The Killers

The Killers, a 1946 noir directed expertly by Robert Siodmak, is officially called Ernest Hemingway's The Killers. But if you've read the story, you may wonder how a piece of fiction just a few pages long turned into a feature film. In actuality, the part Hemingway wrote makes up the first few minutes of the movie, when two gunmen arrive in a small town looking for someone called "The Swede." A friend of his finds him and warns him, but the Swede simply lies in his bed, accepting his fate. "I did something wrong," he says, and is murdered.

The rest of the film, which is an investigation by an insurance man, Edmond O'Brien, is told mainly in flashback, as he interviews people who knew the Swede (memorably played by Burt Lancaster, in his film debut). We learn that Lancaster was a professional boxer until a broken hand ended his career, and he then becomes involved in a robbery, which is what leads to his death. There is a femme fatale, of course, Ava Gardner, in her first major film role. We are left wondering, like Lancaster, whether she ever loved him, or was just playing him for a sap.

The Killers is a terrific film, one of the best noirs of all, with tough performances and crisp black and white photography. The music, by Miklos Rosza, gained a life of it's own, as the "Dum-de-dum-dum" theme that was associated with the hit men was later used as the familiar theme of the TV show Dragnet.

As any good noir, The Killers has a decidedly bleak world viww. It's not often that a film's main character is killed off in just a few minutes (another example of this is Billy Wilder's Sunset Boulevard). We know what is going to happen to the character, but we don't know the why, which is much more interesting.

Of note to Baby Boomers, two familiar faces from '70s TV appear--William Conrad, who starred as the detective Cannon, is one of the killers, and Virginia Christine, who plays Lancaster's girlfriend, played coffee pitchwoman Mrs. Olsen in several commercials.