, Maurice is the only player who comes out of this successfully. Going to jail was part of the plan and before he left to the track he seemed to know who to contact when he did go to jail. Nevertheless, this scene, whose environment is constructed with many games of chess being played, many different sets of movements being made, is a diagram of the film's narrative, complete with the symbolic equation of the chess pieces as the characters and the chess players as Clay and what seems to be the forces of the universe.
The Killing is an intelligent and tight noir that expresses itself in a precisely austere manner. Ebert made a point that this film and a film like Dr. Strangelove could never really be equated with the same director. I will give him that by just watching this film without knowing who directed it would be hard to determine that this was the work of Kubrick mainly because it has many of the attitudes of a traditional noir. Yet, once enlightened with such a fact, the dubiousness of Kubrick's human detachment wreaks havoc in this film just as it does in Kubrick's fantastic films made in Britain. The chess match is emblematic to a mechanistic interplay between two players where Clay and his rigid persona is one player and everything else is his opponent. That is why it is brilliant for Kubrick to visualize his cast as pieces of this plan and to observe their movements in an almost obsessive manner because it is the movements that run the machine, that leap into the next step in the logical procession. It is in the end where we realize that this universe cannot be calculated in mere logical inquiries, where Clay retorts to his misfortune the only way he could; that it's a bad joke.
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