The Killing [DVD]

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Johnny Clay (Sterling Hayden) gets out of prison after a five-year stint and begins to put together plans for a million dollar race track heist. As he gathers his crew together, it seems that Johnny's plan is fool-proof and is sure to go off without a hitch. However, when gang member George Peatty (Elisha Cook Jr) tells his wife (Marie Windsor) about the plans, and she in turn tells her boyfriend (Vince Edwards), the are sown for the whole operation's undoing. From .co.uk ----------- Among Stanley Kubrick's early film output The Killing stands out as the most lastingly influential: Quentin Tarantino credits the film as a huge inspiration for Reservoir Dogs and just about any movie or TV show that plays around with its own internal chronology owes the same debt. This sort of convoluted crime caper had really kicked off with John Huston's The Asphalt Jungle in 1950. From then on, nouveau noir scripts kept trying to find new ways of telling very similar stories. Here the novel Clean Break is adapted for the screen in a jigsaw-puzzle structure that caught Kubrick's eye. With a dry narration we're introduced to the key players in a racetrack heist as it's being planned, but the story bounces back and forth between what happens to each of them during and before the big event. All of this keeps the audience guessing as to exactly how it will go wrong, while the downbeat telling, the unsympathetic characters and the excessively dramatic score clearly foretell that it will go wrong from the start. The denouement is comically daft no matter how many times you see it. On the DVD: The Killing is a no-frills DVD transfer, in 4:3 ratio and with its original mono soundtrack. Criminally, just one trailer is all that's been dug up as an extra. --Paul Tonks