Celebrated as Stanley Kubrick’s first mature film and made when he was only twenty-eight years old. A Classic Film Noir that exposes the myths by which we fulfil our desires. Sex, Murder and the family unit.
Career criminal Johnny Clay (Sterling Hayden) recruits a sharpshooter (Timothy Carey), a crooked police officer (Ted de Corsia), a bartender (Joe Sawyer) and a betting teller named George (Elisha Cook Jr.), among others, for one last job before he goes straight and marries his fiancee, Fay (Coleen Gray). But when George tells his restless wife, Sherry (Marie Windsor), about the scheme to steal millions from the racetrack where he works, she hatches a plot of her own.
While playing chess in Washington Square, Kubrick met producer James B. Harris, who was looking for a young new talent to produce for, having sold his film distribution company. Harris considered Kubrick "the most intelligent, most creative person he had ever come in contact with", and the two formed the Harris-Kubrick Pictures Corporation in 1955.Harris purchased the rights to Lionel White's novel Clean Break for $10,000, beating United Artists, which was interested in the film as a vehicle for Frank Sinatra. At Kubrick's suggestion they hired hardboiled fiction novelist Jim Thompson to write the script. United Artists told the pair that it would help finance the picture if Harris and Kubrick could find a high-profile actor to star. They signed Sterling Hayden, who agreed to accept $40,000. But Hayden wasn't a big enough star for UA, which wound up providing only $200,000 for the film; Harris financed the rest using $80,000 of his own money and a $50,000 loan from his father.
