The Killers (Mark Hellinger Productions, Universal-International, 1946)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Sunday, July 14) I wanted to do a three-film mini-marathon on Turner Classic Movies – it was either that or subject my husband Charles to two more Lifetime movies – including a double bill of films noir featuring director Robert Siodmak, star Burt Lancaster, composer Miklós Rósza and Universal-International as the producing studio. The first was Lancaster’s film debut, The Killers (1946), which was based more or less on a short story Ernest Hemingway published in 1927. The story is about two mysterious men who come to a small town in search of a man identified only as “The Swede.” They’re really hit people there to kill him, and the killers show up first at a diner where The Swede usually takes his dinner exactly at 6 p.m. When he doesn’t show, they hunt him down to the gas station where he works, and then to the boarding house where he lives. The point of the story is that the victim, though he’s warned, makes no effort to get away; instead he calmly faces the imminence of his death. As James Agee wrote in The Nation when the film was new (September 14, 1946), “The Killers starts off with Ernest Hemingway’s brilliant, frightening short story, then spends the next hour or so [actually more like 90 minutes – M.G.C.] highlighting all that the story so much more powerfully left in the dark. … The story, from where Hemingway leaves off, is also a comparative letdown, but it too is better movie – good bars, fierce boxing, nice stuff for several minor players, and the kind of calculated violence and atmosphere in the filming of a robbery and of the last two sequences which was commonplace in old gangster films and is now so rare that in a good sense as well as a bad it is almost museum material. There is a good strident journalistic feeling for tension, noise, sentiment, and jazzed-up realism.”

When producer Mark Hellinger (a former New York crime reporter and columnist who’d been brought to Hollywood by Warner Bros. and had decamped to Universal after one too many feuds with the notoriously combative Jack Warner) and screenwriter Anthony Veiller got hold of The Killers, they made “The Swede” a burned-out boxer named Ole Andersson (though he’s living incognito in Brentwood, New Jersey, where the killers catch up with him, under the name “Lund”) who was seduced into joining a major payroll robbery (back when companies still paid their workers in cash). The woman who seduced him was Kitty Collins (Ava Gardner, under contract to MGM but loaned out first to independent producer Seymour Nebenzal for a film called Whistle Stop and then to this, a one-two punch which transformed her from just another pretty face and hot bod to a major star), and the mastermind of the robbery was her boyfriend, “Big” Jim Colfax (Albert Dekker). The robbery takes place according to plan but Ole double-crosses the rest of the gang and takes all the loot for Kitty and himself – only Kitty double-crosses him, steals the money and returns to Colfax, who uses it to start a construction company and make himself a seemingly legitimate fortune. The plot is unraveled by insurance claims agent Jim Reardon (Edmond O’Brien), who’s curious why Ole made his $2,500 life-insurance policy (provided as a fringe benefit by the oil company that owned the gas station he worked for) to a middle-aged hotel chambermaid with no apparent connection to him. In a series of Citizen Kane-like interviews he works his way up the criminal chain with the help of Sam Lubinsky (Sam Levene), who grew up with Ole on the mean streets of Philadelphia, only Sam became a cop and is interested in arresting the payroll bandits who are still at large. Reardon is hoping to recover the loot to repay the insurance company, though his irascible boss R. S. Kenyon (Donald MacBride, actually a bit less irascible than usual and therefore much more tolerable) thinks Reardon is just wasting his time and there are much more productive things he could be doing for the company.

For someone who’s supposed to be an insurance agent, Reardon seems surprisingly adept with a gun – I was expecting that he’d fought in World War II and had just been demobilized and had got his old job back – even though one of the baddies takes it away from him in a late scene. Neither Lancaster nor Gardner were great actors – imagine this movie with Robert Mitchum and Barbara Stanwyck in the leads! – but they’re both good-looking enough and believable in their roles. I’ve liked The Killers better on earlier viewings than I did this time around; made at a time when film noir had already been a “thing” for about five years or so, there’s already a sense here that Anthony Veiller was ticking off the boxes on a checklist. Naïve, stupid hero? Check. Femme fatale who seduces him into a life of crime? Check. Criminal mastermind who’s bought and paid for the femme fatale? Check. Big climactic shootout at the end in which most of the people die? Check. There are some nice touches, including the scene in a hospital where one of the crooks lays dying and Reardon literally extracts a deathbed confession from him, bringing him to several times until he’s finally got the whole tale out of him before he ultimately croaks, and a great final sequence in which Kitty pleads with Colfax to declare her innocence with his dying breath – which he refuses to do, so the police arrest her for her role in the crimes.

In 1964 Universal did a quite good remake of The Killers, directed by Don Siegel from a script by future Star Trek writer Gene L. Coon, which was originally supposed to be a made-for-TV movie (https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2021/01/the-killers-universal-1964.html) but with the assassination of President John F. Kennedy got released as a theatrical feature instead. Siegel and Coon made at least two changes in the story: they made the initial victim, Johnny North (John Cassavetes), a race-car driver recruited to drive the getaway car in the big robbery; and instead of an outside investigator it’s the hired killers themselves (played in Siodmak’s version by Charles McGraw and the young William Conrad, and in Siegel’s by an electrifying Lee Marvin and Clu Gulager) who uncover the truth after being fascinated by North’s resignation to his fate. One reason I like the 1964 The Killers is that the femme fatale was played by Angie Dickinson (who was a close family friend of the Kennedys and was so broken up when JFK was assassinated she was unable to work for several days) and the Albert Dekker role was played by Ronald Reagan in his last film. Coon made even more of the irony that a man who had got the seed capital for his initial venture from an armed robbery posed as an example of someone who’d “worked himself up the hard way” than Veiller had. As I wrote in January 2021 about the 1964 The Killers, “[T]he smarmy self-righteousness I couldn’t stand about him as a politician is just what this character, a fundamentally corrupt man with the ability to put on a good face, needed, [who] has set up [a robbery] in order to provide himself seed capital to start a development company and be able to claim to people that he rose to success ‘the hard way’ through his own honest effort.” Though the 1946 The Killers doesn’t have the almost inadvertent political resonance of Siegel’s remake 18 years later, it does make a cynical anti-capitalist point at the end in which R. S. Kenyon tells Jim Reardon that thanks to his success in recovering the $250,000 stolen in the original crime, next year’s insurance premiums will go down … by two-tenths of a cent per customer.