Marie Windsor
The Killing | Dir. Stanley Kubrick | 1956 | 84 mins
Sterling Hayden (‘Johnny Clay’) is the star in The Killing, but it’s really an ensemble piece replete with numerous sterling bit-part performances by noir character staples like Elisha Cook Jr., Jay C. Flippen, Ted de Corsia, the inimitable Timothy Carey, and Kola Kwariani, the Georgian wrestler, cum chess player, cum actor. Marie Windsor as the Machiavellian money-hungry femme fatale ‘Sherry Peatty’ excels above all. An understanding of her role necessitates a brief outline of Kubrick’s accomplished noir heist thriller.
Kubrick gets inventive with the temporal structure, but in essence The Killing is a heist movie, with Hayden leading a gang of crooks in a complex robbery involving a corrupt cop and two racetrack employees. One of the former is George Peatty, the cuckold husband of Sherry, played with a mixture of unconvincing braggadocio and convincing submissiveness by Elisha Cook Jr., a familiar face in multiple genre movies over a half-century from 1930 until the late-1980s. Together, they produce some brilliant scenes, riffing off their obvious incompatibility to prepare us for the inevitable snatch of defeat from the mirage of some or any kind of victory. Their loss is everyone’s loss, lending Sherry’s transactional cruelty to George an inescapably fatal character.
Their first scene together establishes the power-laden basis of their relationship, with George desperately trying to capture the attention––and more impossibly––the affection of Sherry, who reclines on the bed reading a style magazine as if she’s a gangster’s penthouse moll like Gloria Grahame in Fritz Lang’s The Big Heat (1953). But she’s not. She’s stuck in a “crummy” rented apartment and she’s married to a track cashier she doesn’t love and who can’t provide the money, virility and refinery she feels she has a right to.
Windsor’s performance is a superb and vastly under-appreciated meta-study of a ‘femme fatale’, carried off with remarkable assurance. Her performance is pure ‘fake-it-until-you-make-it’, a self-reflexive tour-de-force of genre understanding; her whole being suffused with a striving for something (money, prestige, luxury) she doesn’t want to work for, or may not have been able to in a post-war America where a woman of independent mind but not of independent means was up against it.
Her appearance, strong and attractive but not conventionally beautiful, somewhere between make-do glamour and genuine class, is suggestive of someone who is making the most of limited resources because she must. She is not so much vampish––though she has no compunctions about using her sexuality to get what she needs––but calculating and determined in her fight for her own kind of monetised dignity. She’s a fighter with nous, but with little cultural capital. She must do what she has to.
In Sherry’s first scene with George, he complains of a sore stomach to her obvious disinterest and asks him to fix her a drink. “I think I’m developing some pains myself” she responds with sardonic boredom. When George asks why she ever married him, her answer provides the backstory succinctly: “I seem to remember you made a memorable statement. Something about hitting it rich and having an apartment on Park Avenue and a different car for very day of the week. Not that I really care about such things understand, as long as I have a big, handsome intelligent brute like you”. George is neither big, intelligent nor handsome, but he gets the picture. If he had money, it might make some difference, and so he tells her about a job and the big money coming his way. She doesn’t believe him but then realises something in her flagrantly cruel manner: “You’ve never been a liar George––you don’t have enough imagination to lie”.
The next two minutes are all exquisite manipulation and emotional gaslighting until she confidently extracts the information she needs from George. Her comely whispered “why of course darling” when George tells her to keep it secret is expressed with consummate duplicity, leading directly to the next scene in her lover’s arms where she expresses her vulnerability at his philandering nature before spilling the beans in post-coital intimacy. This exposure, the threat of being left once again with nothing, adds complexity to Sherry’s apparent venality, registering something beyond the purely destructive femme fatale: the striving for love. George is a ‘meatball’ says her doubtful lover Val Cannon (Vince Edwards), but “a meatball with gravy” responds Sherry and the sub-plot to snatch the loot from the looters begins.
In one short flirtatious scene with Johnny Clay, after being caught snooping at a gang meeting (which George duly takes a beating for), Windsor and Sterling do wonders with Jim Thompson’s sharp-witted script, with Windsor an irresistible force against Sterling’s immovable object. Sherry’s wiles are so blatantly unscrupulous that Johnny has little trouble identifying the risk to the heist, but will she take his advice to use those wiles to fleece George with his part of the loot, or will her ambition put the whole heist in danger?
George threatens to pull out after his beating, but this trepidation is soon dispelled under the sway of Sherry’s artful seduction: “Think how disappointed I’d be if you didn’t get that money. I’m afraid I’d feel you didn’t really love me.” In a beautifully rendered kitchen scene, which makes a subtle mockery of the domesticity this couple could never have, she leads George to believe she was taken by Johnny against her will. This guileful lie is unsettling enough to extract the day of the robbery from George.
The final scene between George and Sherry is a tragicomic wonder. George enters their apartment dying, the unlikely last man standing after a shootout. Sherry is packing her suitcases waiting for Val––whose hijacking of the robbery has failed––and takes it in the gut from a single, final bullet. “It isn’t fair”, she croaks, “I never had anybody but you. Not a real husband. Not even a man. Just a bad joke without a punchline”. Even the parrot agrees “it ain’t fair” as it crashes to the ground with George who follows his tormenting love into oblivion.
Neil Gray.
View Movie at: https://archive.org/details/the-killing-1956_202404