The Killers (1946): Embellishing Hemingway For A Noir Classic

 In Ernest Hemingway’s short story, The Killers (written in 1927), two tough guys walk into a diner in a small noplace town, make a little tough guy chit chat, and ask about a fellow called the Swede. They know the Swede eats at this little lunch counter most nights. They let on that they are there to kill him. After awhile, when the Swede doesn’t show, they leave. The sole customer at the time is a young man named Nick Adams. (Hemingway’s alter ego in several stories, Adams’ role here is pretty nondescript.) Nick rushes out to warn the Swede. He is lying in his room at Hirsch’s rooming house a few blocks away, fully dressed. The Swede is not surprised to hear that two fellas are gunning for him. He seems resigned to his fate. He wants no help. “There ain’t anything to do now,” he says.  “I got in wrong,” he adds. “There ain’t anything to do.” So Nick leaves.

If Hemingway had an explanation in mind, regarding what exactly the Swede had done to deserve this fate, Hemingway wasn’t telling. He crafted this existential, yet very compelling scenario and left it there. Edward Hopper read the story in Scribner’s Magazine and loved it. It is the inspiration for perhaps his most iconic painting, The Nighthawks.

The Hemingway story also inspired the 1946 movie under review, officially titled “Ernest Hemingway’s The Killers.”  In fact, the short story takes up the first ten minutes of this ninety-five minute picture, and is depicted quite faithfully.  The hit men, as played by stoney Charles McGraw and nonchalant William Conrad (Cannon [1971-76]) are perfectly amoral, menacing and thugish. The conversation in this segment is lifted verbatim from Hemingway and is, not surprisingly, the best dialogue in the movie. 

Hemingway’s choice not to offer any backstory didn’t stop director Robert Siodmak (The File On Thelma Jordan [1950]) and screenwriter Anthony Veiller (Night of the Iguana [1964]) – with a little uncredited help from John Huston - from devising a gripping, noirish tale to explain how the Swede wound up a victim of contract killers. First off, not satisfied to leave us hanging after Nick’s departure, the camera returns to the rooming house and confirms (tastefully) that the killers do show up and ice the Swede. The filmmakers then purloin bits and tropes from scores of earlier underworld movies and wind up with a surprisingly good movie to go along with Hemingway’s tale.

An insurance investigator, Jim Reardon (Edmond O’Brien [White Heat [1949])), shows up immediately, becomes intrigued with the case, and starts asking questions, the answers to which are shown as flashbacks a la Citizen Kane (1941).  That an insurance guy would go after this story makes much less sense in this situation than it did a couple years earlier in Double Indemnity (1944), but if the idea is not credible, O’Brien certainly is. He inhabits this role like it was tailor made for him. Reardon is smart, intrepid, and wryly persistent. Learning that the Swede, whose real name was Ole Anderson, had done time in the state pen, Reardon looks up the cop who put him there, Lt. Sam Lubinsky (a wonderful Sam Levene). Turns out Lubinski and Anderson grew up together; Lubinski became a cop, Anderson a palooka prizefighter and then a crook.

Anderson is played by Burt Lancaster (From Here To Eternity [1953]) in his first starring role, one that made him a star.  He is tall, dark, handsome, smoldering and very soon smitten – more like moonstruck or transfixed - by a beautiful woman, who happens to be the mob boss’s girl: Kitty Collins. The boss is Big Jim Colfax (Albert Dekker). Kitty is played by Ava Gardner (The Barefoot Contessa [1954]) in her first featured role. She too became a star off of her performance (and good looks) here. When she makes her first appearance, as a chanteuse at a party, the Swede could not take his eyes off her, and neither will you, even though she can’t sing worth a damn. Gardner was, for a long time, considered by many to be the most beautiful movie star in Hollywood history (in a pretty crowded field). Anyway, Kitty gets cozy with Anderson for awhile, but when he takes the rap for her on a jewelry caper and goes up river, she goes back to Colfax. When the Swede eventually gets out, they meet again. Kitty is not just the love interest, she’s the femme fatale, and in some ways the lynchpin of the whole story.

There’s a heist with a big payoff, one of those “perfect” jobs where nothing can go wrong, but something does. There’s a blackmail scheme, a big shoot out, all sorts of fun stuff. Ultimately, The Killers becomes the tale of a double cross – or maybe a triple cross. The pacing keeps us interested, the black and white cinematography is, by turns, moody and dramatic, sometimes impressionistic and other times starkly real. The ending is terrific and I, for one, didn’t see it coming.

The trouble with The Killers is that it’s hard to find. It’s not currently available on any of the usual streaming services, although a somewhat murky, but serviceable print is available (free) on YouTube.**   It is available from NetflixDVD. The Criterion Collection has put out a 2-disk set that includes this movie as well as the 1964 remake, which may be available to rent at a good dvd shop, if you can find one.  If you like great film noir, it’s worth looking for.

Incidentally, you can probably skip Don Siegel’s 1964 remake of the same title. It’s largely a hashjob: the story is changed – a lot, more brutal, and less credible. The Swede is no more – the character is now called Johnny North (John Cassavetes), a race car driver.    Kitty becomes Sheila (Angie Dickenson), and her role is reduced.  There’s no insurance guy; instead the assassins themselves decide to investigate, hoping to cash in.  The acting is pretty uneven despite a good cast. In addition to Cassavetes and Dickenson, there’s Lee Marvin and Clu Galagher as the killers, Ronald Reagan (in his last movie role before running for California governor) as the big cheese bad guy, and Norman Fell as his sidekick.  Cassavetes and Marvin are actually pretty good in this, but otherwise we get mostly cardboard.  The main interest in the 1964 version of The Killers is to contrast it with its far superior ancestor.

**Beware of any movie site on YouTube that requires you to register or pay. Check such places first on ScamAdvisor.com.