The Killers. (Universal; 1964) (95 mins.)
It has been reported in a number of Biographies that Ernest Hemingway believed Mark Hellinger's 1946 Production of his short story "The Killers" (Directed by Robert Siodmak) was the finest of all Screen adaptations of his work (a relative status considering the many abysmal movies it contended with for that honor). In "Papa Hemingway", however, a 1967 memoir of the years he spent playing Straight-man to the Great Novelist, A.E. Hotchner has Hemingway falling asleep at a screening of the 1946 film five minutes into the picture! "Never saw him last past the first reel", said Miss Mary (Papa's widow). That Hemingway could fill a theatre with his snoring while a movie that he claimed to admire unfurled before him says more about the Nobel Prizewinner -- ultimately, Hemingway knew as much about Cinema as I know about Deep-Sea Fishing -- than it does the film itself. Siodmak's "The Killers" is a genuinely great film; one of the landmarks of Film-Noir and, for the first fifteen minutes or so, it IS the best Hemingway adaptation there is. In fact, such is the reputation of the '46 film, that when it was "remade" in 1964 by Don Siegel, Puritanical Cineastes leapt to defend the first movie's honor with such haste that through their cries of "cheap", "tawdry" and "lurid" they neglected to note that the Siegel film is nothing less than a subversive Masterpiece.
There is more Mickey Spillane than there is Hemingway in Universal's 1964 "The Killers". It's two protagonists, Charlie and Lee (Lee Marvin and Clu Gulager), are a pair of Professional Hit-men who are at their most eloquent only when they're brutalizing someone needlessly. On a routine assignment, the two are sent to a School for the Blind to whack-out one of the instructors. They discover their prey teaching Automotive Repair to a bunch of Middle-aged Blind guys (think about that one for a second), and, even though he's been tipped-off by a janitor about their arrival, he doesn't budge. Having dispatched their target, it should be Miller Time for our "Heroes", but it isn't. On the train headed for home, Charlie is troubled. Why did their guy just stand there and take it? He knew they were coming; and Charlie'd recognized the sap, too. Sure. Used to be a big Small-Time Race car Driver named Johnny North (John Cassavettes). Bad business. Cracked himself up in a race some years back; end of a great career. Charlie has it on good authority that ol' Johnny got himself mixed up in an Armored Car Heist and (so the story goes) made off with the cash. So what's a guy with seven-figures squirreled away somewhere doing teaching Auto-repair to the Blind? Charlie's mind races and Lee is way ahead of him. If HE doesn't have the dough, somebody does. How hard, Charlie reasons, can it be to find it and take it away from whoever's got it? What follows is a kind of perverse "Citizen Kane" with two thuggish Button-men reconstructing -- in a series of increasingly violent encounters with Johnny's friends, betrayers and enemies -- the downward trajectory of the llfe of a man that they don't give a tinker's damn about. All of this leads them to a Real Estate Developer named Jack Browning (Ronald Reagan, in his last performance), his Wife/Mistress Sheila Farr (Angie Dickinson) and a bloody showdown in the Suburbs. So much for Hemingway.
As Charlie, the hit man approaching retirement, Lee Marvin gives one of his most indelible performances. It's almost a dry run for the semi-psychotic near-ghost he would play three years later in John Boorman's "Point Blank". Like that film (and unlike Siodmak's film), we are invited by the Director to take a kind of vicarious pleasure in the wanton behavior before us. To make it "worse", Charlie and Lee's search for the Armored Car boodle isn't even invested with the almost-Mystical force Robert Aldrich gave Mike Hammer's quest for The Great Whatzit in "Kiss Me Deadly". There's no angle by which anyone in this picture is in anyway redeemed, hence there's nowhere for a traditional moviegoer to turn. Siegel has us where he wants us. Don Siegel was always very good at laying traps for those in the audience who sought some kind of identification with those up there on the screen. Manny Farber once observed that everyone in Siegel's movies is compromised by something. Including the audience, he might well have added. Ultimately, Siegel is saying, we don't care about Johnny North anymore than the men who killed him. If we in the audience must insist on "rooting" for someone, the only choice we are granted are two Murderous thugs. That Siegel forces us to see moral twilight from the point of view of Professional Hitmen is finally what makes "The Killers" unique. No crime drama before it so subverted the audience's desire for Heroes so boldly. No one is redeemed. Papa would've hated it, but he'd have stayed awake.
H. Quinlan (23 November, 1998)
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