The Killing

The Killing (1956)

Timing: 1:25 (85 min)

7.667/10
1453

7.631/10
10751

7.9/10
105000

All about film

Video 6

Photo 47

Actors and characters

Release date

1956-06-06

Country

United States

Production

United Artists, Harris-Kubrick Productions

Genre

Crime, Thriller

Budget

$320 000

Revenue

$0

Website

Director

Stanley Kubrick

Actors

Sterling Hayden, Coleen Gray, Vince Edwards, Jay C. Flippen, Ted de Corsia, Marie Windsor, Elisha Cook Jr., Joe Sawyer, James Edwards, Timothy Carey
All actors and roles (10)

Scenario

Jim Thompson

Producer

James B. Harris

Operator

Lucien Ballard

Composer

Gerald Fried

Artist

Audition

Editing

Betty Steinberg, Clarence Eurist
All team (41)

• The film is based on Lionel White's novel "The Big Score".
• The appearance of the character Sterling Hayden (Johnny Clay), going on a job in a hat and with a briefcase in his hands, was successfully parodied by E. Rязаnov in the comedy "Beware of the Car" (1966).
• The Killing is a slang term meaning "big score".
• The film shows 8 corpses.
• The results of the initial preview screenings were disappointing due to the non-linear nature of the narrative. Stanley Kubrick was forced to sit in the editing room and re-edit the film so that the script unfolded linearly, but this only further confused the entire plotline. In the end, the film was released in its original form (i.e., with a non-linearly developing plot), and it subsequently had a huge influence on other films with a similar plot structure – such as Quentin Tarantino’s thriller *Reservoir Dogs* (1991) or his drama *Pulp Fiction* (1994).
• The text by the author was added to the film at the insistence of the studio management. Stanley Kubrick disowned this idea as much as he could, but was forced to comply. A significant portion of the information provided to viewers by the narrator turned out to be incorrect or erroneous.
• This was Kubrick’s first film for which he hired a cinematographer. Lucien Ballard was invited to the project because Kubrick was working under union rules for the first time, and therefore was not allowed to be both director and cinematographer, as he had been in his previous films. Kubrick and Ballard constantly argued, and their relationship deteriorated over time to the point where Ballard even stopped coming in the evenings to watch the footage shot during the day.
• Sterling Hayden's character approaches Morris (played by Kola Kwariani) with a proposition at a chess club on 42nd Street in New York. Director and screenwriter Stanley Kubrick was a regular there (as was Morris).
• The script originally called for Sterling Hayden's character to be chopped up by an airplane propeller when he went to collect money, but this plot point was changed to show him simply being shot by police. This occurred because American Airlines claimed the episode implied insufficient safety precautions and that viewers would interpret Hayden’s character’s death in that way.
• It is known that Stanley Kubrick was a very demanding director and always shot many takes. The horse race scene, for example, was filmed 45 times in a row, so the horse used in the filming was sent to slaughter directly from the set. It was the 1950s, so no one paid much attention to this (referring to various public organizations advocating for animal rights).