185: The Killers

US   103m   Dir: Robert Siodmak   Key Cast: Burt Lancaster and Ava Gardner

Based on: The Killers by Ernest Hemingway (Short Story)

Ernest Hemingway was usually disgusted by film adaptions of his work but he apparently loved this one. I found this a bit strange because the first twenty minutes are an adaption of Hemingway's story and then the rest of the film from that point was brand new material that had nothing to do with him. 

Two contract killers arrive to kill Pete Lund (Burt Lancaster), a former boxer known as 'the Swede'. Life insurance investigator Jim Reardon (Edmond O'Brien) investigates and uncovers Lund's life story from his boxing career to time in prison and getting entangled with femme fatale Kitty Collins (Ava Gardner). 

I was a bit conflicted about the narrative here. On the one hand, telling the story through flashbacks as Reardon gradually learns information is a clever idea and it takes some neat writing not to end up getting the plot all tangled up. On the other hand, it severely loosens the stakes of the whole story given we know that the main character is dead. Personally, I would have bookended the film with Hemingway's story, revealing Lund's final fate in the closing moments. 

Some critics have lauded this as the best noir film. It certainly captures that atmosphere brilliantly- there's that feeling of a dingy city where just about everyone is crooked in one way or another with the Hemingway-adapted scenes at the start giving this atmosphere the best. 

Ava Gardner is a great femme fatale, it's just a shame we see relatively little of her here. It seems an odd choice to have a great character played by a great actor and then only really use her for a handful of scenes. Burt Lancaster is also great here as a sort of naive and fairly decent man pulled into this dark world. In many ways, the Swede doesn't feel like a noir character; he seems to lack that dark edge to him. Director Robert Siodmak intentionally chose unknown actors so the audience had no perception of them and he found two stars whose careers were launched by this film. 

An enjoyable noir film but I didn't click with this in the way I have with others of the era. The opening scenes are superb and adapt the Hemingway story perfectly but it never quite reaches the same heights again and the film has to bend over backwards to work out how to extend a short story into a full plot.