The Killing (1956)
Directed by Stanley Kubrick
Career criminal Johnny Clay recruits a sharpshooter, a crooked police officer, a bartender and a betting teller named George, among others, for one last job before he goes straight and gets married. But when George tells his restless wife about the scheme to steal millions from the racetrack where he works, she hatches a plot of her own.
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4 films that influenced The Killing
What critics say influenced The Killing
The Melville picture was remade twice as " Ocean's Eleven ," and echoes of the Dassin can be found from Kubrick's " The Killing " to Tarantino's " Reservoir Dogs ."
The crime is indeed perfect, the underworld equivalent of a sublime French meal, but as ''Rififi'' goes on, it becomes as savage as ''Reservoir Dogs,'' ''The Killing,'' or any of the other dozens of films over which it still casts a shadow.
Sandwiched between two great American heist flicks — John Huston's 1950 The Asphalt Jungle and Stanley Kubrick's 1956 The Killing — French writer-director Jules Dassin's Rififi employs the three-act structure that works well for any film of this nature: the meticulous planning of the robbery, the crime itself, and the aftermath during which things begin to unravel for the crooks involved.
The Asphalt Jungle (1950) and that Stanley Kubrick would follow in The Killing a year later.
The movies' most exquisite Freudian head trip since Alfred Hitchcock's Spellbound, Eyes Wide Shut is more dream than story, full of unlikely alliances, illogical developments and cryptic symbols (many of which, as critic Jonathan Rosenbaum has pointed out, were obscured by the alterations to the orgy scene).
Not surprisingly, the film also marked a wide array of historical firsts with some of its elements, primary among them a non-linear story told from overlapping perspectives (although the story structure did take a few lessons from Akira Kurosawa, whose own “Rashomon” accomplished similar seven years earlier).
In truth, though, the effect isn't so much Rashomon as a dispassionate God's-eye view.
His death three years ago on the eve of Eyes Wide Shut's release secured his mythic status and his oeuvre is now complete -- or nearly complete, since his first feature, 1953's Fear and Desire, long suppressed by Kubrick, has yet to resurface.
Stanley Kubrick had made some documentary shorts and a couple of barely feature-length films he considered juvenilia ("Fear and Desire" and "Killer's Kiss"), but "The Killing" is widely agreed to be the first real Kubrick film � archly stylized, sardonic, gimlet-eyed, and richly entertaining into the bargain.
The reason: in both of his earlier pictures, miniscule budgets meant limited ability to have a full staff on production, and in both instances he donned other on-the-job responsibilities to compensate (he was both the photographer and editor for his debut “Fear and Desire,” as an example).