by David Mikics
To help write the screenplay Kubrick recruited Jim Thompson, the pulp novelist who had created some of the most disturbing noir fiction, including The Killer Inside Me (1952), a Kubrick favorite (in a blurb, Kubrick called Thompson’s novel “probably the most chilling and believable first-person story of a criminally warped mind I have ever encountered”). In The Killer Inside Me the hero is a perverted romantic Satan, captivating and appalling by turns. The Killing’s Johnny Clay is just the opposite, the criminal as ordinary Joe, and the men he looks for to join his heist are just as undistinguished. “None of these men are criminals in the usual sense. . . . They all live seemingly normal, decent lives,” he tells his girlfriend Fay.
Kubrick was a little wary around Thompson, a hard drinker who invariably pulled a bottle of liquor out of a paper bag before sitting down at his typewriter. Kubrick and Thompson spent their writing days in a tiny office on West 57th Street in Manhattan, and Kubrick, with his sloppy jacket and drooping white socks, sometimes went to Thompson’s two-story home in Flushing, Queens, for dinner. Thompson’s daughter Sharon said, “Stanley came out to our place and just drove us all insane. He was a beatnik before beatniks were in. He had the long hair and the weird clothes.”20
Kubrick and Harris ran into one problem with The Killing: no racetrack wanted to be the setting for a film about robbing a racetrack. For the initial footage of the racehorses, Alex Singer lay down with his portable Eyemo Mitchell camera in the middle of the track at San Francisco’s Bay Meadows just as the horses left the starting gate. When track employees spotted him, the race was stopped. But Singer, who somehow escaped being arrested, had his footage.
Otherwise, the shooting went smoothly. The Killing was shot in twenty days, mostly on the studio lot. Kubrick and Harris handled postproduction together, with Kubrick calling the shots. (“I was always right next to him in the editing room,” Harris said.) The film cost $330,000, but UA supplied only $200,000, so Harris made up the difference. “At the time, [Kubrick] didn’t really know how to find money. I did,” Harris remembered.21
Harris and Kubrick needed a star, and they found one in Sterling Hayden. The tall, rugged, and rambling Hayden came to acting late. He was working as a fisherman off the coast of Massachusetts when a local newspaper photographed him: “Gloucester Fisherman Looks Like Movie Idol,” the caption said. In 1933, when he first came to LA, Hayden lived in San Pedro on a schooner. Then he served in the Second World War: “I was in Yugoslavia with Tito’s partisans, and I liked everything I saw,” Hayden remembered decades later. He made “ten-day westerns,” then hit it big in 1950 with The Asphalt Jungle, John Huston’s meticulous heist flick. A few years later Hayden’s agent told him, “There’s some weirdo out from New York who’s supposed to be a bloody genius.”22 And so Hayden agreed to star in The Killing, for a salary of $40,000.
“What did Kubrick see in you?” an interviewer once asked Hayden, who gave a loaded response: “Why is a man a two-bit hood . . . maybe the weakness?” When Hayden was called up in 1951 before the House Un-American Activities Committee to testify about Communists in Hollywood, he named names. “I was a rat,” he admitted.23 Hayden’s shame at giving in to HUAC comes through in the character of Johnny Clay, who remains insecure beneath his brusque armor.
We first see Hayden as Johnny Clay in a remarkable tracking shot that Kubrick would use again in Lolita. The camera, following Johnny, sweeps through the rooms of his apartment as if they had no walls. Hayden, his long stride eating up the space in front of him, looks utterly confident, but this soon fades. The moment he launches his plot, the net starts to close around him. Without exactly knowing how, we sense that he will lose this one.
Johnny and his girlfriend Fay echo the pair played by Hayden and Jean Hagen in The Asphalt Jungle. In Huston’s movie Hayden snaps at the pliable Hagen, “Shut up and get me some bourbon.” In the first scene of The Killing Fay, similarly obedient, reminds Johnny matter-of-factly, “I’m not pretty and I’m not very smart.” Kubrick gives Johnny no reaction shot: she doesn’t register with him, not even as an annoyance.
Johnny and Fay might also put us in mind of Stanley and Ruth. It’s hard not to see an image of Kubrick’s wish to escape his marriage to Ruth when Johnny shrugs off his girlfriend so he can plan the heist along with his men-only team.
Johnny cooks up the racetrack robbery as a get-rich-quick scheme. He wants to “have it made,” but the phrase sounds empty in his mouth. He is joined by a ragtag band of partners, including Elisha Cook Jr., well known to moviegoers as the clumsy, cheap hood Wilmer in The Maltese Falcon. In The Killing Cook plays George, a milquetoast husband hounded by his wife, who is having an affair with the hunky Val (played by Vince Edwards, one of Kubrick’s poker buddies).
