THE KILLERS

I recently watched 'Criss Cross', a film noir directed by Robert Siodmak and starring Burt Lancaster, which I was very underwhelmed by.

Nevertheless I approached this film noir with the same director and star with high hopes, as it is a highly regarded adaptation of an Ernest Hemingway short story.  To add to my interest the story was adapted again, in the 1960s, in a terrific version directed by Don Siegel which I have fond if distant memories of.

When I say adaptation that’s a bit of a stretch.  

Judging from the plot summary on Wikipedia, Hemingway’s story is quite sparse - all that happens is that a couple of hired hit men turn up in a small town, find their victim, and shoot him dead.  The reader is left with the intriguing question of why the victim doesn’t try to escape from his killers or at least plead for his life.

So it would be more accurate to say that this film (like the later one) is inspired by Hemingway’s story in that it attempts to explain the victim’s fatalism as well as who sent the assassins and why.

The film gets off to an excellent start with a very suspenseful scene straight from Hemingway when the two killers enter a diner in search of the victim, known as the "Swede" (played by Lancaster), followed quickly by his murder.

The rest of the film is mainly a set of flashbacks narrated by various acquaintances of the Swede told to an insurance investigator (played by Edmond O’Brien).

The plot turns out to be surprisingly intricate, involving a successful heist immediately followed by a clever double cross, with the Swede as the ultimate victim.

Lancaster (in his film debut) and Gardner dominate every scene they are in but I would have liked their relationship to have been more central since it is the reason for why the Swede ends up a broken man.

And I could certainly have done with less of O'Brien, partly because I found his smug and rather flippant attitude grating and inappropriate but also in terms of the plot it makes no sense for his character to be so involved in the police work to the extent of at times putting himself in situations of extreme jeopardy.