Stars: Burt Lancaster, Ava Gardner, Edmond O'Brien, Albert Dekker, Sam Levene, Vince Barnett
Director: Robert Siodmak
Oscar History: 4 nominations (Best Director, Original Score, Adapted Screenplay, Film Editing)
Snap Judgment Ranking: 4/5 stars
Throughout the Month of June, as a birthday present to myself, we'll be profiling 15 famous film noir movies I've never seen (my favorite film genre). Look at the bottom of this review for some of the other movies we've profiled.
During the classical era of Film Noir (the 1940's and 50's), the genre only enjoyed mild success with Oscar. Just six films (The Letter, The Maltese Falcon, Double Indemnity, Mildred Pierce, Crossfire, and Sunset Boulevard) were cited for the Best Picture, none of them winning (in fact, unless you consider The French Connection to be a noir film, you have to wait until 2007 for a proper noir film to win, even if it's neo-noir). However, a weird thing happens when you expand to Best Director, as the number of films cited nearly doubles. One of these films is The Killers, a film that did surprisingly well in 1946 with Oscar despite starring a newcomer (this is Burt Lancaster's film debut) and an actress that Oscar usually kept at arm's length (Ava Gardner), scoring a quartet of nominations and likely coming close to a Best Picture citation. This trivia is worth remembering as we explore the film, knowing that it's one of the few films we're profiling this month that was genuinely critically-acclaimed at the time of its release, and not just rescued later by cinephiles.
(Spoilers Ahead) The movie centers around the Swede (aka Ole Andreson, aka Pete Lund, aka Burt Lancaster), who is being pursued by two men, hired killers who stand up the diner where the Swede frequently eats, and eventually find him in a hotel room where they shoot him in cold blood, but weirdly the Swede doesn't run from his impending death or struggle, but just lets it happen. We then see insurance investigator Jim Reardon (O'Brien) look into the life of the Swede, feeling that there is something fishy about his death. He tracks down the Swede's identity, and hears the story of his life through a series of interviews, getting closer & closer to the truth, and eventually learning that the Swede once staged a robbery with a criminal "Big Jim" Colfax (Dekker) and successfully pursued Big Jim's girlfriend Kitty Collins (a dynamite moniker, and perhaps one that could only be sported by an Ava Gardner character). The Swede is accused of running off with the money, but this is actually part of a long con by Kitty and Big Jim, who never broke up and are in fact married in domesticity years later, and have essentially put the fix on the Swede, knowing that he must die or the other men in the heist could someday figure out that it was Big Jim who was the double-crosser, not the Swede. The film ends with Big Jim dying in a shootout, seconds before he might help save his wife from the chair with a deathbed confessional.
The movie is based on a short story by Ernest Hemingway, though only the first twenty minutes focuses on Hemingway's original work, and it shows in the sense that the first twenty minutes is arguably the tightest of the picture. This sounds like an insult, as almost none of the characters who matter in the picture (those played by Lancaster, Gardner, O'Brien, and Dekker) are actually a part of the first twenty minutes, but just know that there's a tightness to those first twenty minutes that would be impossible to carry forward through a 100 minute picture, and if that had occurred this would rank as a classic in the vein of Double Indemnity or Laura, rather than a more "forgotten classic."
Still, the rest of the movie is pretty great, even if it never hits the emotional high of those first opening scenes. There are clear parallels to Citizen Kane here, with the Swede being dead for nearly the entire movie (so it's the how not the what that the audience is curious about), but the interesting twist compared to Welles' magnum opus is that Charles Foster Kane is the most famous man in the country, while the Swede is so unknown to even those closest around him that many of them don't know his real name, and in a lot of ways he dies a mystery, a tool to be used or projected upon by those around him.. The only thing we do know is that he is desperately, hopelessly in love with Kitty Collins, enough so that it causes his own demise. Lancaster was making his screen debut with The Killers (which was the cover photo of the book that I mentioned in our series kickoff), and may be giving the best performance from him that I've seen. He's swaggering, sexy, and with a great deal of brute malice in his work that instantly shows the draw of the Swede and also why it's so easy for Kitty to con him. Gardner is good, but doesn't quite sink into the character the way, say, Barbara Stanwyck would have given the same material. Still, Gardner has never been so glamorous and beautiful, and considering how the role is written, she really doesn't need to be much more than an object of desire. Best of all is Vince Barnett as a ginned-out former cellmate of the Swede's. Barnett gets an awesome soliloquy in the middle of the picture about the stars and planets, to the point where if this was in contention for a Best Picture nomination, he was probably in the cards for a Best Supporting Actor nomination. Though he doesn't get the same level of credit as ubiquitous character actors like John Carradine & Ward Bond do, Barnett appeared in hundreds of movies (though IMDB lists less, his obituary has him pegged at 400 movies...even if we just count his IMDB page it's a lengthy CV), so this might have been an appropriate way to honor his work in hindsight.
Previous Films in the Series: The Woman in the Window, The Big Sleep
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