By Ruby Ephstein

RECEIVED WISDOM, seldom the most reliable or durable of guides, has it that Paths of Glory kicked off Stanley Kubrick’s freakish streak of groundbreaking movies. Fortunately, we here at Cinerama know better.

That honour, we insist, belongs to The Killing, arguably the greatest of all heist movies and certainly the most intricate and imaginative. Spoilers R Not Us, as you know, so let’s just say the climax is as profoundly unexpected and shocking as the end of the first half of Full Metal Jacket.      

Yet while Kubrick’s own “My way or the highway” story is as celebrated as any in Hollywood history, his determination to march to the beat of his own drum had nothing on the actor around whom The Killing revolves, Sterling Hayden, a name all-but erased from widespread awareness. Such was the price one had to pay in paranoid post-WW2 America for being outed as a pinko Commie traitor. Not that Hayden gave a damn. Never has Tinseltown harboured a more radical or reluctant star.    

The Library of Congress testifies to Hayden’s talent. The US National Film Registry housed there lists no fewer than five of his films as “culturally, historically or aesthetically” significant: The Asphalt Jungle, Johnny Guitar, Dr Strangelove (Or How I Stopped Worrying And Learned To Love The Bomb), The Godfather and The Long Goodbye.

Yet Hayden was disdainful of his craft, which he pursued primarily to finance whichever new boat took his fancy. “Bastards,” was how he described most of his celluloid appearances, “conceived in contempt of life and spewn out onto screens across the world with noxious ballyhoo; saying nothing, contemptuous of the truth, sullen and lecherous.” 

Born Sterling Relyea Walter and poor, Hayden was adopted by his stepfather, James Hayden, and, after a nomadic childhood, ran away to sea at 17, rising rapidly to renowned ship’s captain. Encouraged by friends, he approached producer Edward Griffith and came away clutching a Paramount contract. Needless to add, his looks didn’t hurt his reinvention.

Towering over co-stars at an intimidating 6ft 5in, unsmiling, granite-jawed and Nordic-featured, he was dubbed “The Most Beautiful Man in the Movies” and “The Beautiful Blond Viking God” (as well as the somewhat less macho “Shirley”). “Incredible, really, how I got away with it,” he would reflect, “parlaying nine years at sea into two decades of posturing.”

But beneath the beauty lay plenty of beastly. Francis Coppola knew what he was doing when he lured Hayden from the wilderness to play the corrupt cop in The Godfather. Nobody else could have punched Al Pacino’s clean-cut face with such convincingly vicious power and ferocity that he transformed Michael Corleone from a clean-cut war hero into a savage mobster. One who, the next time they met, would blow his brains out.

Imperishable as those scenes were, Hayden only had a cameo in The Godfather, but that stubborn minimalism was centre stage in the other four of his movies preserved by the Library of Congress. He was Dix Handley, a loyal henchman, in The Asphalt Jungle (1950), another hypnotic heist movie as well as one of the most gripping of noirs, In the title role of Johnny Guitar (1954) he’s a reformed gunslinger neck-deep in a love-hate tryst with Joan Crawford’s titanium-tough bar-owner Vienna.

In The Long Goodbye (1973), he steals the show as Roger Wade, a spouse-beating alcoholic author castrated by writer’s block. Most unforgettably of all, in Dr. Strangelove (1964) he’s General Jack D. Ripper, the blackly comic gung-ho part that bore closest resemblance to his public persona while subverting it: General Ripper blames his sexual impotence on “the Russkis” and issues irreversible orders to bomb Moscow.        

Hayden’s journey from blond bombshell to Red renegade was as typical of a man allergic to standing still as the fact that he wed one of his four wives three times. If the title of Woody Allen’s memoir, Apropos of Nothing, represents one extreme of the aptness spectrum, Hayden’s choice, The Wanderer, marks the opposite.

Quitting Paramount before the Japanese blitzed Pearl Harbour (and just after the studio bought him the boat used in Captains Courageous), he shrewdly signed up for the Marines as “John Hamilton” to eliminate the prospect of being teased as a Hollywood pretty boy, and soon joined the Office of Strategy Services, the forerunner of the CIA. The OSS had been founded by his chum “Wild Bill” Donovan, the barely-disguised model for Robert De Niro’s character Bill Sullivan in his grossly underrated self-directed epic The Good Shepherd.  

