Lose the narration!

Tonight after work I attended the Dubuque Film Society's showing of Stanley Kubrick's "The Killing" at the Carnegie-Stout Public Library.
It is an entertaining film noir from 1956 starring Sterling Hayden as the leader of an ad hoc criminal gang brought together to pull off a fantastic heist -- the theft of a racetrack's receipts.
Hayden is great and the cast also includes a veritable "who's who" of Fifties crime picks, including such where-have-I-seen-that-guy before actors like Jay C. Flippen and Timothy Carey. Elisha Cook Jr., the ABSOLUTELY FANTASTIC character actor from San Francisco (199 roles at least, including Wilmer Cook in "The Maltese Falcon") also figures prominently in this film.
Kubrick pushed the envelope by hopscotching through time with his narrative structure (similar to "Reservoir Dogs"), but apparently the studio FREAKED at his dismissal of conventional narrative form. The studio officials demanded a narration overlay to the scenes, ala "Dragnet" or something like that.
The narration doesn't ruin the film, but it did cause many people in the Dubuque Film Society audience to wonder what the movie might have been like with the narration disregarded.