The lugubrious, witty narrator has always been an integral part of film noir, becoming almost as heavy a cliché as the fedora and the trenchcoat. More often than not, it appears in first-person, making Hammett-like observations on the taste of the local coffee & pie and, of course, the length of a dame's legs; sometimes, it's third-person, reminiscing on a friend or a colleague who got caught up in the wrong game or fell for the wrong woman.

In Stanley Kubrick's big-budget debut The Killing, the narration is far more distanced, bordering on rigid. Art Gilmore's voice sounds like a stenographer's read-back or a policeman's account, date-stamps included; it also provides a sense of fatalism as it's often reminiscent of a coroner's report. He not so much chronicles as states the happenings leading up to a two-million-dollar heist at San Francisco's Bay Meadows horse track, a scheme cooked up by ex-con Johnny Clay (an assured Sterling Hayden). The robbery goes remarkably well; the getaway couldn't go more awry.

A little less than a decade after the noir's golden age, The Killing was at once a resurrection and a tombstone. Made in 1956, not long after Kubrick met and befriended his longtime producer James B. Harris, it deploys a rudimentary con-job in a purposefully disorienting fashion. The timeline is chopped up, and the interiors are just a little more shadowy than one would expect in a run-of-the-mill noir. This wild sense of formalism is barely wrangled in by the more conventional facets of the film's story and accepted noir staples.

Loosely adapted from Lionel White's crime novel Clean Break, the ethos of the crime and noir genres are scrambled and upended as well. Clay never encounters a foil or foe; he doesn't even seem to be battling himself. If he's in conflict with anything, it's bad luck which would make The Killing borderline existential. There's a femme fatale (Marie Windsor), but she is married to George (a great Elisha Cook Jr.), Clay's milquetoast of an inside man, and when she tries to bat her lashes at Johnny, he roughly casts her aside. When the film is not focused on Johnny and the caper, it digs its heels into the dark melodrama between George, his wife and her young lover (Vince Edwards).

Many of Kubrick's gifts are still in incubation here but larval genius is genius nonetheless. Noir critic Eddie Muller called it "the last amusing movie [Kubrick would] ever make" and he was partially right. The New York-born director continued to work for studios but his thematic content got considerably darker and his ideas on morality, death and humanity inched further into the gray. All his obsessions are pupating in The Killing under the guise of an abstract noir that culminates in perhaps the greatest moment of misfortune ever put to the screen.

Early on, Clay recruits two ex-cons amongst his stable of inside men: an ace sharpshooter (Timothy Carey) and a chess-playing muscle-for-hire (Kola Kwariani). They are the only two men that do their job for nothing more than a paying gig; their only motivation is in doing what they're good at. In contrast, all the crooked straights in Clay's gang see the heist as a way out, an escape from their unfair and mundane existence and, as it so often is in life, it's the straights you got to worry about.