Ernest Hemingway's The Killers

There are two notable film adaptations of Ernest Hemingway's short story "The Killers." One was made for television in 1964 by Don Siegel, starring Lee Marvin. I haven't seen that version. But I have just seen the 1946 original, directed by German ex-pat Robert Siodmak, and believe it to be one of the best films noir I have ever seen.

Normally, after I make a bold statement like that about a film's level of quality, I'd throw in a still from the movie. But this movie's so old that there are no stills, just an image of the cover of the DVD box, and I didn't feel like that would class up the blog here. So, no picture. Just imagine Burt Lancaster in a wife beater throwing himself around a hotel room while gritting his teeth. Okay, now we can continue.

The film opens with a scene taken straight from the Hemingway story. Two thugs enter a near-empty diner in the small town of Brentwood, New Jersey. They're looking for a Swedish man going be the name of Pete Lund. They say they're going to kill him when they find him. A young man, the frequent Hemingway character Nick Adams, races from the diner to tell Lund of the danger. But "The Swede" doesn't even seem to care. Sure enough, the very next day, he turns up dead in his room, riddled with 8 bullets.

And the rest of the film follows a dogged insurance investigator (Edmund O'Brien) as he tries to piece together the how's and why's of The Swede's case. The Killers is often referred to as the Citizen Kane of noirs for an obvious reason: the entire story is told in flashbacks, as characters relate their perceptions of The Swede to O'Brien's investigator.

Like Kane, we fill in the details of The Swede's history gradually, only getting enough information to remain aware of the plot, never enough to understand fully what's going on. There isn't much to the story that you wouldn't find in any other classic noir movie - a femme fatale in the form of the duplicitous (and strikingly gorgeous) Ava Gardner. A couple of spry hoods who can't be trusted. And, of course, a large sum of money constantly changing hands, tempting everyone to double-cross one another.

It's no surprise that John Huston was a major contributor to this screenplay. The dialogue is among the best in the noir canon, displaying a fiendish intelligence and grim wit. Some of the exchanges rank among the most archetypal of any noir film, especially the mandatory seduction-into-evil sequence between Gardner and Lancaster.

The entire enterprise, in this regard and others, bears some similarities to Huston's own Maltese Falcon, though it makes a bit more sense. Like that film, The Killers proves something of a master class in noir technique. The remarkable cinematography enhances every shadow, bathing everything in half-obscured darkness. And a heist scene at a hat factory, told in one continuous unbroken crane shot, remains remarkable and surprisingly effective.

There's an inherent lack of believability to a lot of noir films. We're expected to accept foolish men casually throwing their lives away for a chance at bedding a beautiful woman. All manner of calculated murder plots are attempted and carried off. And then there's the chance meetings, the overheard conversations, the crosses, double-crosses and triple-crosses. But The Killers may even push things a bit too far. There are many moments during the film when, should one small factor have been altered ever so slightly, the plot would never work out at all.

But none of this matters once the film kicks into high gear. We're carried along by the sheer virtuosity of Siodmak's direction (his use of mirrors to show us a foot pursuit in one barroom scene in particular struck me as pure genius), the radiance of Ava Gardner and Miklos Rozsa's bombastic score. This is a must-see for fans of the crime genre.