The Killers (1946) - film review

Late one evening, two strangers arrive in a small New Jersey town.  They stop at a roadside café where they intend to kill a man named Ole Anderson, also known as "the Swede".   When the target fails to turn up, the killers make their way to his boarding house where he lies waiting for them, almost as if he wanted to die.   After Andersen’s death, insurance investigator Jim Reardon is assigned to look into his murder, to establish why he should choose to make a chambermaid he barely knew the beneficiary of his life assurance policy.  By speaking to the people who knew Andersen, Reardon begins to piece together his eventful past life – a life soiled by violence, greed and treachery...

One of the absolute best examples of American film noir, The Killers manages to combine the most alluring cinematographic style with a thoroughly compelling thriller storyline.  The film, one of the few true film noirs from Universal,  marked the screen debut of 32-year-old Burt Lancaster, a one-time circus acrobat who quickly became one of Hollywood’s most iconic movie stars.  It also gave the virtually unknown Ava Gardner her first important screen role, a femme fatale whose seductive beauty masks a heart of coldly vicious feline duplicity.  Production was supervised by Mark Hellinger, who was once a successful journalist before he became an independent film producer, credited with such great films as The Roaring Twenties (1939).

Advertised as Ernest Hemingway’s The Killers, it is in fact only the film’s prologue (leading up to the shocking killing of the Swede) which is Hemingway’s work – taken from his short story The Killers.  The remainder of the film is original, a taut labyrinthine plot that was scripted by none other than John Huston (he was denied a credit because he was then under contract with another studio, Warner Brothers).  In common with many film noir dramas of this period, the film employs an extended flashback narrative structure, similar to that used previously in Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane (1941). 

The Killers was directed by German émigré Robert Siodmak, who is credited with some of the finest classic film noirs – others include The Spiral Staircase (1945), The Dark Mirror (1946) and Criss Cross (1949).  The influence of German expressionism is keenly felt in Siodmak’s inspired use of stark shadows, unusual camera angles and harsh lighting, all of which give the film an unsettling dreamlike feel, whilst heightening the bleakly oppressive mood of pessimism and cynicism which is so quintessentially film noir.    

In 1964, The Killers was remade by Don Siegel, with John Cassavetes, Lee Marvin and Angie Dickinson.  Originally made for television, the film was deemed to be to far too violent for the small screen and was instead given a cinematic release.  Today, this film compares poorly against the 1946 original, which is almost universally acknowledged as one of the great masterpieces of classic American film noir, and also one of the most attention-grabbing and enjoyable examples of its genre.

© James Travers 2008

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