Hemingway's THE KILLERS (1946): [Ava Gardner, Burt Lancaster] Make a Mistake . . . Once?
Written: Sep 20 '00 (Updated Mar 25 '09)
Product Rating:
Pros: Superb monochromatic expressionism and stylized realism in lighting, film texture, and editing.
Cons: The raw swiftness and apparent simplicity of the plot requires attention and discernment.
The Bottom Line: THE KILLERS, which introduced Burt Lancaster and Ava Gardner to major Stardom, is a complex, intricate, exciting crime story, underlaid by an existential human question.
Fueled by Miklos Rozsa's famous chords, Al and Max the Killers are snaking the white line on a road into Brentwood, New Jersey. So begins Robert Siodmak's THE KILLERS, aka, "Ernest Hemingway's The Killers" (actual title card). The first fifteen minutes of this seminal crime melodrama, almost word for word, follows the dialogue and description of one of Hemingway's best short stories.
New York Columnist Mark Hellinger, a Hollywood screen writer in the 1930's (THE ROARING TWENTIES, 1939; THEY DRIVE BY NIGHT, 1940), returned after World War II wanting to set up a production unit, a device of freedom which had become much coveted after the model of Orson Welles' Mercury Players. For his first project, Hellinger imagined a film similar to CITIZEN KANE in form, relatively inexpensive, with unknown talent, an intricate story about a world familiar to him, and -- most all --a title and subject that would raise a splash, bring in profits to bankroll an ambitious schedule in the future of "Mark Hellinger Productions, Inc."
Hellinger bought the screen rights to "The Killers" from his former newspaper buddy Hemingway for $36, 000. He conceived a vision that would use the short story (about a gang hit) as ingeniously as the opening of CITIZEN KANE: an exposition of a long, complex story in a nutshell. He added what is now called a back story, using the rest of the movie to dramatize it: A story he had once reported, of a group of robbers who were found dead, one by one, after a big Brooklyn pay roll robbery -- though the money was never recovered.
Ambitious young Screen Writer Richard Brooks (KEY LARGO, 1947; later Writer/Director of such films as IN COLD BLOOD, 1967), then mired in Maria Montez epics (COBRA WOMAN, 1944), was paid to put a scenario in rough shape and sequence. Out of admiration for fellow writer Hemingway, associate Hellinger, and friend Welles, John Huston (writer of Producer Hellinger's HIGH SIERRA, 1940), still in the U.S. Army and under contract to Warner's, anonymously wrote the actual screen play. He provided a second act in which an insurance investigator, like the self-effacing reporter in KANE, would piece the story together from interviews; followed by a third act in which the survivors would be brought together in a denouement. An old newsman colleague of Hellinger, Huston's friend, Anthony Veiller, polished the result and took official credit for the writing.
Hellinger, following Welles' practice, optioned half a dozen players who had never or seldom been seen on screen. It was a first film for Burt Lancaster (Swede, the victim) and "Killer" William Conrad. Edmund O'Brien, Sam Levene, Charles McGraw, Virginia Christine, Jack Lambert, and Jeff Corey had been in a couple of films apiece. Ava Gardner, veteran of bit parts, at age 23, was picked to star in the key role of femme fatale Kitty Collins, which made her career.
Robert Siodmak and his favorite expressionistic camera man Woody Bredell were signed to shoot the film. Siodmak, who developed his reputation in German Films in the late 1920's, actually was born in Tennessee, and thus he had a feel for the American experience, as well as expertise in UFA camera and lighting methods, essential to the creation of a Film Noir.
Max and Al (Conrad and McGraw) have arrived in (then) sleepy Brentwood, late on a fall afternoon of 1946. They prowl around a closed gas station, where they had been told they will find their prey. They look across the street at a Hopper-esque diner. They enter the place and make inquiries of George the manager (Harry Hayden) and customer Nick Adams (Phil Brown, playing Hemingway's alter ego). Max and Al are looking for a big guy who works at the station (with Nick, it turns out). They are told, if Swede doesn't come in for supper by six, he won't be coming. Max and Al tie up Nick and Sam the Cook (Bill Walker) in the kitchen, and keep an eye on George -- "Bright Boy," Max calls him -- while they wait out the few minutes to six in real time. When they leave to seek Swede at his rooming house, and Nick makes a futile attempt to save Swede, it is the end of Hemingway's story. The rest of film is imagined.
ACT II: "The more I know about love . . . the less I know."
Jim Reardon (Edmund O'Brien), crack insurance investigator for Atlantic Casualty, is making a routine adjustment on a $2,500 policy, found in the effects of Pete "Swede" Lund, at the Brentwood police station. The Chief has little interest in the death of a gas station attendant with a prison record, killed by out-of-towners. No one was hurt but the drifter, and he didn't own real estate, after all. (Hard to believe, but it is a common attitude to this day in many places.) While talking with Nick and Sam, Reardon becomes interested enough to have Nick lead him over to the Coroner's Office. He examines the scarred hand of the corpse, and takes with him a green silk handkerchief decorated with a gold harp, encircled by shamrocks. Swede, when shot eight times in his bed, had clutched it in his hand.
The handkerchief turns out to be the rosebud of the case.
