He made his screen debut with a minor role in Billy Wilder's 1951 movie "The Big Carnival" (alternately titled "Ace in the Hole"). One of Carey's most recognized early roles was in the 1956 Stanley Kubrick film "The Killing", in which he portrayed a gunman hired to shoot a racehorse as a diversion from a racetrack robbery. Kubrick then cast him in his next film, the World War I drama "Paths of Glory" (1957), as one of three soldiers accused of cowardice.