Marie Windsor plays Sherry, wife of the hapless George, with a viperish contempt. Kubrick had seen Windsor in The Narrow Margin (Richard Fleischer, 1952), where she gets called a “60 cent special, cheap, flashy, strictly poison.” In The Killing as in The Narrow Margin, Windsor is some kind of a dame, hard as nails, a jarring, unquiet spirit. She has a touch of Joan Crawford about her, and she can remind you of Lana Turner when her almond-shaped eyes slide slowly, like billiard balls, to the bottom edge of the screen. But unlike those doyennes Windsor remains a bit player. She lacks Turner’s intimacy with fate, or the alien force of Crawford’s stark, staring rage.
Windsor’s Sherry gets The Killing’s snazziest dialogue, no doubt courtesy of Jim Thompson. When she tells her boyfriend Val that her wimp of a husband will be their road to riches, he sneers, “That meatball?” “Meatball with gravy, Val,” she snaps. In the end, Sherry turns the heist into a disaster by spilling the beans and then gets herself spectacularly killed, which might be Kubrick’s revenge on Ruth for inserting herself into her husband’s filmmaking, here analogous to Johnny’s crime scheme. Women spell trouble, is this picture’s implication. With Harris and Kubrick at the helm, your project comes off perfectly; if you let Ruth meddle, you risk catastrophe.
Early on in The Killing, the burly Kola Kwariani, one of Kubrick’s chess buddies, tells us why Johnny is not the existential hero of noir but instead a walking emptiness. At a midtown chess and checkers club, Kwariani, playing a character named Maurice, brushes off a bad chess player with “Shut up, potzer.” Then he tells Johnny,
I have often thought the gangster and the artist are the same in the eyes of the mass. They are admired and hero-worshipped, but there is always present underlying wish to see them destroyed at the peak of their glory.
This speech, riffing on New York intellectual Robert Warshow’s famous essay on gangster movies, goes right over the confused Johnny’s head. He is not the glorious artist-gangster but instead a mediocrity. His blankness finds an echo in some later Kubrick heroes: Dave in 2001, Barry Lyndon, Bill Harford. In this crew only Dave has native intelligence. Kubrick liked his protagonists baffled and beaten, and not overly smart.
The Killing’s denouement arrives quickly. After a chaotic shootout, only Johnny is left alive from the gang, and he has a suitcase full of money. And now Kubrick makes something brilliantly calamitous happen. In a Hitchcockian touch, an airport luggage cart carrying the million-dollar suitcase gets overturned by a middle-aged lady’s yapping poodle, and Johnny watches all those dollars swirl through the air like a leaf storm. Johnny’s plot has come to a dead end, as we suspected it would.
With the spectacular ending of The Killing, as in its fight scene where the bare-chested Kwariani struggles with eight cops, Harris and Kubrick stole a page from Huston’s Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948), one of Kubrick’s favorite movies. Like Johnny Clay’s dollars, the gold that Huston’s Fred C. Dobbs (Humphrey Bogart) thirsts for gets blown away in the wind, gone forever. But Johnny is no Dobbs. Bogart turns Dobbs into an allegorical figure of avarice, a hunched-over gargoyle chortling madly. Johnny has none of Dobbs’s aggressive quirks: he is more or less a dud, as Kubrick intended him to be. The noir films most similar to The Killing have incon
spicuous, muddled heroes: think Edgar Ulmer’s Detour (1945) or Jules Dassin’s Night and the City (1950).
The Killing is a comic film, though it’s not very funny: Kubrick doesn’t enjoy absurdity the way Hitchcock does. The movie employs a complex recursive time scheme that forecasts Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction, and, like many Kubrick films, a voice-over. In Killer’s Kiss the longed-for escape from the urban trap actually took place, but in The Killing, Kubrick obeys the laws of his chosen genre. In noir the quest for freedom must fail, and irony rules.
The Killing ends with a flat hopelessness. The money has just blown across the airport runway. “Johnny, you’ve got to run,” Fay says to him. “Ah, what’s the difference,” he groans. Two cops wait for him, symmetrically framing the screen, the caryatids of Johnny’s commonplace doom. There they are with guns drawn facing Johnny, and facing you, the viewer. Then comes the signature: “A Harris-Kubrick Production.”
