Stanley Kubrick had made two pictures before this one, but they were juvenilia; this shrewdly worked out suspense film, which he made at the age of 27, is the real beginning of his career.

Written and directed by Hollywood's newest miracle boy, 27-year-old Stanley Kubrick, The Killing is a fascinating exercise in criminal craftsmanship.

This shrewd, engrossing, complete-in-itself melodrama is the kind of film one had begun to think was no longer possible to make in Hollywood.

This is a bad joke without a punch line. The Killing is directed by Stanley Kubrick who co-adapts to screenplay with Jim Thompson from the novel Clean Break written by Lionel White. It stars Sterling Hayden, Marie Windsor, Elisha Cook Jr, Vince Edwards, Jay C. Flippen and Coleen Gray. Music is by Gerald Fried and cinematography by Lucien Ballard. Ex-con Johnny Clay (Hayden) has a plan to make a killing at the racetrack, with some special inside help he plots to nab $2 million in an intricate robbery. It looks a good thing, the right people are in place, but there's a potential spanner in the works in the shapely form of Sherry Peatty (Windsor), the unfaithful and devious wife of one of the robbers. Cheaply made by Kubrick and his producer partner James B. Harris, The Killing is a lean and mean mid 50's film noir. Poorly received at the box office and met with indifference by critics upon release, it's a film that has come to be noted as hugely influential - more so as Kubrick's reputation has grown over the passing years. Clocking in at under 85 minutes, film is told in a fractured narrative structure that at the time was viewed as an oddity. Story is constructed around crosscut flashbacks as the robbery is planned and then executed, with Kubrick's direction as meticulous as the actual robbery itself. It's not hard to understand why confusion was an issue back upon its rel…