The surgical precision of Stanley Kubrick’s direction is something I've always marveled at. His unquestionable ability to never waste a frame in his stories is efficient and intuitive. The heist at hand of the horse track never feels as though we are ever indulging in any wasteful uses of audience attention. The precision with structuring the robbery by our main character, Johnny Clay, displays methodical and professional consistency. The low budget nature of the film surprisingly caters to the claustrophobic intensity. Every scene is shrouded in shadow and each character drips volatile intent. The dialogue by Jim Thompson, notorious crime novelist, illustrates a very colorful word play which never seems to grow repetitive. Each sentence is delivered with mesmerizing consistency that grips us into believing the professional nature of these men. Every line uttered also strikes with a malicious nature. I’ve always loved how simple the layout of each scene is. Never growing more complex than a simple room. The only vast set piece being the horse track in question. It crafts an atmosphere of secrecy where we as an audience feel included. The level of danger always feels exponential as each component of this robbery solidifies. My favorite sequence is the robbery itself.
The robbery sequence is subtle in how it plays out. The narration almost feels as though a higher power is reciting a trainwreck at hand. It’s charming in how it sounds like an old broadcast of the era with its booming sport’s like play by play. Even with expert precision Kubrick still manages to tantalize us with ways in which it goes wrong. The tone of the drawbacks never feels orchestrated or forced. Every moment where something goes awry feels nihilistic in its execution. The two details being the sniper for the job being gunned down by police and the shootout that ends up taking all the co-conspirators. Each incident is set up meticulously. Every detail is small until it heightens to a truly grotesque fatality, the incident with the co-conspirators being truly sinister. Openly planned by a co-conspirator Georgie’s wife, Sherry, in which her secret boyfriend attempts to steal the money after the robbery is complete. The pieces of this festering violence are meticulously built up until its lethal conclusion. The scene is played for shock and it genuinely left my mouth wide open the first time I ever viewed the sequence. I’m so used to long, drawn out action scenes and to see it end so abruptly with no heroic conclusion was a delightful departure from most crime cinema.
Kubrick eventually went on to become the filmmaker we so highly regard today. These building blocks displayed within the film are consistently shocking coming from a new filmmaker. Sadly, I find that this film of his gets lost in the shuffle of his larger filmography. It’s a smaller piece of his younger output and I still find that it has so much to display on what he would become. The direction, characters, music, and cinematography operate with clockwork efficiency. This is a truly timeless piece of hardboiled crime cinema that could be shown in a classroom. It’s a nice time capsule of the time period and what that era of film had to offer. I highly recommend it to anyone who operates with a small budget or needs a lesson on how to craft poignant dialogue and simplify the process of projecting information.
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