5 Movies That Influenced Quentin Tarantino’s 'Reservoir Dogs'

'City on Fire' (1987) directed by Ringo Lam

Perhaps the most obvious influence on Reservoir Dogs is Ringo Lam’s 1987 Hong Kong crime thriller City on Fire. It focuses on an undercover cop who infiltrates a gang of criminals and is involved in a heist gone wrong. Like Tim Roth’s Mr. Orange, Chow Yun-fat’s Ko Chow finds himself at a moral crossroads, forcing him to choose between loyalty to his new friend and criminal justice. The similarities don’t end there, though. Check out Mike White’s 1995 short ‘Who Do You Think You’re Fooling?’ which compares some of the key scenes from both movies. Despite the likeness, Reservoir Dogs is uniquely its own. There’s an excellent article on Eastern Kicks that compares and contrasts Reservoir Dogs and City on Fire. Tarantino often owns his influences, but has never (to the best of my knowledge) directly referenced City on Fire as inspiration, although he did once say in an interview with Film Threat, “I loved City on Fire, I got the poster framed in my house, so it's a great movie.”

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'The Killing' (1956) directed by Stanley Kubrick

Stanley Kubrick’s 1956 noir The Killing is another influence often cited when talking about Reservoir Dogs. Like Kubrick, Tarantino uses a number of flashbacks to form the narrative and show how the robbery was botched. In an interview with the Seattle Times Tarantino said:

I didn't go out of my way to do a rip-off of The Killing, but I did think of it as my Killing, my take on that kind of heist.

–Quentin Tarantino

Another film, similar in tone and subject matter, that Reservoir Dogs has often been compared to is The Asphalt Jungle (1950). Like The Killing it stars Sterling Hayden, but in a 1992 interview with Paul Zimmerman, Tarantino was quick to state his preference for Kubrick’s film, “Killing is almost a paraphrase remake of Jungle, but I think it’s a lot better.”

It’s also worth noting that legendary crime author Jim Thompson allegedly wrote the majority of the screenplay for The Killing, adapted from Lionel White’s novel Clean Break. However, Kubrick credited himself with the screenplay and gave Thompson an ‘additional dialogue’ credit, almost causing the pair to fall out. As per Robert Polito’s Savage Art: A Biography of Jim Thompson, Thompson “virtually had to be restrained in his seat from exploding” when he saw the credits. He labelled Kubrick “sly and devious”. That said, Kubrick and Thompson did work together after The Killing.

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'Kansas City Confidential' (1952) directed by Phil Karlson

From one 1950’s noir to another, Phil Karlson’s Kansas City Confidential influenced the plot of Reservoir Dogs according to Howard Hughes’s Crime Wave: The Filmgoers’ Guide to the Great Crime Movies (2006). But don’t take Hughes’s word for it, Kansas City Confidential is now public domain and you can watch the film in its entirety online.   

I steal from every single movie ever made. If my work has anything, it’s that I’m taking this from this and that from that and mixing them together.

–Quentin Tarantino in an interview with Empire Magazine

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'The Big Combo' (1955) directed by Joseph H. Lewis

The notorious ear-cutting scene in Reservoir Dogs is said to have been inspired by Joseph H. Lewis’s 1955 crime noir starring Cornel Wilde, The Big Combo. Thanks to the joys of YouTube both scenes have been captured in their entirety and collected together in a single video. Watch them here.

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'Au Revoir Les Enfants' (1987) directed by Louis Malle

On the surface the 1987 autobiographical film directed by Louis Malle might seem like an odd influence on Reservoir Dogs. As the story goes, Tarantino was working at Video Archives, a video rental store in Manhattan Beach, where he’d often recommend largely unknown films to customers. On one occasion he recommended Au Revoir Les Enfants which was mispronounced by the customer as ‘Reservoir Dogs’. The rest, as they say, is history.

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Jean-Pierre Melville