The Killing, released in 1956 and known in Spain as The Killing, is a documented reference for Reservoir Dogs. Andrzej Sekula recalled that he watched it with Quentin Tarantino while they were preparing the cinematography work. The connection can be studied in the way a heist is organized and in the expectations created by a story that does not continuously follow the order of events.
In Stanley Kubrick’s film, the plan requires coordinated tasks. The narrative may return to an interval in order to place another action within that mechanism. Tarantino also alters chronology, but he 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 offscreen.
The difference affects suspense. Understanding how a plan is supposed to work makes it possible to fear its failure; listening to 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 recognize the influence without reducing the two films to an identical puzzle of disordered scenes.
A shared reference during preparation
The connection to Kubrick has concrete support in the crew’s work. In “From Rags to Reservoir Dogs,” by Stephen Pizzello, published by American Cinematographer in November 1992, Sekula recalled watching 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 entry identifies Kubrick as director and screenwriter of The Killing, Jim Thompson as the writer of the dialogue, and Lionel White’s novel Clean Break, as the adapted work. Sterling Hayden plays Johnny Clay. The film centers on a robbery at a racetrack, conceived as an operation that requires several interventions to be coordinated.
That starting point makes it possible to turn time into a material difficulty. The precision of a heist depends on one person being where they should be and acting when it is their turn. Telling the tasks 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 observe together.
To compare it with Reservoir Dogs, this relationship between organization and knowledge matters. The mere use of earlier scenes would not be enough to establish a meaningful kinship: many stories interrupt the present to explain the past. Here, changes in the placement of information affect the trust we can place in a plan or in those who say they carried it out.
The robbery shown and the robbery left unseen
In “The Killing: Kubrick’s Clockwork,” published by Criterion on August 15, 2011, Haden Guest analyzes the fragmented chronology and the narrative voice that marks hours and minutes. The story returns to events from the robbery and places different actions within a schedule. That voice offers guidance that makes it possible to reconstruct the temporal sequence while the film divides it into parts.
Repeating an interval creates a particular effect: what seemed like an isolated action takes on a place within a larger whole. The new scene can complete a stretch we have already seen without making the previous scene false. The disorder in presentation serves to show dependencies. Each piece is intelligible on its own, but its importance increases once we recognize what it enables or what it puts at risk.
Reservoir Dogs uses a different structure. Its main present gathers the survivors in the warehouse, and the shifts into the past provide background on specific characters. The jewelry-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.
For that reason, it is not wise to imagine that the recollections will necessarily assemble a complete version of the robbery. The film may clarify who a man is or how he managed to join the group and still leave the action that sparks the encounter unseen. What the viewer gains is the ability to interpret behavior. New information changes the value of an accusation, a silence, or a show of trust.
The difference becomes clear when Mr. Orange’s identity is revealed. That section does not complete a heist task from another angle of the same operation. It reorganizes 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 verbal explanations do not occupy the same place either. The voice that sets out the schedule in The Killing guides the reconstruction of events. In the warehouse, one account comes from someone involved and can be challenged by another. 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 the dispute among partners
A heist plan turns personal differences into a coordination problem. While each member carries out their assignment, 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 solely with the technical skill of a few 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 fit together to which account of the failure will prevail. The dispute prolongs the danger because one 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 accepting information that cannot be continuously verified. When that acceptance disappears, every explanation has to defend itself. Reservoir Dogs can sustain long 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 within another precedent. The Killing provides 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, instead of attributing Tarantino’s entire story to a single model.
One useful way to compare these structures is to distinguish the moment an event takes place from the moment we learn about it. A scene set before the robbery may appear very late in the film; its chronological position and its informational function do not coincide. Noting both avoids calling every return to the past a 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 can leave an action offscreen and make it clear that it happened. Another can show an action without our yet understanding its consequences. In Reservoir Dogs, the absence of the robbery does not force us to doubt that it exists. In The Killing, seeing a task does not mean immediately understanding all its connections. These differences make it possible to describe editing with concrete verbs: foreshadow, delay, complete, return to an interval, or skip over it. Each operation changes access to the story in a different way.