Released in 1954, Lewis Gilbert’s The Good Die Young, a neglected British-American hybrid noir, relates a post office robbery through a series of flashbacks in which we are introduced to the four central protagonists who collectively come to signify a masculinity in crisis; a new post war malaise. It is worth noting that Gilbert’s noir preceded Kubrick’s The Killing, a film which is considered to be far superior and more revered. And in some respects, Gilbert’s film likely influenced The Killing expressly in the ending where the last of the four protagonists meets his death on the airport tarmac while clutching banknotes in a heavy handed symbolic gesture. Kubrick repeats this doomed ending but with greater clarity and imagination.
While the flashback structure in The Killing is resolutely mechanical and the fatalism resonates with a tangible brutality, Gilbert’s approach bears an equivalent pessimism about post war Western society, much of it amplified through the slimy figure of a posh playboy and sociopath essayed by Laurence Harvey with a venal, rascally delight. With a strong cast populated by the likes of Stanley Baker and Richard Basehart, Gilbert’s noir holds its own against classic noir films such as The Killing and could arguably be shoe horned into a cycle of films that preceded the British New Wave film movement that was to emerge in the late 1950s.
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