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To say that Stanley Kubrick is one of the most influential film directors upon anyone who’s made a movie in the past 50 years is just a fact. We can discuss whether or not Kubrick’s filmography is underrated, overrated, or just rated, but his influence permeates directors from every country and of every genre. Watch There Will Be Blood, and its ties to 2001: A Space Odyssey are inescapable. Even directors like Tim Burton and Christopher Nolan cite him as an influence. Steven Spielberg — in many ways the polar opposite of Kubrick — made a completed film out of one of Kubrick’s failed projects, A.I. Artificial Intelligence. His grasp of cinematic language, his cynical point of view, and his dazzling visual effects have made the man one of the titans of modern cinema. But you wouldn’t know it from The Killing.

The Killing is a heist film by way of film noir, starring mostly unrecognizable actors. The main exception is Sterling Hayden, who’d go on to collaborate with Kubrick as Jack D. Ripper in the classic satire Dr. Strangelove, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love The Bomb. Hayden plays the ostensible lead, Johnny, a crook who gets a crew together to steal $2 million from a horse racetrack during a hotly contested race. What’s most impressive about The Killing is something that’s notably absent from most of Kubrick’s classics: its economy of time. The Killing is just 83 minutes long; as a random comparison, Disney’s classic animated feature Pinocchio is 88 minutes long. Within Kubrick’s filmography, The Killing is one of the shortest films he made, by a long shot. Hell, Barry Lyndon and Eyes Wide Shut are about twice as long.

If you’re a fan of such films as Dr. Strangelove, 2001, The Shining, and Full Metal Jacket, you may not know what to think of The Killing. The Killing is straightforward and I’d wager that no one would identify the film as something from Kubrick if they didn’t know he co-wrote and directed it. There are no identifying features here; no stunning tracking shots, no Kubrick stares, just a tightly wound film noir and heist. Don’t get me wrong: The Killing is a good movie, and a fine start to Kubrick’s career, but unlike most of his future work, which somewhat subverts various genres, this is not packed with surprises. What there is to embrace with The Killing is quirky character work from actors like Hayden and Elisha Cook, Jr., as well as a suspenseful second half with some innovative screenwriting techniques — at least, innovative for the time.

Something that is a crutch throughout the entire film — and a truly odd choice for someone so idiosyncratic as Kubrick—is the voiceover narration that tells us…everything. The narrator of The Killing isn’t one of the onscreen characters, but something straight out of Dragnet or another cheesy cop show from the 1950s. We’re told where the characters are, why they want to rob the racetrack, what their relationships are, and so on. There are very few scenes in this film that tell us something indirectly; pointedly, those are the best scenes in the film. An example is midway through, when George, the cowardly racetrack clerk (Cook), is discussing a recent run-in with the gang with his femme fatale wife Sherry. They both got roughed up a bit because George told his wife about the heist; Sherry manipulates George by making him think that Johnny had his way with her.

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