Hayden thus had a busier war than most. The only American selected to receive commando training in Scotland, he parachuted into Croatia and ran guns and supplies to Yugoslav partisans behind German lines. He also befriended Yugoslavia’s growing band of Communists; the partisans’ leader, the future President Tito, pinned a medal on his chest.

Hayden was not only a vocal anti-capitalist; he supported the Hollywood Ten, the writers and directors banished by the studios after refusing to testify to the House UnAmerican Activities Committee over their Communist links. In stark contrast to Elia Kazan, he was ashamed for “ratting” to HUAC, with whom he co-operated in naming names during Joe McCarthy’s communist witch-hunts. No regret haunted him more.      

IF HAYDEN WAS a “posturer”, he fooled an awful lot of clever people, including the stellar directors of that quintessential quintet of movies: Robert Altman, Francis Coppola, John Huston, Stanley Kubrick and Nicholas Ray. In fact, Jack D. Ripper was Hayden’s second plum role for Kubrick; the first was Johnny Clay in The Killing.

Released six years after The Asphalt Jungle and another masterly exercise in sunless noir, The Killing, according to Kubrick, was his first “mature” feature. Like all his best screenplays, this one was adapted from a novel, in this instance Lionel White’s Clean Break. Clay is the stick-up man and conductor of a meticulously orchestrated racetrack robbery that we see unfold in episodic, overlapping and, most daringly for the era, non-linear fashion.

“Seeing it without his credit, would you guess it was by Kubrick?” wondered Roger Ebert rhetorically. As the esteemed critic asserted, every Kubrick movie stands alone, a gem of unique hue and gleam even when the subject is war, as it was on three occasions. Narrated by Art Gilmore, a well-known if uncredited radio announcer, The Killing is less about guns and hitmen than precise timings, chess and the domino effect.   

Revelling in pulp novelist Jim Thompson’s quickfire contributions to the diamond-hard dialogue, Hayden moulds Clay into a canny cookie with a keen eye for the tiniest details. He enlists specialist “pros” while refusing to reveal the identities of their accomplices, let alone any broader elements of his audacious plan to plunder $2m – the killing in question – from the Lansdowne racetrack in San Francisco. The horses are shot thrillingly by Sam Peckinpah’s favourite cinematographer, Lucien Ballard, though the actual venue was Bay Meadows, then the most venerable track in California.

Art steals more blatantly from life in an early scene where Clay hires Maurice, a pro wrestler, to create a distraction by instigating a bar brawl. Not only do they meet at the same chess club Hayden frequented as a boy; Kubrick himself was a chess junkie who played zealously between scenes.  

Not that the chess connection is solely worth pointing out as tasty trivia. Clay plots the heist as Kubrick plotted a chess game. Every rook, bishop and pawn has their job to do and place to be at a synchronised juncture. Everything depends on making the right move at the right time and in the right order. Even the slightest mis-step could cause the dominos to fall. Even in the dying moments, when he has every excuse to rip off that mask of stoical cool, Hayden, like any experienced chess player, remains poker-faced. It is impossible to imagine anyone else as Clay. Perhaps all that posturing was simply Sterling playing Sterling.     

The Killing is about as romantic as The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, but the heart still weeps and snaps, especially as we spy on Sherry and George, a cruelly ill-wed couple. Marie Windsor, who made Marlene Dietrich look innocent, is at her ruthless best as the faithless femme fatale, every contemptuous quip a dagger in the chest of the mousey husband she looks down on literally as well as figuratively. As the sexless cashier desperate to win back her unblind faith, Elisha Cook regales us with the most vividly pathetic of all the fall guys he’d portrayed in noir classics such as The Big Sleep and The Maltese Falcon. All Clay has to do to make Sherry behave is threaten to beat her duplicitous face into “hamburger meat”.

Cook is such a brilliant sap, in fact, that it’s hard to stifle a guilty giggle upon re-glimpsing that grim, hope-drained face. And yes, given the extensive pleasures we derive from the tragedies that fuel noir, we viewers, of course, are sadistically complicit.    

The last line is right up there with “Nobody’s perfect” and “Shut up and deal”: urged to run from the law by his childhood sweetheart, Clay replies, “What’s the point?”. That could so easily have been the sign-off to every noir.

To reveal any more truly would be an unforgiveable crime.