“The Killers” (Ernest Hemingway, 1927)
The Killers (dir. Robert Siodmak, 1946)
The Killers (dir. Andrei Tarkovsky, Marika Beiku, and Aleksandr Gordon, 1956)
The Killers (dir. Don Siegel, 1964)
I’ve never been an especially big fan of Hemingway. I like The Sun Also Rises. Elements of A Farewell to Arms and For Whom the Bell Tolls work. A Moveable Feast was disappointing, while The Old Man and the Sea was very unappealing. I’m less familiar with the short stories, although most of those that I have read have been worth it. “Hills Like White Elephants” and “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place” is particular are well-written examples of that particular school of impressionistic short story that take after Chekhov and Joyce.
Before now, though, I had never read one of his Nick Adams stories. I only knew that they shared the one character, a semi-autobiographical take on Hemingway himself, and that they chart his moral and personal development in a sort of diffuse bildungsroman. Reading a biography of Hemingway always seemed like a better use of my time instead.
But I did sit down and read one of the stories, “The Killers,” and it is resoundingly okay. Teenage Nick Adams is in a Midwestern diner owned by a man named George one night. Two men, the titular killers, enter the establishment and, after discussing the limited culinary options available, tie up Nick and the diner’s cook. They are hired to murder a boxer named Ole Anderson, who they expect to be there. He is not and never arrives. The hostages are let loose. George sends Nick to Anderson’s residence to warn him of the danger he faces, but Anderson is resigned to his fate. Nick presumably learns something about mortality and fatalism.
Like I said, it’s fine. Critics have pointed out that the story is reminiscent of pulp fiction of the period, but elevated through Hemingway’s characteristic minimalism. The story is largely plain spoken dialogue and nothing much happens on the surface, but beneath it, you have a story about stoicism in the face of death and the effect that Anderson’s decision to die rather than seek escape has on Adams’s growth as a human being. Standard fare, you know?
You will find the entirety of Hemingway’s “The Killers” minus a few racial slurs reproduced in the 1946 film of the same name directed by German emigre Robert Siodmak, but that only takes up about twenty minutes of the runtime. The rest is devoted to the backstory of Anderson (Burt Lancaster in his first lead performance) as revealed in interviews of his associates conducted by investigator Jim Reardon (Edmund O’Brien). The screenplay by Richard Brooks, Anthony Veiller, and John Huston is structured very much like Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane, because if you’re going to steal, you steal from the best.
Anderson is a former boxer. An injury to his hand forces him out of the sport and he lacks the brains for much else. He takes to crime, becoming involved with gangster “Big Jim” Colfax and the inevitable femme fatale Kitty Collins (Ava Gardner) before dumb luck lands Anderson in prison for three years. Upon release, he takes up again with Jim and Kitty, who have become a couple in the interim period. Along with men he met in prison, Anderson takes part in a robbery that ends in betrayal. The rest of the film follows the aftermath of this double cross and provides a resolution to Hemingway’s story in which justice ultimately prevails according to the Hays Code standards.
The Killers is as well-made as it is well-regarded. It made stars out of Lancaster and Gardner and was another hit for Siodmak. Even Hemingway apparently liked it, which is a little surprising given that the film more or less violates every dictum of his artistic philosophy and doesn’t even give an acting credit for Phil Brown as Nick Adams. I would never call it my favorite noir, but you could certainly do much worse than this.
A second, presumably unauthorized adaptation was produced as a short film by students at Moscow’s State Institute of Cinematography in 1956 and is only known to audiences now because of the involvement of future auteur Andrei Tarkovsky. It’s technically even more faithful to Hemingway’s story than the 1946 as it uses the slurs that Siodmak and company left out. They are also clearly loan words in Russian, which is almost as distracting as the very obvious use of blackface for the diner’s cook. It’s impressive for a student film and you can perhaps infer Tarkovsky’s talent from it. That or you wish his co-directors had done more.
A third version was directed by Don Siegel in 1964. Billing itself as Ernest Hemingway’s The Killers in much the same manner that Bram Stoker’s Dracula would in the 1990s, it is a very loose reworking of the 1946 adaptation, retaining its structure, but changing much else. An off-kilter opening shows our two killers, portrayed by Lee Marvin and Clu Culager, infiltrating a school for the blind. They murder their unresisting target, a former race car driver and thief named Johnny North (John Cassavetes). Baffled by North’s reaction to his own death and the possibility of finding the missing money from the robbery they know North was involved with, the two hitmen seek to find answers to North’s past.
Now, the reason why Don Siegel’s The Killers has any lingering presence in the cultural consciousness is because of the presence of one actor in his final role, uncharacteristically cast as an antagonist, before going into full time villainy as the governor of California and president of the United States. Really, it’s one scene, which you might have already seen without knowing the context. Go type ‘Ronald Reagan + The Killers’ into a search engine and you’ll find it. Reagan’s character, a criminal mastermind in the vein of the “Big Jim” Colfax in the earlier film, viciously slaps Angie Dickinson’s Sheila Farr, the fickle lover to Cassavetes, who proceeds to punch the man who would later give us such gifts as the War on Drugs and supply side economics.
It would be a somewhat memorable scene in a mostly lifeless film had it not featured three such notable actors. As it is, it’s a stunning piece of cinema. I’m also convinced that Michael Showalter’s portrayal of Reagan in Wet Hot American Summer: First Day of Camp and his extended beating of a White House lackey played by Judah Friedlander comes almost entirely from this film. You don’t need to watch this version of The Killers, but those thirty seconds beckon like nothing else in it.
oliveresque 