The Killing Review

At twenty seven Kubrick took a Lionel White novel, hired Jim Thompson to write the dialogue and produced the film that made the industry pay attention. The structure is the reason. Rather than follow the robbery forward, he breaks the day into overlapping strands and rewinds to each conspirator in turn, the cashier, the barman, the marksman hired to shoot a horse, so that you assemble the plan from fragments and understand its fragility before the men do.

Sterling Hayden is superb as a career criminal on one last job he has thought about too long, and Elisha Cook Junior and Marie Windsor make the weak link and its cause genuinely painful. The ending, an airport, a cheap suitcase and a small dog, is one of the great deflations. The flaws belong to the studio. An omniscient narrator announces times and locations with the flat authority of a newsreel, which the film does not need and which flattens several scenes, and the supporting women outside Windsor are barely written. Everything Kubrick became is visible here in cheap black and white.