The Killers

I recently saw this at the 2008 Palm Springs Film Noir Festival. Not really Film Noir as it was made after the genre had passed and is in color and features no detectives or private eyes and not even a film as it was originally intended as the very first made-for-television movie. Produced by Universal's Revue Studios it was deemed too violent for television. It of course isn't too violent by today's standards and NBC censors did call for revisions of the movie and since there are only a few questionable scenes It could have been easily done but they left it as was and it didn't make it's May of 1964 television premier. Instead it went to theaters and drive ins in July of 1964. Long-time film and television director Don Siegel directs. His most noted work would still come late in his career with Clint Eastwood in "Coogan's Bluff", "Two Mules for Sister Sara", "The Beguiled", "Dirty Harry" and "Escape From Acatraz" and John Wayne in "The Shootist" and Charles Bronson in "Telefon." This film is as different from the 1946 film as that film is as different from the short story by Earnest Hemingway that both film borrow from. The 1946 film is noted for being Burt Lancaster's first film role and the 1964 film is noted for being Ronald Reagan's last film role. Seasoned hit-man Charlie Storm (Lee Marvin) and young enforcer sidekick Lee (Clu Gulager) have been hired for larger than usual fee to knock off a retired professional race car driver who now teaches shop class in a school for the blind. A series of flashbacks tell the story of Johnny North (John Cassavetes) and his mechanic Earl Sylvester (Claude Akins) and the femme fatale Sheila Farr (Angie Dickenson) who comes into their lives. Sheila is the kept woman of mobster Jack Browning (Ronald Reagan) whose gang includes Mickey Farmer (Norma Fell) and George Flemming (Robert Phillips). Also in the cast are a couple of familiar and wonderful character television actors in small support roles with Kathleen O'Malley and Burt Mustin. Music score by John Williams when he was a contract composer before he made it big the film also features a Henry Mancini song "Too Little Time" with an on screen performance by jazz singer Nancy Wilson. Screenplay adaptation by Gene L. Cook and director Siegel this deserves a look especially from it's great cast and historical perspective. It keeps flowing pretty smoothly and never bogs down. Cassavetes seems uncomfortable in the role and their really isn't much on screen chemistry between he and Dickenson but Dickenson is delicious as the femme fatale and Marvin and Gulager, especially Gulager's smooth wit, are great as the hit team. Angie Dickenson was on hand at the screening for an audience Q&A following the film and it was great to see her. I liked this and would give this an 7.5 out of 10.

One of Hollywood's greater contract directors, Donald Siegel, brought Hemmingway's short story to TV, but NBC turned it down because, for 1964, it was too damn brutal. Although it pales in comparison to the 1946 original, this cheap (thanks to the gawd-awful production values of Universal in the sixties) remake holds it own.

When button-men Lee Marvin and Clu Gulager show up at a school for the blind to empty their silenced revolvers into former race-car driver John Cassavetes, they don't expect him to just stand there and take it. Marvin, exuding clean-smelling and lean menace and Gulager, a carrot-juice swilling sociopath travel cross-country in their search for Cassavetes' story. They find that the race driver, washed up after a near-fatal crash gains employment with mobster Ronald Reagan (I can just see Ronnie giving Gorbachev the same look at the 1986 summit that he gives Cassavetes when the driver challenges the mobster for control of Reagan's girl, Angie Dickinson). After lots of double-crosses and a fair amount of "why did he or she do that?," Marvin comes calling at Reagan's door.

Lee Marvin was excellent when portraying a killing machine and he holds the movie together. He and Gulager are there to punctuate the sometimes good and sometimes not-so-good flashbacks and they are suave and eerily debonair grim reapers. If anything, they're more interesting than the flashbacks; all good action flicks need good bad guys and Reagan looks too bored with the whole thing. Is it possible that, after seeing him so successful and upbeat for eight years in the White House, a grim and petty Reagan seems anachronistic? Yet, it really is Marvin who makes this movie rise above the cheap production values, the cheesy matte photography, and the canned John(ny) Williams score.

Marvin was about to begin a string of successes that would last into the early seventies. That voice is so distinctive! When he talked, he sounded, as another reviewer once said, "like a dinosaur growling." He is so evil and you can't stop liking him. Although Marvin and Robert DeNiro are completely different actors, they both have the same effect on me when they inhabit the screen--I stop doing everything else and just watch them. Pure charisma. When asked by David Letterman why he was so popular, Lee Marvin simply grinned and, with his index finger extended, growled, "Ratatatat!" Don Siegel would go on to make other tough movies; his style was clean, tough, and with just enough style to leave the audience with a satisfied taste in it's mouth. Under his direction, Clint Eastwood would establish himself as a superstar. One can only imagine how far Marvin would have gotten under the command of the button-man director!

