NFR Project: 'The Killers' (1946)

 

NFR Project: “The Killers”

Dir: Robert Siodmak

Scr: Anthony Veiller

Pho: Woody Bredell

Ed: Arthur Hilton

Premiere: Aug. 30, 1946

103 min.

Who’s a better film noir director than Robert Siodmak (1900-1973) ? No one.

The premier practitioner of American noir was a German refugee. After film work in his native land, the Jewish Siodmak escaped first to Paris and then Hollywood. (His brother Curt invented the Wolf Man, and wrote Donovan’s Brain and I Walked With A Zombie.)

Siodmak was a jack of all trades, but beginning with Phantom Lady in 1944, he began to specialize in noirs, using deep shadows, harsh backlighting, and other effects in light of the German Expressionist cinema of the 1920s. This approach turned Siodmak’s landscapes into perilous and unsettling interiors and night shots, a twilight world in which morals are frayed at the edges. Siodmak directed at least nine noir films in his Hollywood days, setting standards for the genre.

The Killers is his masterpiece, sometimes and somewhat jokingly referred to as “the Citizen Kane of noir films,” in that it is primarily composed of flashbacks. It’s a free adaptation of a 1927 short story by Ernest Hemingway.  It’s the first film of a 33-year-old Burt Lancaster, and the first starring role for 24-year-old Ava Gardner.

Lancaster is the Swede, the mild-mannered garage mechanic who’s the victim when two killers (Charles McGraw and William Conrad, perfect) come to his small town to blow him away. “I did something wrong . . . once,” he says when his coworker Nick tries to warn him that the bad guys are coming. Swede does nothing. The men enter, fill him with lead, leave.

An insurance investigator, Riordan (Edmond O’Brien), is tasked with finding the beneficiary for Swede’s life insurance policy. Riordan finds that the Swede is really Ole Anderson, a former boxer turned petty crook. Working his way through the chain of witnesses, he reconstructs Swede’s downfall via flashback. It turns out that the Swede was part of a big payroll heist, $250,000 that he loses, snatches back, and loses again in short order.

Riordan rubs the criminal kingpin behind it all the wrong way, so he becomes a target for murder as well. The film is taut, fast-moving – Riordan races to solve the mystery before the dark forces overtake him.

Meanwhile, we get a look at the tragic Swede, played sensitively by Lancaster. He’s a big lummox, just the kind of guy to get in over his head due to a dame. Gardner plays a classic femme fatale, duplicitous yet smashingly beautiful. There are great supporting actors such as Jeff Corey as “Blinky” Franklin and Sam Levene as Lt. Lubinsky.

Justice is served, but Swede remains the classic noir protagonist – ill-fated, morally flawed, none too bright, easily swayed by a woman. It was a formula as close to classic tragedy as American film would get until the mythic Westerns of Anthony Mann (1950-1958).

The NFR is one writer’s attempt to review all the films listed in the National Film Registry in chronological order. Next time: Let There Be Light.