Review: The Killers (1946)

It’s often said that The Killers is the Citizen Kane of film noir. This is fitting because not only is The Killers one of the best noir films of the 1940s, but it also borrows its narrative structure from Welles’ opus. Starring Burt Lancaster in his screen debut and Ava Gardner in one of her earliest roles, the film is a grand demonstration of their appeal as Golden Age leading actors. But the film is more than that. It’s also one of the few good Ernest Hemingway adaptations, and apparently the rare adaptation of Hemingway’s work that ol’ Papa actually liked. It’s easy to see why.

The film begins in a small New Jersey town where two mysterious men (William Conrad, Charles McGraw) show up in a diner asking about “The Swede” Ole Anderson (Burt Lancaster). They’re in town on assignment to kill Anderson when he shows up for dinner, and the others in the diner, held at gunpoint, are powerless to do anything about it. But Anderson doesn’t come, so they head over to his boarding house to find him where he’s at. One of the diners, Nick Adams (Phil Brown), beats them to the boarding house to warn Anderson, but Anderson doesn’t care. He stays in his bed and accepts death. The killers show up and finish the deed.

These first 15 minutes or so are a near-perfect adaptation of Ernest Hemingway’s celebrated short story, “The Killers.” The dialogue is taken near verbatim from Hemingway’s prose, and director Robert Siodmak’s crisp visual style and editing reflects the brevity of the writing. But where Hemingway’s story ends, Siodmak’s film begins, with an insurance investigator played by Edmond O’Brien showing up to figure out why Anderson left his $2,500 insurance policy to a chambermaid he hardly knew. It’s not exactly as elegant as the mystery of “Rosebud” in Citizen Kane, but it’s a mystery nonetheless.

The investigator looks into Anderson’s past and traces his history to Philadelphia, where he starts to put together the pieces of his criminal past and relationship with a gangster’s moll, Kitty (Ava Gardner). At each stage of the investigator’s journey, we flash back to the past, exploring one side of Anderson’s life through the eyes of an individual that knew him. As the film progresses, we learn more about his struggles and his doomed involvement in a heist gone wrong. Like Citizen Kane, it helps us to understand a troubled man only in retrospect, viewing every moment of triumph or tragedy in light of his pathetic final moments.

The film is a brilliant work of adaptation, using Hemingway’s story as a story prompt. Hemingway loved to leave unanswered questions in his writing; he’d never fill in the blanks of motivations or internal lives, leaving the reader to make assumptions about the reasons behind events. Siodmak and writers Anthony Veiller and uncredited collaborators Richard Brooks and John Huston work backwards using the unanswered questions in “The Killers” to fill out the backstory of the film. It’s a work of startling reverse engineering, using a punchy little story of killers in a diner to craft an elaborate noir plot of heists and double crosses.

The Killers came out before film noir was first recognized as a definable subgenre by French critics, but it’s clearly one of the standouts of the genre, establishing its visual language with its smoky rooms, tilted camera angles, and harsh shadows. Siodmak’s steady hand is often invisible, keeping a remarkable pace and never letting scenes linger too long. Like Welles, his visual invention can be a little understated. It takes a few breathless visual moments to clue you in to how nuanced the camerawork is. 

One is the depiction of the central heist, where four men rob a factory payroll. Setting the template for everything from Welles’ Touch of Evil (1958) to Johnnie To’s Breaking News (2004), the scene is depicted in one long take. Siodmak and cinematographer Woody Bredell crane above the robbers as they enter the factory and truck over to a second-floor payroll room to watch the men commit the robbery through the windows. As the men flee and the guards give chase, the camera dollies back to witness the ensuing gunfight. It’s a remarkable scene construction in its clarity and precision; it doesn’t use an unneeded shot, because it contains only one.

Another shot is less technically astounding, but no less remarkable. As the investigator finally catches up to Kitty, he takes her to a bar to stake out other conspirators in Anderson’s death. Siodmak depicts them entering the bar through the crooked reflection of the mirror on the bar wall. We watch them enter, unknowingly trailed by an assailant, and move to the table right in the front of the mirror. Only then does Siodmak’s camera tilt down from the mirror, but the reflection has told us everything we need to know about the trap that lies in wait. It’s a convention of noir to use mirrors and surfaces to cue the viewer to fractured identities and shadowy motives. Perhaps the most famous instance of this is the hall of mirrors in Welles’ The Lady from Shanghai (1947). But it wasn’t convention yet in The Killers. The visual language of the genre was still being constructed, in this film and others by Jacques Tourneur, Anthony Mann, and Joseph H. Lewis.

But none of it would amount to much more than style if it weren't for Lancaster and Gardner at the film’s centre. Their physical perfection is obvious from the moment they appear on screen, Lancaster’s chiseled, towering physique making most male stars seem boys in comparison and Gardner being possibly the most sultry brunette ever put on screen. Looks count for a lot in a film as visually-oriented as The Killers, especially when you need to buy that Lancaster risks everything he has to land a woman like Gardner. But performance also matters, especially the way that Gardner hides a multitude of lies in her smile or how Lancaster’s paradoxical masculinity, both terrifying and gentle, is already on full display in his first film.

The Killers is a remarkable acting debut. It’s a stunning adaptation. And it’s a breathtaking visual feat. That it’s all three at the same time solidifies what a stone-cold classic it is.

9 out of 10

The Killers (1946, USA)

Directed by Robert Siodmak; written by Anthony Veiller and Richard Brooks & John Huston (uncredited), based on the short story by Ernest Hemingway; starring Burt Lancaster, Ava Gardner, Edmond O’Brien, Sam Levene, Vince Barnett, Virginia Christine, Charles D. Brown, Jack Lambert, Donald MacBride, Charles McGraw, William Conrad, Phil Brown.

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