2
Keep Doing It Until It Is Right:
Paths of Glory, Spartacus, Lolita
“ENOUGH OF WAR FILMS. They’re death at the box office. Poison,” said MGM’s head of production, Dore Schary, to the twenty-seven-year-old Kubrick in 1956.1 Kubrick and Jimmy Harris were trying to get MGM interested in making Paths of Glory, Humphrey Cobb’s 1935 novel about the French army in World War I. Paths of Glory was one of the few books that Kubrick had read during high school. He devoured Cobb’s saga sitting in his father’s waiting room while Jack Kubrick saw his patients. Kubrick wasn’t drafted during the Korean conflict because he was married, but Harris was a vet, and now the two wanted to make a movie about war.
Schary wasn’t biting. He had been on the hook at MGM for the box office failure of John Huston’s The Red Badge of Courage (1951), and he wasn’t going to make the same mistake twice. War movies were verboten in Schary’s lexicon, but he was impressed by The Killing. Though the movie had flopped, losing the hefty sum of $130,000 for United Artists, it made several reviewers’ top ten lists. So Schary told Harris and Kubrick, “We have a room full of properties we own. There must be something in there you boys want to do.”2
Kubrick and Harris were now under contract at MGM, thanks to Schary, and they had forty weeks to produce a feature film. They started rifling through MGM’s junk heap of old novels and screenplays. When they got bleary-eyed from long hours of reading, they would play ping-pong or watch a movie in one of the studio’s screening rooms.
One day Kubrick found a gem: Burning Secret (1911) by Stefan Zweig, the Austrian Jewish writer who committed suicide in Brazil in 1942 after fleeing the Nazis. (“We talked a lot about two writers, Arthur Schnitzler and Stefan Zweig,” Harris remembered.)3 Burning Secret tells the story of a beautiful Jewish woman who goes on vacation with her twelve-year-old son while her husband remains back at home in the city. A baron staying at their hotel seduces the mother, and the boy eventually discovers the secret affair. Shocking, subtle, and above all suspenseful, Zweig’s novella is perfect movie material. (In fact, it had already been filmed twice in Germany, in 1923 and 1933, and would be made again by Kubrick’s assistant Andrew Birkin in 1988.)
In the end, Kubrick never made Burning Secret. MGM canceled Dore Schary’s contract in 1957 when his latest pictures turned out to be big losers. When MGM found out that Harris and Kubrick were working on not just the Zweig script but also Paths of Glory, they too were fired, for breach of contract.
Kubrick enlisted Calder Willingham, the prickly, talented southern novelist, to write the Burning Secret screenplay with him, and they seem to have worked on it for the better part of a year. The script was thought to be lost, but a copy of the script, dated November 1956, recently turned up in Gerald Fried’s archives. Kubrick did with Burning Secret what he did four decades later with Schnitzler’s Dream Story, the basis for Eyes Wide Shut: he relocated it to America and removed nearly all traces of Jewishness, much as Arthur Miller removed Jewishness from Death of a Salesman. (There is a fleeting glimpse of a knish bakery in Eyes Wide Shut, but that’s about it.) “He takes a Jewish story and turns them all into goys,” as Kubrick scholar Nathan Abrams puts it.4 The married woman is no longer a voluptuous Jewish beauty but a 1950s American housewife named Virginia. Her husband is called Roy, her son Eddy, and the baron becomes a distinctly nonaristocratic seducer named Richard. The hotel is in the Appalachian Mountains.
“Some of the Burning Secret dialogue seems to have found its way into Eyes Wide Shut,” Abrams reports. “Not word for word, but the essence: the seducer makes the same pro-adultery arguments that Sandor does”—the handsome Hungarian that Nicole Kidman dances with in Eyes Wide Shut, in a spellbinding scene straight out of Max Ophüls’s The Earrings of Madame de . . . (1953).
Burning Secret is one of a long list of unmade Kubrick films. The Kubrick archives contain his script taken from Nabokov’s novel Laughter in the Dark (1932), along with a World War II drama, The German Lieutenant, about a last-ditch German mission behind enemy lines (written with a former paratrooper, Richard Adams). There is also I Stole Sixteen Million Dollars, based on the 1955 memoir by Baptist-minister-turned-bank-robber Herbert Wilson. Kubrick wanted to make a movie from H. Rider Haggard’s hoary Viking epic Eric Brighteyes (1890), a book he loved deeply. And he planned to make Zweig’s stunning Chess Story (1941), which might have been the first great film about chess, given Kubrick’s passion for the game.5
Zweig’s Burning Secret resembles King’s The Shining (1977) and Louis Begley’s novel Wartime Lies (1991), the basis for The Aryan Papers, another movie Kubrick never made. In all of these a child decodes the dangerous adult world, then takes on the responsibility of a grown-up. Here is a key to the Kubrick universe. His films have the aura of the kid who has spent his time thinking and tinkering, trying to get things exactly right—a skill you need in both chess and photography. But when the grown-up world looms and boyhood hobbies yield their place to the facts of life, which include not just sex (as in Lolita, another movie about a child) but war and mass death, then you grow up fast.
