The Killing, released in 1956 and known in Spain as Atraco perfecto, is a documented reference for Reservoir Dogs. Andrzej Sekula recalled seeing it with Quentin Tarantino while they were preparing the cinematography work. The kinship can be studied in the way a heist is organised and in the expectations created by a story that does not continually follow the order of events.
In Stanley Kubrick’s film, the plan requires tasks to be coordinated. The narrative can return to an interval to place another action within that mechanism. Tarantino also alters chronology, but devotes much of his shifting to changing what we know about the men gathered after the robbery. The event around which the story turns remains off screen.
The difference affects suspense. Understanding how a plan should work makes it possible to fear its failure; hearing explanations of a failure forces us to decide whom to trust. Both operations manage information, although they do not pose the same question to the viewer. That distinction helps us recognise the influence without reducing the two films to an identical puzzle of jumbled scenes.
A shared reference during preparation
The connection with Kubrick has concrete support in the work of the crew. In “From Rags to Reservoir Dogs”, by Stephen Pizzello, published by American Cinematographer in November 1992, Sekula recalled having watched The Killing with Tarantino during their preparatory conversations. The testimony confirms a shared reference, although it does not attribute every later editing decision to that viewing.
Criterion’s listing identifies Kubrick as the director and screenwriter of The Killing, Jim Thompson as the dialogue writer, and Lionel White’s novel Clean Break, as the adapted work. Sterling Hayden plays Johnny Clay. The film centres on a robbery at a racecourse, conceived as an operation that needs several actions to be timed precisely.
That starting point makes it possible to turn time into a practical difficulty. The precision of a heist depends on one person being where they should be and acting when they should. Breaking the tasks down separately can make the plan understandable and, at the same time, remind us that each participant controls only a limited part. The viewer has to connect actions that the characters cannot see together.
When comparing it with Reservoir Dogs, what matters is that relationship between organisation and knowledge. Merely using earlier scenes would not be enough to establish a meaningful kinship: many narratives interrupt the present to explain the past. Here, changes in the position of information affect the trust we can place in a plan or in those who claim to have carried it out.
The heist shown and the heist that is missing
In “The Killing: Kubrick’s Clockwork”, published by Criterion on 15 August 2011, Haden Guest analyses the fragmented chronology and the narrative voice that marks the hours and minutes. The story returns to the events of the robbery and places different actions within a timetable. That voice provides guidance that makes it possible to reconstruct the temporal sequence while the film distributes it in parts.
The repetition of an interval creates a particular effect: what seemed like an isolated action acquires a place within a whole. The new scene can complete a stretch already covered without making the earlier scene a lie. Disorder in presentation serves to show dependencies. Each piece is intelligible in itself, but its importance increases when we recognise what it makes possible or what it puts at risk.
Reservoir Dogs uses a different organisation. Its main present gathers the survivors in the warehouse, and the shifts into the past provide background on specific characters. The jewellery-store robbery remains absent. Leigh Singer points out this difference with The Killing in his review of Tarantino’s debut for the BFI, updated in January 2022: the criminal operation Kubrick shows is elided in Tarantino.
That is why it is unwise to imagine that the memories will necessarily assemble a complete version of the robbery. The film may clarify who a man is or how he got into the group and leave the triggering action unseen. What the viewer gains is the ability to interpret behaviour. New information changes the value of an accusation, a silence or a display of trust.
The difference becomes clear when we learn Mr Orange’s identity. That passage does not complete a heist task from another angle on the same operation. It reorganises the viewer’s relationship with a character we had already seen wounded and protected. The earlier scene keeps its actions, but the gap between what White knows and what we know becomes decisive.
The spoken explanations do not occupy the same place either. The voice that sets out the timetable in The Killing guides the reconstruction of events. In the warehouse, one version comes from someone involved and may be challenged by someone else. The fact that a character describes an event with conviction does not automatically make them an authoritative voice over the story.
From the mechanism of the plan to conflict between accomplices
A heist plan turns personal differences into a coordination problem. While each member carries out their part, those differences may seem secondary. Failure changes their weight: an individual decision affects those who depend on it. This principle makes it possible to compare both films without treating them as stories concerned only with the technical skill of some thieves.
Kubrick provides a visible structure whose precision can be measured against what happens. Tarantino focuses attention on men trying to explain a disaster whose consequences we know only in part. The question shifts from how the tasks are fitted together to which account of the failure will prevail. The dispute prolongs the danger because an interpretation can quickly become a decision against another member of the group.
Trust therefore has both practical value and vulnerability. It makes it possible to act with others, but it requires us to accept information that cannot be checked continually. When that acceptance disappears, each explanation has to defend itself. Reservoir Dogs can sustain lengthy exchanges after the main action because words decide who deserves help, who is suspicious, and who has the right to give orders.
The comparison with City on Fire places the relationship between infiltration and loyalty in another antecedent. The Killing offers a different point of comparison: the possibility of generating tension by distributing a criminal event in a deliberately incomplete way. The reference becomes more precise when we pay attention to its function in each film, rather than attributing Tarantino’s entire story to a single model.
One useful way to compare these structures is to distinguish the time of an event from the time when we learn about it. A scene set before the heist may appear very late in the film; its chronological position and its informational function do not coincide. Noting both avoids calling any return to the past repetition or assuming that every fragment belongs to the personal memory of the person appearing in it.
It is also worth separating omission from uncertainty. A film may leave an action off screen and make it clear that it happened. Another may show an action without our yet understanding its consequences. In Reservoir Dogs, the absence of the robbery does not require us to doubt its existence. In The Killing, seeing a task does not mean immediately understanding all its connections. These differences make it possible to describe the editing with concrete verbs: advance, delay, complete, return to an interval or skip over it. Each operation changes access to the story in a different way.