Reardon interviews the beneficiary of the policy, an obscure cleaning woman at a hotel on the beach in Atlantic City, where Swede stayed in the summer of 1940. He is further intrigued by what he learns, and given reluctant permission by his boss Kenyon (Charles McBride), he finds Swede's boyhood friend, Detective Lieutenant Sam Lubinsky (Sam Levene), and his wife (Virginia Christine), a former girlfriend of Swede. With their help, Reardon unravels the story of Ole "Swede" Anderson, a boxer who, in the mid- 1930's, broke his hand in the ring and turned to crime.
Swede's last words of explanation to Nick had been, "I did something wrong . . . once." It all has to do with the robbery of the Prentice Hat Factory's 250, 000 dollar payroll, insured by Reardon's Atlantic Casualty, in 1940. But the existential question lying behind Reardon's investigation is, what exactly was the "something" Swede did wrong? Was it the robbery? becoming a boxer? throwing a bad punch? leaving the right girl? loving the wrong girl? doing a good deed for her? What?
This story about crosses, double crosses and multiple crosses, over a 15 year period, turns on Kitty Collins (Ava Gardner), girlfriend of "Big Jim Colfax" (Albert Dekker). Swede meets Kitty at a party in Jim's penthouse. Big Jim is out of circulation (in jail), but from the moment Swede sees Kitty in a *green satin gown, and hears her sing throatily, "The more I know about love . . ." he forgets his loyal girlfriend, infatuated with Kitty. We also meet a future member of the robbery gang, Jeff Corey as Blinky Franklin. A strong suggestion is given, tabu in those days, that Blinky is a heroin addict, and one wonders if drugs are not also a motivation in the contradictory behavior of Kitty Collins herself.
In the same room where Swede died, Act II ends, with the wounding of the final member of the gang, Dum-Dum, so named, ironically, for the snub-nosed bullets he uses in his pistol.
The action moves from New York City to Pittsburgh, Pa. Reardon has found Big Jim Colfax living comfortably as a respectable contractor there. Reardon and Lubinsky have also located Kitty, and Reardon persuades her to meet him, perhaps to provide the final piece of the puzzle, and of course, to recover the Insurance Company's money.
The meeting takes place at The Green Cat, a little club below Squirrel Hill, and it is one of the best sequences of its kind in American Film. Kitty and Reardon are seated in front of a gigantic, slightly tilted mirror, common in those places. Keep your ears open to the dialogue, one eye on the beautiful, nervous Kitty, and the other eye on that mirror because the real action is going on in its reflections.
At one point, we see the action past a foregrounded statue of an exotic cat, suggestive of Pioneer Independent Albert Lewin's similar device in THE PICTURE OF DORIAN GRAY, and, closer to our subject, Huston's THE MALTESE FALCON. Indeed, as a tracking camera follows Kitty down the bar, accompanied by an ominous, distant boogie-woogie piano and Rozsa's slowly mounting theme, we see at the far end, in cameo, Huston and Hellinger drinking with a pair of women. The immediate shoot-out gives voice for the first time to the full: Dum-ta-Dum-Dum . . . Dum-ta-Dum-Dum-Da-a-a -- lost in gunfire!
The film ends with a conventional wind-up of the period, but even here, Division Boss Kenyon adds a wry, realistic twist when he compliments Reardon: "Due to your splendid efforts, the basic rate of the Atlantic Casualty Company -- as of 1947 -- will probably drop 1/10th of a cent!"
THE KILLERS has so many complicated, thoughtful plot and character moves that some callow recent reviewers have dismissed it as only a crime story that doesn't add up. Far from it, the film is one of the best jobs of story-telling ever done in motion pictures. It is no CITIZEN KANE, but it is not a one trick knock-off either. From the score, which was used by Jack Webb in DRAGNET, to caper films like Huston's own THE ASPHALT JUNGLE (1950), to the careers of half a dozen future movie stars and character actors, the film's influence was wide and long lasting.
The connections range from the triviality of the fact (which I just learned) that Virginia Christine became later the famous Folger's TV Coffee Lady to the serious, that Ronald Reagan gave up acting and followed Albert Dekker into politics after playing his only villain, Big Jim Colfax in the re-make of THE KILLERS (Siegal, 1964).
Siodmak continued to direct such films as DARK MIRROR (1946), CRY OF THE CITY (1948), CRISS-CROSS (1948), THE GREAT SINNER (1949) and THE CRIMSON PIRATE (1952).
For Mark Hellinger, THE KILLERS was the financial and critical success he hoped for. It allowed his Company to produce BRUTE FORCE (Dassin, 1947) and THE NAKED CITY (1948). It is his voice in the latter film which carries his immortal words: "There are eight million stories in the City of New York . . . . This is one of them." By the time audiences heard those words, he was dead of a heart attack, at the age of 45.
THE KILLERS was another of those of those eight million stories.
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*How, you ask, do I know Ava Gardner wore a green satin dress in this monochrome film? Well, given the color symbolism in the story, I might have guessed. Actually, for several years, I had pinned up on my wall an early color centerfold (from Esquire Magazine) of Ava in that dress, with its interesting strap over one shoulder. I can see that picture in my mind's eye now.
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