“Stanley Kubrick’s masterful manipulation of chronology brings an excruciating sense of doom to The Killing, a classical noir about a carefully threaded heist unraveled by the scheming of a fiendish femme.”
Ex-con Johnny Clay (Sterling Hayden) has put together a crack team of specialists (ie a rag-tag collection of losers and dodgy characters you wouldn't trust to walk your dog) for a fool-proof raid on a racetrack.
It's the classic One Last Job trope, but told via an ingenious and highly influential non-linear narrative (it's fair to say that Quentin Tarantino's Reservoir Dogs would not be same without it).
The Killing is generally considered to be the 'first' bona fide Kubrick film and is a minor-key classic - with a script co-written by Jim Thompson and a brilliant supporting cast that includes the great Elisha Cook Jr.
