From Stanley Kubrick’s Personal Collection: The Killing

Two early Stanley Kubrick classics – his very first short and breakthrough feature – screen from unique prints loaned from the filmmaker’s own personal collection.

  • Director

    Stanley Kubrick

  • With

    Sterling Hayden, Elisha Cook Jr., Marie Windsor, Timothy Carey

  • USA 1956. 85min

  • 35mm

  • Certificate

    PG

Kubrick’s breakthrough thrillingly reinvented the heist film, recounting the robbery of a racetrack by a motley gang of criminals in radical, chronology-splintering fashion. The cinematography captures the seedy underworld action with all the hard-edged impact of a Weegee photograph. Kubrick deployed single-source lighting to give dramatic stylisation to the compositions, which punch even harder in the ultra-stark whites and coal-deep blacks of this uniquely high-contrast contact print. Add in its authentically lowlife cast and Jim Thompson’s pulp-poetry dialogue, and you have a noir masterpiece as only Kubrick could have delivered.

James Bell

Contains racist language.

+ Day of the Fight

USA 1951. Director Stanley Kubrick. 16min. 35mm

Kubrick’s very first film follows a boxer preparing for a fight, and already displays his masterly control and visual panache.

Access information

The screening on Saturday 14 June 20:20 NFT1 will be presented with Descriptive Subtitles viewable with WatchWord glasses. These subtitles include descriptions of non-dialogue audio and livecaptioning of the introduction. Please note there are a limited number of WatchWord glasses available.

Tickets £22.50, concessions £18.50 (Members pay £2.50 less).