If Stanley Kubrick had made only Fear and Desire, Killer’s Kiss, and The Killing, he would be known as a minor noir director, less significant than Jacques Tourneur or Jules Dassin, but interesting nonetheless. With Paths of Glory (1957), his next movie, Kubrick vaults into the pantheon. Paths of Glory is sometimes called an antiwar movie, but war is merely the setting for the director’s inquiry into what men do for success and power. The film mostly shies away from battlefield gore, unlike Hollywood’s most famous World War I movie, Lewis Milestone’s All Quiet on the Western Front (1930). Kubrick’s battlefield scenes are lucidly designed, and—a rare thing in a war movie—they convey clarity, not chaos, as critic Gary Giddins notes.6
Like The Killing, Paths of Glory deals with plotters. Here the plot requires sending masses of men to their deaths. At the beginning of the film, General Broulard, played to polished, insidious perfection by Adolphe Menjou, entices another general, Mireau (George Macready) to try to take the Anthill, the Germans’ bastion. The attack is clearly futile: everyone knows the French soldiers will simply die in no-man’s-land. Colonel Dax, played by Kirk Douglas, protests that the assault on the Anthill is useless, but he goes along with it.
Dax’s men, pinned down by enemy fire, don’t even make it out of the trenches. And so Mireau demands that some of Dax’s soldiers be executed for cowardice. Three are chosen: the eccentric Private Ferol (Timothy Carey), Corporal Paris (Ralph Meeker), and Private Arnaud (Joseph Turkel). The long, drawn-out scene in which the three men face the firing squad is one of Hollywood’s most wrenching depictions of capital punishment, comparable to the gas chamber death of Susan Hayward in Robert Wise’s I Want to Live (released a year after Kubrick’s film, in 1958).
Paths of Glory had greater star power than The Killing, since Kirk Douglas played the hero. Douglas, much more expensive than Hayden (he was to earn $350,000 on Paths of Glory), was fresh from Vincente Minnelli’s Lust for Life (1956), which had done poorly at the box o
ffice despite critical plaudits. But Douglas had a long track record as a moneymaker. In early 1957, Douglas told Harris and Kubrick that he was ready to start on Paths of Glory if they agreed to make a deal with his company, Bryna Productions (named after Douglas’s mother, so that he could put her name in lights). Harris remembered that Douglas’s agent, Ray Stark, “killed us with that deal. He just buried us. He was a tough agent and we were desperate.”7 Harris and Kubrick agreed to make five pictures with Bryna.
United Artists didn’t want Paths of Glory. The studio predicted correctly that a downbeat movie about corrupt generals would do badly at the box office, and also that it would be banned in France. But Douglas was a shrewd negotiator. He pushed through Paths of Glory by threatening to pull out of another project, The Vikings, which promised to be (and was) a commercial juggernaut for UA.
Gerald Fried, whom Kubrick had known since high school, wrote the music for Paths of Glory, as he had for Kubrick’s three earlier features. Fried’s score is superb, with tense bouts of percussion punctuating the battlefield forays. The film’s director of photography was Georg Krause, who had worked with Elia Kazan, but Kubrick told Krause exactly what to do, as he had told Lucien Ballard, his cinematographer on The Killing. In fact, Kubrick operated the handheld camera himself, here used for Douglas’s unsteady-looking crawl across no-man’s-land. In his later movies, too, Kubrick always reserved for himself the handheld camera sequences, with their rough, jostling feel.
Kubrick once again enlisted the oddball character actor Timothy Carey, who shot the racehorse in The Killing. Carey returns in Paths of Glory as one of the three condemned men. In all his roles, Carey gives off a slightly psychotic vibe. He enraged Douglas, and frustrated Kubrick, by indulging in offbeat improvisations. The scene where Carey rips apart his last meal, a duck dinner, required five hours, sixty-four takes, and eighteen ducks. But in the end Carey succeeded brilliantly. He steals the show with his slobbering, sobbing breakdown as he staggers toward the firing squad, leaning on the shoulder of a priest (Emile Meyer, who usually played thugs). “You better make this good, Kirk Douglas doesn’t like it,” Kubrick shrewdly said to Carey before he filmed the scene, and the strategy worked.8