• The Killers

2/8/24 (Thurs)

A 1946 film noir by Robert Siodmak that feels its age. Two gangsters come into a diner announcing their intention, as one does, to kill a regular customer known as the Swede. When he does not show up, they amble over to the gas station across the street where the Swede works. Meanwhile, a customer at the diner runs to the Swede’s room to warn him that he is in danger, but the Swede seems passively resigned to his fate, which is quickly met.

That is apparently where the Hemingway story, the basis for the film, stops. Subsequent events created by the filmmakers show how this situation came about and how the crime is resolved. The story is spun out through a series of flashbacks, not necessarily sequential. The Swede turns out to have been a failed boxer who has become involved in a heist with seasoned gangsters. He is approached by the leader’s girl, who confides in him that he is being cheated. Her information and sex appeal spur him to take the money and run with the intention of escaping with her. He is then double-crossed when she grabs the money for herself and disappears. Events thereafter bounce back and forth from past to present, gradually coming together with yet another double-cross in a truly surprising ending.

The dialogue is flat, the acting is wooden, and the staging is unmemorable. The film is bafflingly called the “Citizen Kane of noir” because of its flashback structure, but the past events in that earlier work were views from varied perspectives that deepened the characterization, whereas they operated in this movie simply as pieces of a narrative puzzle. The structure was intriguing and may have worked with better dialogue. Some of the clues seemed a stretch, as when the inspector sees the corpse’s battered right hand and immediately deduces that the man was a boxer. Also, the motivation for the inspection, tied to an insurance payout, was unconvincing. The plot with its unexpected twists and turns deserves a better rendering.

Burt Lancaster, in his movie debut, has impressive energy and intensity as the Swede, and Sam Levene, just a few years ahead of his turn as lovable gangster Nathan Detroit in Guys and Dolls, was convincing as a police lieutenant and the Swede’s friend. On the other hand, Edmond O’Brien as the main inspector is practically a parody of a 1950s cop, though there’s little he could do given the script. Ava Gardner, tackling her first substantive movie role, was disappointingly bland as the femme fatale, though she certainly looked the part. That said, her performance led to stardom, so what do I know? (I found the movie under a Criterion collection of Ava Gardner films.) Others ranged from the ridiculous, starting with those diner gangsters (who looked like they were ready to break out in “Brush Up Your Shakespeare”), to the competent.

This movie is highly regarded within the noir genre and is registered in the US National Film Registry as a significant part of film history. It just looks archaic to me.