Playlist: The Killing (1956)

If you haven't seen Stanley Kubrick's third (first?) feature film, you have. Maybe it was titled Reservoir Dogs. Ok, in fairness to our boy Quentin, he freely acknowledges the influence on his work. That's his thing after all. In truth, the original script by the director and ace noirvelist Jim Thompson (based on Lionel White's novel, Clean Break) is a non-linear, out-of-sequence, shifting perspective crime thriller template that is still in use today. 

Sterling Hayden is Johnny Clay, looking for one last score before he goes straight with his gal. He pulls together a crew of old cronies and desperate inside men, including Elisha Cook, Jr., to knock over a racetrack on the day of the biggest race of the year. What could go wrong? 

Some things that went right:

• Marie Windsor steals the show as Cook's scheming wife, chewing and spitting out Thompson's rat-a-tat dialogue in classic femme fatale fashion
• When Hayden's head heister is looking to lay low, he rents a room from an old cellmate's little old Italian father. The father's name? Joe Piano.
• Clay calls on an old wrestler friend, Kola Kwariani, for a favor. You can't understand a word Kola says in his thick Russian accent, but he's the kind of guy that lets his body do the talking. The body? Think George "The Animal" Steele. 
• The wrestler spends his days taking pawns at the Academy of Chess and Checkers. Five cents an hour. A struggling Stanley Kubrick made a little money playing chess in NYC before his photography career took off. 
• Timothy Carey, as sharpshooter Nikki Arane, is something to watch. Looking like a tougher John Tuturro and grinding out his lines through clenched teeth, Carey doesn't fail to leave an impression. So much so on Kubrick that he casts him in a bigger role in his next film, Paths of Glory. But wait, there's this: Nikki Arane is the hidden  face behind George Harrsion on the cover of Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. Seriously.
• Toward the end, there's a poster on a wall for a Burlesque house featuring a show by comedian Lenny Bruce. Some inadvertent cool.