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Stanley Kubrick: "The Killing" (1956)

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                         1956's The Killing was Stanley Kubrick's first real proof of his talent. Since this movie is paired with Kubrick's previous film, Killer's Kiss , on the Criterion release, they sort of go hand in hand in that they're both terse, economical noir thrillers, although The Killing  is a darker, more confident beast.                                                The Killing is a straightforward affair (it's an adaptation of noir novelist Lionel White's Clean Break ), telling the story of a group of desperate outcasts (led by Sterling Hayden) who plan on pulling off a heist on a San Francisco racetrack. The story is told in a fragmented linearity, showing each member's role as the heist goes down. And, like most heists, it doesn't run smoothly and ends in tragedy. Along with John Huston's The Asphalt Jungle ,  The Killing is the standard from which all modern heist movies are based, with its complex personality clashes and
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Stanley Kubrick: "Killer's Kiss" (1955)

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                           After the failure of Fear and Desire ,  Killer's Kiss  marks an impressive step forward for Stanley Kubrick.                          The story is a New York-based noir tale about Davey (played by Jamie Smith), a young lonely palooka boxer who falls in love with his next door neighbor, Gloria (played by Irene Kane), a taxi dancer. The two plan to move from New York to Seattle, but their plans are interfered by Gloria's possessive mobster-like boss, Vincent Rapallo (played by Frank Silvera).                     Fear and Desire was not a particularly good film (for a lot of reasons), partly because the film was a little too ambitious for it own good. A war film shot on a shoestring budget isn't going to impress any muckety-mucks in Hollywood. Kubrick compared Fear and Desire to a midget baseball player who doesn't take the base-on-balls but rather swings despite his limitations (James Thurber's "You Could Look It Up").  Killer&
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Stanley Kubrick: "Fear and Desire" (1953)

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                      Cinematic debuts are not necessarily indicative of the success or quality of a director's successive work. They are the proverbial "foot in the door". Not great or ambitious enough to be considered classics, but talented enough to grab someone's attention and, hopefully, the springboard for more projects. There's a handful of debuts I can think of that show an exceptional amount of talent: Steven Spielberg's The Sugarland Express (more of a theatrical debut; his first feature-length film, if you want to be technical, was Duel ), Peter Bogdanovich's Targets  (an incredibly underrated film), the Coens' Blood Simple , Tarantino's Reservoir Dogs , P.T. Anderson's Hard Eight , Sidney Lumet's 12 Angry Men  (which is the one of the best movies ever made, in my estimation), David Lynch's Eraserhead , and, probably the most famous debut in movie history, Orson Welles' Citizen Kane .                     But what about
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