The Killing

Year of Release:  1956
Director:  Stanley Kubrick
Screenplay:  Stanley Kubrick, dialogue by Jim Thompson, based on the novel Clean Break by Lionel White
Starring:  Sterling Hayden, Colleen Gray, Vince Edwards, Jay C. Flippen, Elisha Cook Jr., Marie Windsor
Running Time:  85 minutes
Genre:  film noir, crime, thriller

Career criminal Johnny Clay (Hayden) puts together a meticulously planned robbery of a racetrack.  The plan seems to be foolproof and everything initially goes to plan, but greed, betrayal, and plain bad luck conspire to ruin everything.

This was Stanley Kubrick's third film, but his first one to make a real splash.  It is a genuinely tense, exciting noir thriller.  Like many heist films the first part of the film is devoted to putting the plan together and setting it all in motion, with the second half of the film being devoted to the robbery itself and its aftermath.  The story jumps around in time, sometimes showing the same events from different perspectives.  The film is well-performed, with some great hardboiled dialogue provided by crime novelist Jim Thompson, and has some very strong moments, such as the scene where a parking attendant (James Edwards) is subjected to racist abuse from someone who had previously been kind to him.  The look of shock, disgust and contempt on the attendant's face speaks volumes.  This is a fine example of film noir. 

  

If....

Year of Release:  1968
Director:  Lindsay Anderson
Screenplay:  David Sherwin, based on the script The Crusaders by David Sherwin and John Howlett
Starring:  Malcolm McDowell, Richard Warwick, Christine Noonan, David Wood, Robert Swann, Peter Jeffrey
Running Time:  107 minutes
Genre:  Drama, satire

The film is set in an all-male British boarding school where the pupils lives are ruled by meaningless tradition, and bullying, predatory prefects (known as "Whips") who force the younger boys (who are referred to as "scum") to act as their personal servants.  The headmaster (Jeffrey) is completely ineffectual and out of touch, and the rest of the adults are either bullies, weird or ineffective or a combination of the three.  Mick Travis (McDowell), Knightly (Wood) and Wallace (Warwick), three senior boys, start to rebel and soon become a problem to the staff and Whips.  After a particularly brutal beating, the three boys plot violent revenge for the school's Founder's Day celebration.

Lindsay Anderson, who himself attended boarding school, had a reputation for tough, social realist films such as This Sporting Life (1963), and this film mixes gritty realism with surreal flights of fantasy.  The early scenes introduce the daily life of the school, depicting the traditions, and casual cruelties that Mick and friends are rebelling against.  The picture switches, seemingly randomly, between colour and black-and-white.  Apparently because it was easier to film the scenes in the chapel in black-and-white rather than colour, and Anderson liked the effect and decided to use it throughout the film.  There are memorably bizarre sequences, such as where McDowell flirts with a waitress (Noonan) in a cafe and they end up wrestling naked on the cafe floor impersonating tigers, and a scene where a character, who has seemingly been killed earlier, pops up in a drawer to shake hands with his supposed killers.  This is very much a film about the late 1960s.  It's a counterculture film, about the struggle between old and new ideas that were going on in Britain at the time.  Despite it being very much a product of it's time it is still weirdly relevant today, in it's depiction of old versus young, albeit in possibly the most privileged place imaginable.  The violent climax, which involves a gun battle at the school, is possibly even more disturbing now than it was at the time. This is a deeply disturbing film, that still packs a punch, but it is also very funny, and features a star-making performance from Malcolm McDowell, in his film debut.         
 McDowell and Anderson reunited with writer David Sherwin for two subsequent films, O Lucky Man! (1971) and Britannia Hospital (1983),  in which McDowell reprised the role of Mick Travis, albeit as a very different character each time.  Both of them are very well worth checking out, if you can find them.

Richard Warwick, Malcolm McDowell and David Wood in If....

Crooklyn

Year of Release:  1994
Director:  Spike Lee
Screenplay:  Joie Susannah Lee, Cinque Lee and Spike Lee, based on a story by Joie Susannah lee
Starring:  Alfre Woodward, Delroy Lindo, Zelda Harris, Spike Lee
Running Time:  115 minutes
Genre:  Drama, comedy, coming of age

This semi-autobiographical directed by Spike Lee, and co-written by Lee and his siblings, Cinque and Joie Susannah.  The film is set over the spring and summer of 1973 in a tough but close-knit neighbourhood in Brooklyn, New York, and focuses on nine year old Troy Carmichael (Harris) growing up with four rowdy brothers and her troubled by loving parents:  Strict school teacher Carolyn (Woodward), who holds the family together, and ambitious but naive musician Woody (Lindo), who had some success with pop music covers in the past but now wants to concentrate exclusively on his own music.

The film is colourful, lively and is unusually light for a Spike Lee film, however there is still plenty of grit.  The neighbourhood is populated with eccentric characters, children play on the stoops and the street, everyone knows what is going on with everyone else and more often than not look out for each other, but it is tough, and there is always a threat of violence, although having said that, it's more likely to be a light punch rather than a gunshot.  The film is visually inventive.  Troy goes to stay with relatives in the South, which she finds very disturbing and disorientating, and these scenes are filmed in widescreen without anamorphically adjusting the image, which gives it a strange elongated look.  The performances are great, Alfre Woodward, Delroy Lindo and Zelda Harris are all superb, and the Carmichael family do feel like a real family, and your left wondering what happens to them after the film.  Spike Lee has a part as the neighbourhood glue sniffer Snuffy.  It's a loose film, without a strong plot, and feels quite baggy and episodic.  It's warm, funny, gritty and real, with a fantastic soundtrack of early '70s soul music.

 Zelda Harris and Delroy Lindo in Crooklyn