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People are voting emotionally.

Just perfect...

It's entirely possible that sending the audience out feeling lousy was intentional

The story-telling is good with flashbacks.The film is both funny and heartbreaking. You smile in a scene and get a soulcrushing revelation in the next.

The Killing is one of Kubrick's early films before he really broke out with Paths of Glory and Spartacus, but the talent is evident. The film is a very straightforward concept, a heist at a horse track, but it lays out the blueprint for making a heist film that is still used today with the Ocean's series. They lay out their plan just enough that the viewer knows what is going on and the general outline of the plan, but it isn't until the climactic heist that it all comes together. The decision to show the heist from each characters perspective non-linearly worked very well and was a bold choice at the time as it was a novel approach.Sterling Hayden gives a good performance, though it is odd to see him as the mastermind when he is usually just typecast as a heavy. Elisha Cook Jr. also does well as the meek clerk who is pushed around by his two timing wife. The characters are given moments of compassion, particularly Joe Sawyer's bartender, to let the audience root for them, while still reminding us that they are criminals.

As someone who considers Stanley Kubrick one of the greatest directors who ever lived, 'The Killing' is not one of his very best (his masterpiece being '2001').This said, 'The Killing' is a big step up from the still solid if flawed 'Killer's Kiss' and especially the very poor (for me his only misfire) 'Fear and Desire', which only had the camera work and use of light and shadow going for it.My only two complaints with 'The Killing' are with the ending and the narration. The ending was rather rushed and anti-climactic, ending on too much of an abrupt note. The narration poses more of a problem, apparently it was forced into the film and the tacky execution really shows, it is annoyingly cheesy, over-explanatory and overused and the film would have fared much better without it like Kubrick intended.However, 'The Killing' looks great, complete with brilliantly evocative camera work/cinematography, atmospheric use of light and shadow and suitably claustrophobic sets. The music score is a marked improvement over the music scores for 'Fear and Desire' and 'Killer's Kiss', it's not perfect with parts that are a bit too loud and intrusive but here it is not inappropriately jaunty, it has its haunting and tense moments without being too obvious and unlike 'Fear and Desire' it doesn't sound like a bad Bernard Hermann imitation.Also significantly improved is the dialogue, excepting the narration. Here the script is witty and deliciously sardonic, providing some really enjoyable chemistry between the characters and actors. Kubrick directs with a masterly touch, with much more of his own style coming through (one can say that he had not found it with 'Fear and Desire', was starting to find it with 'Killer's Kiss' and found it with 'The Killing). The story is ground-breakingly non-linear but tightly paced and with some genuine suspenseful tension and moving poignancy.Of a strong cast, yet another big improvement, standing out are Sterling Hayden, Marie Windsor and Elisha Cook Jnr, who are all excellent in roles perfectly tailored for them.In summary, while not one of Kubrick's best (he went on to do even better, with his first masterpiece being 'Paths of Glory') it is his first "very good" film. 8/10 Bethany Cox

"The Killing" (1956) certainly deserves its title. It is honestly "Ocean's Eleven" before there was an "Ocean's Eleven", but it is not nearly as good. The use of shadow in the film added to the mystery of it all and the flashbacks helped tie everything together without giving too much away. This movie wasn't horrible to watch but, it's certainly not my favorite. It had the potential to be really good, but the lack of humor, depth, and drama held it back. The plot was decent, but it could have been flushed out more. I honestly wonder if the costume designers and makeup artists created Sherry's look based off of Betty Boop. George Peatty, played by Elisha Cook Jr., was such a sucker. I felt bad for the guy at the beginning, but when you see how he has no back bone you just wanna smack the guy and tell him to wake up and smell the coffee.

The Killing is a smart-ass heist drama - a noir of the highest order - with a lip-smacking precision which is at odds with the summation: that all human designs are futile and frustrating. Stanley Kubrick's 84-minute labyrinthine thriller transports the moral contortions of film noir to the overwrought atmosphere of the race-track, suffusing them together with dread-inducing temporal uncertainty. The Killing is a story of a group of low-level hoods that hops around a heist at a race track, viewing the events from the perspective of the men involved. Johnny Clay (Sterling Hayden, competently thumping a restrained characterization), just released from a 5-year stint in prison, instigates the operation, recruiting inside men from the track like bartender Mike, book-keeper Marvin, and clerk George (Elisha Cook, a particular standout), along with corrupt policeman Randy Kennan to orchestrate the daring heist. Each represents a specific role in the intricate process, a key piece to the overall puzzle which is deliberated over through clandestine meetings. Our unlikely schemers all believe their newly acquired riches will salvage whatever opportunities they've previously squandered. But as in most film noir, here too a dame holds the key to doom. The weak-willed George naively believes the money will satisfy his wide-eyed viper of a wife, Sherry (spectacularly portrayed by Marie Windsor). Her passive-aggressive interrogations are ripe with assaults on George's nonexistent masculinity, and what begins as idle pillow talk quickly avalanches into full-blown disaster. Overall the plot works like clock-work; drawing us into the scheme and then milking the pleasures of witnessing it unfold exactly as planned. Well almost! The movie soon settles into a thrilling vein culminating into an unexpected and brutally ironic climax as the group's hard-earned cash literally blows away - a compelling image of great symbolic value that visually mirrors early images of the racetrack grounds littered with losing tickets. Kubrick holds the image for maximum impact, and the look on Hayden's face is a deft summary of film noir's intrinsic fatalism: all are doomed, and the only question is how.It is a tremendous pleasure to see how it all unfolds, largely because Kubrick directs it with the skill of a consummate pro (despite being all of 27 years old then). Kubrick's structuring of the material makes it a brisk film noir, moving us around the narrative like an unassembled jigsaw puzzle that slowly but surely comes together in the end, but never in the way we might expect it. And by doing so, he propels the acidic realm of film noir into something even darker!