Titles are important. Take the action/thriller Snakes on a Plane. Screenwriter David Dalessandro shopped his screenplay Venom for five years before a big production house took a serious look. But it wasn’t until more seasoned writers Sebastian Gutierrez and John Heffernan renamed it that the ball really got rolling. Here’s what Samuel L. Jackson said about it:

“All I needed was to hear the title and I knew I wanted to be in that film.”

By comparison, not necessarily to Snakes on a Plane, but to films within its genre such as The Asphalt Jungle, In a Lonely Place and Touch of Evil, the title of Stanley Kubrick’s 1956 crime drama The Killing seems a bit plain. Undoubtably film noir–of that its star (did Sterling Hayden star in anything else, besides westerns) and original movie poster attest.

So there will be killing…of that we can be assured. Yet the film’s title alludes to a singular act.

Hollywood journeyman Hayden stars as Johnny, a low rung career criminal who abides by the thieves code of loyalty, self reliance and tight lips. Johnny has spent the last five years in stir plotting an assent to criminal respectability via a two million dollar heist of proceeds from a horse racetrack. His complex scheme requires two inside guys.

One of them, a ground down husband of an unfaithful, materialistic wife is a cashier at the track. His name is George. The other, Mike, is also married; his wife, sweet and bedridden, is in desperate need of expensive medical care. Mike is the track’s bartender.

To that mix add Marvin, an old friend with an implied sexual history with the much younger Johnny. Marvin, the financier of the heist, could complicate things, but Johnny is unconcerned. As is common in such transactional relationships, Johnny is not gay. He has a gullible, loyal girlfriend.

Finally there is Randy, a crooked cop inspired by his affinity for expensive suits, luxury apartments and life and limb. He’s in debt to a local mobster.

These are the principal conspirators–the loot to be split evenly between them– swimming in a plot manufactured by screenwriters Kubrick and Jim Thompson. (Yes, that Jim Thompson.) The plot and pot is stirred by the then twenty-eight year old Kubrick in his first meaningful foray as film director.

Kubrick cloaks The Killing in documentary style using stock footage of a horse racetrack in the opening credits and voice over narration to establish a non linear timeline. The narration, along with mock pedestrian camara work and natural lighting establishes a world of simplistic hyper realism evident when Johnny runs errands in the lead up to the robbery.

This is the lens that Johnny envisions the heist through.

The documentary style is abandoned in interior scenes where the details of the plotting and the messiness of the conspirators private lives are established. Here Kubrick imposes his tenacious, claustrophobic camera style along with classic noir lighting techniques that reveal the lines and lies on the conspirators faces, the texture of the walls closing in on them and the cracks in the armor they wear and the plans they make.

This is the intramural reality that we see.

The cast is made up of prolific character actors from the world of film noir handpicked by Kubrick himself. Standouts Elisha Cook (The Big Sleep, Phantom Lady, Born to Kill) as the relentlessly henpecked George and Marie Windsor (Force of Evil, Narrow Margin) as his wife, the repugnantly duplicitous Sherry, play the obvious foils in Johnny’s scheme.

But it is the reliably understated Sterling Hayden who puts The Killing into motion. So caught up in the illusion of control, Hayden’s try-hard Johnny underestimates the devil who rests on his and his fellow conspirators shoulders. He forgets, or perhaps he’s never learned, that the devil also lives in the labyrinthic details of complicated plots devised by simple men.