Skip to main content

Review: The Killers (1946)



Written in the 1920s, when mobsters were a constant scourge to America’s society, “The Killers,” though containing no more than 3,000 words, reflects palpably the spine-chilling horror and relentless hostility that accompany such organised crime. The novella bears testament to Ernest Hemingway’s unparalleled genius, in that the author’s penchant for laconicness creates the most timeless of beauty. It is a bracing thriller that comprises barely any descriptions of the incident but short, impetuous, unnervingly comical conversations between the characters. Hemingway’s purposely-designed ending- the built-up towards the final climax is perfectly dismantled by a wanting of dénouement- is the prime example of a great suspense.

In a 1947 film directed by Robert Siodmak, Hemingway’s story becomes a point of departure whereon screenwriter Anthony Veiller appropriates the authorial voice and fills the audience in of the reason an ex-boxer, an outstanding debut from Burt Lancaster, is targeted by two hit-men, played with due eeriness by Charles McGraw and William Conrad. Hemingway’s creation is still preserved in its entirety in the first 20 minutes of the film, with the actors carrying out the hard-edgedness of the original with much brilliance and adroitness.

The remainder revolves around the unravelling of the mystery. Edmond O’ Brien is fitting for the role of a calm and calculated life insurance investigator, who searches high and low in his dogged pursuit of solving the puzzle. Through flashback the ex-boxer is revealed as a ruined man doomed the moment he claps eyes on a femme fatale named Kitty Collins, the first breakout role for Ava Gardner. He takes to bad courses, joins a mob, confronts the mobsters and flees with the booty when he realises he is double-crossed; only to be double-crossed again later by, unsurprisingly, his beloved Kitty. It is slightly disappointing of how Veiller recklessly bastardised Hemingway’s masterpiece by conceiving the backstory of the ex-boxer with stock materials that were particularly favoured by 1940s’ film noir.

Hackneyed though it seems the picture still has its sterling moments, and is effusively praised by Hemingway. Indebting to Siodmak’s dexterity, the film retains much of the suspenseful elements that Hemingway would’ve approved of if he were having in mind a more detailed version of the novella. The mystery is pared down layer by layer, which increases greatly the entertainment and excitement that are otherwise worn off if the tempo is unwisely hastened. Exceptional performance by the leading cast- Lancaster is smouldering, wistful, tragic-heroic; Gardner never disappoints with her seamless shifting between the sultry and the duplicitous- also helps exalting the status of the film to that of the classic. The score is composed by the prolific Miklos Rozsa.


Those who maintain the conviction of always giving the adaptations a wide berth are still encouraged to experience the first 20 minutes of the film after they read the novella. The thrilling sensation of seeing the immortalised words of Hemingway being so gruffly bandied about is simply ineffable. Avid readers of Hemingway are bound to be delighted.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Paintings in Proust: Vesuvius Erupting by J.M.W. Turner

In Proust’s Swann’s Way , the narrator’s grandmother is described as one who inculcates in her grandson a reverence for the “elevated ideals.” Infinitely disdainful of the mechanical nature of replica, when shown photograph of the magnificent Mount Vesuvius his grandmother dismisses it with a lofty query as of whether other more acknowledged artists did paintings of the volcano in the first place. She is having in mind the great J.M.W. Turner, whose depiction of Vesuvius in flame displays, in her view, “a stage higher in the scale of art.” The enduring fascination with volcanoes was especially evident in the 19 th century, which saw an irregularly high frequency of Vesuvius eruptions that, at the time, alarmed many of the imminent cataclysm that a thousand of years before destroyed the city of Pompeii. Turner, according to a number of sources, may not be amongst the first-hand witnesses of those eruptions, but badgered his geologist friends, John MacCulloch and Charles Stoke...
2 comments
Read more

Felix Vallotton

"He was there or not there: not there if I didn't see him."- Henry James, The Turn of the Screw One sees immediately from Felix Vallotton’s paintings that he must had been a gifted raconteur. The painter was possessed of the natural aptitude of unfolding and withholding the narrative flow at the most propitious timing. Mysteriousness emerges. The viewers are bound to be tantalised. Whilst most of Vallotton’s paintings are about the quotidian, the domestic, beneath them their pent-up energy seethes and trembles, threatening to explode at any moment. It isn’t just the quotidian that he depicted, but the interior dramas. Any reader of Ibsen’s or Strindberg’s plays will know that interior drama can be the most frenetic. A woman leans towards a man, her hand entwines his body in show of sensuousness. She whispers into his ears something that the viewers are forbidden the right to privy to. But one has the eye to deduce, from the slightly wrinkled of the man’s nose and t...
Post a Comment
Read more

Review: La Jetee (1962)

In Matter and Memory , French philosopher Henri Bergson posits an implausible notion – the pure present: “The pure present is an ungraspable advance of the past devouring the future. In truth, all sensation is already memory.” Since time is a movement , an unending progression, there is not a definite point as that of a present moment, Bergson seems to suggest, but an admixture of the past and the future, the has-beens rapidly encroaching on, and eventually subsuming, the what-ifs. In a sense, and as absurd as this may sound, the present is ever elusive to our consciousness: what we perceive of the now , at the very moment in which it is being registered, is already relegated to the realm of the past. The past seems, therefore, the only reality we have really experienced; the reality that we are predestined to never possess. Chris Marker’s La Jetee (1962) envisages a future in which man finally discovers the means of triumphing over time’s irrevocable logic: experiments are ...
Post a Comment
Read more