The Killers (Universal, 1964)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2021 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Following The Old Dark House last night I turned on the TV to TCM’s Saturday night “Noir Alley” for a quite different movie, though one that certainly engaged in the darker sides of human life: The Killers, a 1964 film directed by Don Siegel from a script by future Star Trek writer Gene L. Coon and a remake of a 1946 film, also called The Killers, that like this one took its basic inspiration from a story of that name Ernest Hemingway had written and published in 1927. “The Killers” was an economical tale, just seven pages long, about a young man who witnesses two people who obviously are hired guns for some mobster or another come to his small town and confront their intended victim. The key to the story is that instead of either pleading with the hit men to spare his life or trying to escape them, the victim – referred to in the story only as “The Swede” – waits there stoically and accepts his inevitable fate. Director Siegel had been interested in shooting this story as a film as early as 1946, when he was a montage specialist and second-unit director at Warner Bros. and was looking to make a transition to full-fledged director. He tried to get Jack Warner to buy “The Killers” for him, but Warner wasn’t interested and instead Universal-International producer Mark Hellinger bought it.

There was an obvious problem with filming The Killers as a feature, and that was its brevity; Hellinger, Siodmak and writer Anthony Veiller had first to show the Swede actually getting murdered and then invent a backstory to explain why someone had taken out a contract on a seemingly insignificant man and why he hadn’t tried to stop them from killing him. They invented a character named Jim Reardon (Edmond O’Brien), an insurance investigator on the trail of armed robbers who had committed a crime and got away with the loot, thereby costing his company a lot of money in claims. In 1946 Hellinger cast Burt Lancaster, a former circus acrobat who was making his first film, as the Swede and Ava Gardner as the femme fatale who lured this rather dumb would-be boxer into a criminal plot. When Siegel finally got to do a remake at Universal in 1964 – a film originally intended as a made-for-TV movie but ultimately released as a feature – he and Coon changed the plot. The pigeon was Johnny North (John Cassavetes), a former racing driver lured into driving a car as part of a mail-truck robbery after he fell for femme fatale Sheila Farr (Angie Dickinson, quite effective in a cool, efficient way closer to Mary Astor in The Maltese Falcon than Barbara Stanwyck in Double Indemnity or Ann Savage in Detour).

Sheila crashes the pits as North and his business partner, mechanic Earl Sylvester (Claude Akins) are preparing for a big race whose $15,000 prize they need to expand their speed shop. She successfully seduces him and keeps him up all night on the eve of the race, in which he suffers a big crash that destroys his car and leaves him with his eyesight permanently damaged enough that he can’t drive race cars anymore. Using the name “Jerry Riordan,” he signs up to drive in whatever skuzzy sorts of motor sports will have him, including demolition derbies, until Sheila tracks him down and offers him a job driving a fake police car in an elaborate mail-truck robbery Sheila’s main man, Jack Browning (Ronald Reagan, in his final film and his only villain role; according to an imdb.com “Trivia” poster Reagan hated playing a bad guy, but he’s excellent in the part: the 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), has set up 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. \

The robbery is an elaborately planned affair in which one of Browning’s gang members, George Fleming (Robert Phillips), rehearses by driving a car at the 25 mph speed the mail truck will take on a deserted mountain road. Browning plans to set up false detour signs and ambush the truck as it turns onto the side road, but to do that he needs both a driver and a car that can do the run in less than two minutes. Sheila remembers that racing driver she once toyed with as an affair partner – she and Browning have an “arrangement” by which she can have brief affairs as long as she comes back to him in the end (her previous tricks have included a bullfighter and a boxer – the latter may be an ironic reference to the Swede’s occupation in the 1946 film, and the former might be a reference to Ava Gardner’s notorious real-life infatuations with bullfighters) – and figures he’ll be sufficiently down on his luck he’ll be willing to join their criminal conspiracy in exchange for $100,000, one-tenth of the $1 million loot they think the crime will net. Only after the robbery Sheila agrees to double-cross Browning and help North make up with all the money – but it’s a trap; she’s really working with Browning to freeze out their other partners and dispose of North. She shoves him out of her car at high speed and he falls into a gully by the roadside, and while he recovers his will to live is spent and he’s a sitting duck for the two hit people Browning sends to kill him.

The killers are Charlie Strum (Lee Marvin) and his partner Lee (Clu Gulager), and instead of an outside investigator it’s the killers themselves in this version who, fascinated by why their victim put up no resistance and quietly let them kill him, investigate the circumstances of the crime and follow the trail to the man who took out the contract. Eddie Muller’s host commentaries made it seem like this was a new idea for a movie, but it wasn’t; just six years earlier Siegel and writer Sterling Silliphant had made a film called The Lineup, in which Eli Wallach and Robert Keith played a team of hit men who likewise become fascinated with the circumstances of their latest job (finding and hunting down innocent cruise passengers who unknowingly were used as mules by a gang of drug smugglers who secreted their package into their victims’ luggage) and hunt down and ultimately kill the man who hired them. “At no time during the shooting of The Killers was I aware of the similarities with The Lineup,” Siegel said – but later when he re-saw the two films he “got” how many elements, particularly the kinky relationships between the killers, from The Lineup he had used in The Killers.

The Killers was also sandbagged by the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, which occurred while the film was in production; when news of the assassination reached the set Angie Dickinson, a close friend of the Kennedy family, broke down, cried and was unable to work for several days. The assassination also led NBC, which had planned to air The Killers as a movie for television, to cancel it because they thought showing a film with this much violence would be considered tasteless and exploitative after the shootings not only of President Kennedy but his alleged assassin two days later. And the connections became even more macabre when one of the actors in The Killers not only was elected President himself but was also the victim of an assassination attempt supposedly motivated by the killer’s obsession with a movie star. Director Siegel didn’t actually want his film to be called The Killers – he had wanted it to be called Johnny North and had worked out an idea for the opening credit in which North’s alias “Jerry Riordan” would be flashed on screen and then dissolve into the character’s real name – but he said Universal’s executives insisted on The Killers because they thought an association with Ernest Hemingway would make the film seem more “important.”

Under whatever name, The Killers is an excellent thriller, a major stop on Lee Marvin’s quirky rise from out-and-out villain in films like Violent Saturday (1955) and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance 1962) to anti-hero here, to dual role as sinister villain (with a similar character name to his one here, “Tim Straum”) and comic hero in the Western spoof Cat Ballou (1965), to out-and-out hero (albeit flawed and morally ambiguous) in films like The Dirty Dozen and Point Blank. I must admit that part of the appeal for this movie to me is Ronald Reagan’s appearance as the villain; I first saw this film while Reagan was President and it was great fun, as someone who’d never liked either Reagan’s personality or his politics, to see his character hypocritically declaim that “I made it the hard way” when we’ve seen he really made it from an armed robbery was great fun and politically and personally satisfying. But even this long after Reagan’s presidency became history, seeing him blown away by Lee Marvin in a final shoot-out that eliminates all the principals in front of a picture-perfect cookie-cutter suburban home (one of many such fronts maintained on the Universal backlot – when my then-partner and I took the Universal tour in the 1980’s we got to see a whole lot of them, and the tour guide explained that some of them had stickers with a fire design and the legend “HOT!,” indicating that a director on the lot had selected that one for use) remains deeply gratifying. Charles mentioned that there was a British film from the 1980’s called The Hit (I haven’t seen it but its director, Stephen Frears, is a longtime favorite of mine) that is in essence a third version of The Killers, and that one might well be worth seeing some day.