The New Pictures

The Killing (Harris-Kubrick; United Artists) announces the arrival of a new boy wonder in a business that soon separates the men from the boys. At 27 Writer-Director Stanley Kubrick, in his third full-length picture, has shown more audacity with dialogue and camera than Hollywood has seen since the obstreperous Orson Welles went riding out of town on an exhibitors' poll. What's more, Director Kubrick made his entire movie for a price ($320,000) that would hardly pay for the lingerie in an Ava Gardner picture, with the result that The Killing seems likely to make a killing at the cash booths.

The plot, worked up by Kubrick from a novel (Clean Break) by Lionel White, tells the familiar story of a stickup. Led by an ex-convict (Sterling Hayden), six men put the heist on a race track, but even though the tote is $2,000,000, the script fixes things so that crime does not pay. Nevertheless, the plot produces a gut-clenching suspense and plenty of surprises --pulled out of the hat alive and kicking.

And by hook or crook, trick or treat, carrot or stick, Director Kubrick has extorted a brilliant run for the customer's money from a field of Hollywood also-rans. As the leader of the gang, Actor Hayden gives a believable performance. As Hayden's henchmen, Jay C. Flippen, Ted DeCorsia and Joe Sawyer have the right wrong look; when the camera catches them together, the screen resembles a class photograph from San Quentin. And as the philosophic muscle merchant, Kola Kwarian throws the bull as charmingly as he throws the bulls.

Actress Marie Windsor and Actor Elisha Cook, however, outdistance the field with ease in what might be called their obscenes of married life. And the camera watches them, watches the whole shoddy show with the keen eye of a terrier stalking a pack of rats.

Stanley Kubrick, who looks (according to one Hollywood observer) like "an undernourished Marlon Brando," is the son of a Bronx physician. At 13 he began "fooling around" with his father's Graflex. At 16 he took some pictures of his English teacher reading Hamlet and sold them to Look Magazine. At 17 he quit college for a full-time job as a Look staff photographer, and at 21 he made his first film: a 15-minute study of a boxer on the day of a fight. It cost $3,900, sold for $4,000.

After a second short, Flying Padre, fared no better, Stanley persuaded his family to put up $50,000 for a full-length feature called Fear and Desire, a story of four soldiers lost behind enemy lines. Unable to afford expensive fog machines, Director Kubrick at one point produced an illusion of fog with a California crop sprayer, almost asphyxiated cast and crew in a mist of insecticide. The picture, praised by the critics for its "visual power," was drowned in a downpour of public inattention. Killer's Kiss came next, a story about a pug and a floozy; financed by some friends of the family, it thudded even louder than its predecessor.

Then Kubrick met his Maecenas, a prosperous young television distributor named James Harris. Together they set up Harris-Kubrick Films Corp.--"I give Stanley a free hand to create," says Harris, "and he leaves the money problems to me"--and induced United Artists to put up $200,000 for The Killing. Harris added $120,000 to the budget "so we could make it right." Even so, the moviemakers felt the fiscal pinch, but necessity was a kind mother to Director Kubrick's invention.

"It was all a big gamble," says Harris, "but now the gamble is paying off." K. and H. will make two more pictures for United Artists, and even haughty old M-G-M has asked them to make a movie under the sign of the Lion. Hollywood is highly impressed with the Kubrick rubric: "We want to make good movies, and make them cheap. The two are not incompatible."

23 Paces to Baker Street (20th Century-Fox), a picture that literally steals Sherlock blind, will probably leave most moviegoers longing nevertheless for Holmes sweet Holmes. Like Conan Doyle's detective, the hero of this picture (Van Johnson) is a flinty misanthropist whose only friends are a dear old dud called, in this case, Matthews (Cecil Parker), and his seeing-eye girl (Vera Miles). Since the hero is blind, it follows of course that his second sight is very sharp indeed, and one night, as he sips his Scotch in a London local, it tells him that the conversation at a neighboring table is rather like the curate's egg--there's something rotten about it. The chase begins. And after the usual 90 minutes in the London fog, it leads the moviegoer to the overwhelming question: Soho what?

Bhowani Junction (M-G-M). "You can't make an omelet," the Communist snarls, "without breaking eggs." The eggs in this merry metaphor are human heads, and after the big train wreck in this picture, the extras' heads are splattered in full color across the landscape of northern India. A scene of horror. But wait! Through the screams and the wreckage, an angel of mercy comes floating in a filmy white sari that sets off her dark eyes and lush lips, lays bare the creamy smoothness of her shoulders. "I didn't have time," she explains, "to get into my uniform." Is it Florence Nightingale? No, it is Ava Gardner, Hollywood's idea of what every dying man needs. Her eyes are large with sympathy--or is it something warmer? Her breast heaves with horror--or is it coquetry? With Actress Gardner, who can tell?

Ava plays a Eurasian girl in this movie version of John Masters' bestselling novel about the last days of the British in India. She is a chee-chee cutie who gets the worst of both worlds, though all she really wants is "to belong." At first she tries to belong to the British, but one dark night an officer forgets his sahibitions and tries to rape her under a bridge. Ava beats his brains out with an iron bar, and unexpectedly finds herself "a heroine of the new India." She tries to go native with a dark-skinned Sikh, but it won't work. So at last she has to settle for Stewart Granger, an aging British colonel who isn't too fussy about the color of a pretty girl's skin.

In this cheerful game of hide-and-Sikh there is, for a wonder, something to stir the mind as well as the glands. In the scenes of "passive resistance." the wide screen seethes with indiscriminate humanity, and in the heart-daunting sight of this faceless myriad, the Westerner can experience the awesome fecundity of Asia, and can feel the blind power of the millions east of Suez who are now putting a shoulder to the wheel of progress.

The shape of Asia, however, is almost obscured by the shape of Ava: Ava in costly saris, Ava in bloody rags, Ava in tight-fitting blouses, Ava bound and gagged in the villain's power, Ava clenched in the hero's arms, Ava in a temple, Ava in bed.

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