Classic heist movie on TCM tonight at 7 p.m.: "The Killing," directed by Stanley Kubrick.

It's a pretty good movie and advanced for its time, 1956, with a kind of gritty realism. Sterling Hayden heads up a band of heisters who relieve a racetrack of a lot of cash lying around the money room.

Elisha Cook, playing the usual dweeby loser, gets ready for his part in the robbery by taking a Colt 1903 Model M "pocket pistol" out of a gym bag. He first racks the slide, and only then inserts a magazine. But the movie's worth watching even apart from that.

If I recall correctly, all the big guys get .45s, while poor, shrimpy Cook gets the .32. He also loses his wife to Hayden. Hey, it was the 1950s, and that's just how things were.