I haven't seen Robert Siodmark's 1946 original, but since it's generally accepted to be better than this version; I sure want to see it! Second best, this may be, but that's certainly not to say that this isn't an excellent flick. Lee Marvin steps into the role of a hit-man brilliantly, and his no-nonsense performance really makes the film. He is joined by Clu Gulager as his fellow hit-man and partner into an investigation that comes about through Marvin as he wonders why he was paid so much to kill a former race car driver, who also didn't run away when he had the chance. What follows is a tour de force of gangster pulp fiction as the two hit men pay little visits to the various players in the plot behind the assassination they were contracted to commit. The style of the movie is delicious, and watching these two men stroll around coolly in their expensive suits while interrogating their various victims is a treat indeed. Several modern films, Pulp Fiction most obviously, have taken a lot of influence from this flick and it's always good to know where that influence came from.

The central pairing of Lee Marvin and Clu Gulager is what made the film for me. The way that they populate their scenes is excellent, with one of them doing the talking and the other fiddling around in the background. The way that this is orchestrated gives away a very understated coolness, which the film is always keen to capitalise on. The pair's chemistry is more to do with the style and how they look together than how they interact with each other; and that is right on cue. The Killers also benefits from an excellent support cast, which includes the likes of Ronald Reagan, Angie Dickinson and John Cassavetes. This film can't be considered noir because it's in colour, but this is about as close as you can get to the style without actually being a part of it. The film that it was based on was film noir, and this remake has managed to retain the foundations, even if it has lost the dark picture. On the whole, The Killers is an excellent picture and while what some people say about it being second to the original may be withstanding; I say this is an excellent flick in it's own right.

Under the title Ernest Hemingway's The Killers, Don Siegel's 1964 movie shows no more fidelity to the short story from which it takes its name and a fraction of its plot than Robert Siodmak's 1946 masterpiece, The Killers. And though it borrowed from the earlier movie its flashback structure (substantially simplified) and much of the backstory written for it, it's not quite a remake, either: the changes strike too deep.

A pair of contract hit-men track down a victim who seems ready, almost eager, to die. The killers this time around are Lee Marvin and Clu Gallagher, whose cozy arrangements suggest something of Fante and Mingo in The Big Combo. The first big shift from its 1946 predecessor is that Marvin's curiosity, not an insurance investigator's, sets the plot in motion, by his delving into the target's past and the whereabouts of a million dollars from a heist years before (in fact, he becomes the principal character). The second is a racheted-up level of violence: The movie opens with the pair tracking down their prey in a school for the blind, whose residents they ruthlessly terrorize during their hunt. And the level stays high.

John Cassavettes plays the victim, a former race-car driver fallen on hard times since a bad smash-up. Through the reminiscences of old buddy Claude Akins and past associate Norman Fell, we relive his racing career to an extent that stretches of the movie look like outtakes from Grand Prix. In those glory days he crossed tracks with the femme fatale of the piece, Angie Dickinson (in her rat-pack, late-Camelot salad days herself). After his car crash and their break-up, she lures him off the primrose path – to serve as driver during a mail-truck robbery.

But Dickinson's heart belongs to daddy – daddy in this instance being Ronald Reagan as a heavy. This marks his last film role. For a while it was chic to dismiss Reagan as a lousy actor, but he was always compentent enough. The puzzle is that the undeniable charisma that helped garner him the governorship of California and the presidency of the United States never came through on the screen; he couldn't carry a picture. He has a nasty moment slapping Dickinson silly when her attention strays to Cassavettes, but Marvin redeems his top billing by stealing the movie.

Ernest Hemingway's The Killers remains a good example of how the complexities and suggestiveness of the noir cycle were to metamorphose into a faster, flatter, more literal and brutal style of moviemaking starting in the late 1950s. Don Siegel was in the forefront of this change, starting in period noirs (The Verdict) but reaching his apogee, so to speak, in Dirty Harry. He delivers the goods, pronto, in a plain brown wrapper.

Director Don Siegel's "The Killers" is very loosely based on the Hemingway short story with few similarities. Two killers (Lee Marvin and Clu Gulager)complete an easy hit-for-hire but wonder why their victim, although warned in advance, didn't run away from them. After piecing together some information, they realize that the $25,000 they got for the hit is a drop in the bucket compared to a missing million dollar stash of stolen loot. After questioning a few "witnesses" they discover that the man they killed had been double-crossed and had lost his will to live. Throw in Angie Dickinson as a two-timing temptress and Ronald Reagan (of all people) as a nasty double-dealing henchman and you've got one violent movie without any good guys in sight. Marvin and Gulager are excellent as the hit men and John Cassavettes is also great as their hapless and resigned victim. Reagan, who supposedly regretted his turn here as a villian, is surprising effective. It was the only time in his career he played a "bad guy". Angie Dickinson, of course, is no mere window-dressing. She gives everyone a run for their money as the best-looking devious dame on the planet. "The Killers", which was originally made for TV, but released in theatres instead due to its violent subject matter, is a one-of-a-kind early 60's film noir. It may have little to do with Hemingway's story, but I'm sure "Papa" would have enjoyed it anyway.