Stanley Kubrick’s low budget homage to gangster films is itself often cited as the greatest American heist film of all time, thanks to a desperate lot of thieves, comprised of recognizable film noir vets, who execute a precision raid on a race track bank vault, and let it slip away through paranoia, bungling, and the inevitability that crime can’t pay in the pictures. Kubrick pushes his constantly mobile camera through cheap, expressionistic sets, using harsh light sources to create a dingy atmosphere in which the group of men (Sterling Hayden, Jay C. Flippen, Ted de Corsia, Elisha Cook Jr.) plan their heist to the second, using a studio enforced voice-over narration to guide the time-shifting narrative with ironic detachment. At 28 Kubrick was already a virtuoso at camera movement, atmosphere, and narrative manipulation, an auteur in the making, and if the film owes a debt to the likes of “The Treasure of the Sierra Madre”, “The Asphalt Jungle”, “Rififi” and “The Naked City”, it’s only as homage; this is a film that’s too grungy, too calculated, too devastating to be a mere rip-off, it’s of its own element, and a pure cinematic adrenaline rush.