The Killers
The Killers
The Killers, as a rule, is referred to as the best example of Film Noir, I do not believe this moniker really suits them. It goes without saying that it is one of the best films noir of the 1940’s and also has a plot structure based on Welles’ famous film, The Third Man. Particularly expressive is this film with Burt Lancaster and Ava Gardner who were a couple of popular actors of the Golden Age in the movie industry.
But it is much more than that; It is indeed one of the very few films conceived by Hemingway which is weird since even that old Papa seems to have liked such an adaptation himself. It is clear why.
The opening shot of the movie sets the action in a small New Jersey town and two people are seen entering the diner searching for Ole Anderson (Burt Lancaster) ‘The Swede’. They try to trace him there for an assassination plot which comes later when he appears at the diner for supper and everyone else present at the diner is, literally, helpless, held hostage at gunpoint with nothing to do about the situation. He never arrives so they decide to go across the building to his boarding house and see if they can find out the lady’s room they’re looking for.
Nick Adams (Phil Brown), one of the people in the diner, gets to the boarding house before they get there and notifies Anderson of the events but he doesn’t; he remains in bed and waits to die. In the end, The Killers find him after all ottomoan.
For about the first fifteen minutes more or less, it is purely an adaptation of the Work of Ernest Hemingway, The Killers. And, the dialogue is almost exactly replicated from Hemingway’s text. Robert Siodmak perfectly depicts Hemingway’s brevity in the use of graphics and editing.
However, it is in Eugenides where Siodmak starts showing us a story that is not in the novel: the appearance of an insurance investigator Edmond O’brien who wonders why Anderson, after being assassinated by hired thugs, left a $2500 insurance policy for the maid he had hardly known. It’s not exactly as satisfying a ‘mystery’ as the eponymous “Rosebud”-quasi puzzle in Citizen Kane, but it’s still a puzzle.
Delving deeper into the case, the investigator explores Anderson’s history and tracks him down to Philadelphia, where he begins collecting information about his criminal past and his association with a gangster’s mistress Kitty, played by Ava Gardner. All throughout the investigator’s undertaking, we alternate the present with the past, and in some ways, look back in time through one of the people who knew Anderson.
Cinematically, therefore, it expands on how the character suffered, and then how he became embroiled in a crime that went terribly wrong. Also like Kane, it only allows you to see a disappointed man at the end of his life, churning through so many of his achievements and failures with such utterly despair at the last moments.
This is brilliant; even the readers do not see it the way it is supposed to be. These men (and women) abandon ship every so often to figure out new, more explosive promotional stories such as this one. Almost all works of Hemingway are characterized by his penchant of leaving out a lot of things. This could explain the absence of quotations in the whole epic saga.
Siodmak (and screenwriters Anthony Veiller & uncredited collaborators Richard Brooks & John Huston) basically reverse engineer this narrative device in THE KILLERS, weaving around the specific events untold backstories to bring all of them to screen.
It is reverse engineering at its finest – take short punchy little narrative about killers sitting around talking at diner counter tops and build up sprawling in complexity convoluted three act film noir involving multiple robberies doublecrosses etc in this way!
The Killers came out before the French critics had acknowledged film noir as a distinctive sub genre but it is certainly one of the best classic representatives of the given type with elements such as smokey rooms tilted camera angles sharp shadows etc.
Siodmak’s steady hand is often invisible. He manages an astounding pace and time for each cut without letting too much time to pass between successive shots, over in such scenes. Like welles, it is also possible that his visual inventiveness does not carry too much.
It is through some breathtaking eyeful moments that you come to appreciate the level of sophistication that the camerawork avails. One is how the central heist is depicted – four men robbing a factory payroll. This scene paves was for every project ranging from Touch of Evil (1958) and Breaking News (2004). The scene is done in one pour.
Siodmak and cinematographer Woody Bredell are above, in a crane, watching the robbers who are entering the factory and truck to the second floor to a payroll room and committing a robbery through the window.
You have to dolly back the camera when the robbers run away, and guards run after them, so that you can see what happens next. It is a remarkable scene structure in clarity and precision; only one shot was required, no excess shot was added because there was only one needed.
The last shot is worth considering without being as overwhelming as the previous one. Investigator, who’s already chasing Kitty, takes her to a bar waiting for easier prey in the Anderson killers. Siodmak has them following someone through a crooked reflection of a wall mirror in the bar, until they are seated at a table right in front of a mirrored wall and an assail ant. It is only after that that the camera sails down from that mirror, but the reflection has revealed what the audience has to be directed towards — the trap.
This is a traditional device of film noir, using mirrors and surfaces to imply that the characters have fragmented understanding and ulterior interests, the use of hall of mirrors in The Lady from Shanghai (1947) being infamous. But it was not yet a trope in The Killers; the framework was still being constructed here and in some other works of Jacques Tourneur, Anthony Mann, Joseph H. Lewis.
Yet, it should be understood that all this style would be decorative only without Lancaster and Gardner in it. Their beauty can be noted from the very first appearance on the screen. What is best about Lancaster is that with his muscular chiseled physique statuette other male stars look like little boys beside him. And Gardner probably was the hottest brunette seen on the screen.
Such complaints are unappreciated in such a visually impressive film as The Killers, particularly if a viewer is made to accept that giant sitting there can risk every pride of his life on a mere Gardner. But performance matters too – one can not fail to appreciate how convincingly Gardner handles a multitudinous set of falsehoods concealed within her smile or how Lancaster’s contradictory nature masculine and soft, scary and maternal is tested in his first film.
It is one of such terrible interpretations a filmic version of The Killers has been that it does not even make comparison with its vampire interpretation. It is a great piece of work from an actor. And the complete work is very well acted too. That it does all these three things together impresses only more on how really great a film this one is.
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- Genre: Action, Adventure
- Country: United States
- Director: John Woo
- Cast: Nathalie Emmanuel, Omar Sy, Sam Worthington