Try as hard as you might, but in my opinion, there’s no genre of film more American than film noir. Yes, I know that its origins lie in German Expressionism and that it was German directors who crafted the earliest and often best examples of that genre, but the imagery, the feel is undeniably American. The streetwise, no nonsense detectives, the women that are as beautiful as they are deadly, the cold and empty streets, the ravenous consumption of cigarettes and whiskey, film noir speaks to a darkly romantic vision of the United States in the 1930s and 40s just as the western genre speaks to the wild, untamed America of the 1890s. Idealized as well as unrealistic of course, but since its creation it has become an indelible part of our country’s mythology. Film noir is as much folklore as Johnny Appleseed, Davey Crockett, and Ted Bundy.
In the world of film noir, you can’t talk about the classics (at least classic enough to be in the Criterion Collection) without mentioning The Killers, directed by German-American director Robert Siodmak. Adapted from a story by Ernest Hemingway (another piece of America’s romanticized vision of itself), the film stars Edmond O’Brien as Jim Rearden, an investigator who works for an Atlantic City Life Insurance company, who stumbles upon case in the town of Brentwood, New Jersey where a man named Pete Lund, otherwise known as the Swede, was murdered in his hotel room. Not too unbelievable even in a small town, but the crime seemed less like a robbery gone wrong and more like a professional hit, and Pete’s life insurance policy paid out to a cleaning woman who only met him a few times, and only by the name of ‘Mr. Nilsson’. Intrigued, Rearden decides to dig deeper into the life of the Swede, and as he digs the long, sad, strange story of the death of Pete Lund, a.k.a Nilsson, a.k.a Ole ‘Swede’ Anderson. His friends, his lovers, his highs and his lows, and directly in the center of it all a young woman named Kitty Collins and her green handkerchief.
Of course, although Edmond O’Brien and the rest of the cast put in good work, the big names this time through are that of Burt Lancaster in his film debut as Ole Anderson and Ava Gardner, who was just then starting to get credited roles, as Kitty Collins. Obviously Burt had the looks to get into movies, but I think what really stands out here is this gloomy aura that seems to surround him. Ole Anderson is a man whose life can be described as a string of failures each greater than the last, and that’s what Lancaster looks like: A man who looks like he had a lot of potential in his younger days, a lot of big dreams, but the moment passed a long time ago and he could never move past it. Young, but paradoxically very weathered. A good first step on what would be a very successful career in film.
Unlike Lancaster’s Ole, the ultimate failure, Ava Gardner’s Kitty Collins is, appropriately enough, untouchable. I don’t know if you can find a more textbook depiction of the femme fatale archetype in film, and this was an era that played fast and loose with them. Kitty is beautiful, obviously, but it’s a cold beauty; A mask that she puts on in order to hide a devious mind. You can see the moments when she slips it on and it’s fascinating to see, wondering just how deep this deception goes. Pretty deep, but I’ll let you see the movie for yourselves to see what form it takes.
If you’ve ever read a work by Hemingway, then you understand what his writing style is like: Terse, active rather than descriptive, full of that prewar listlessness. Similarly, Robert Siodmak is a very unpretentious filmmaker, so when the time came to do a movie of The Killers, Siodmak just straight up took the original story and put it on film. No muss, no fuss, no major alterations in order to fulfill the whims of a focus group, just a book that was adapted into a movie. We’ve got entire franchises based on books that don’t bother trying to keep things accurate to the source material, but here we see a movie from 50 years ago or so managing to do just that. Not so hard if you actually try, now is it?
Siodmak’s adaptation is definitely a no-frills type of noir experience. There are no internal monologues about the city set to Miles Davis style jazz, rain and fog coating the streets like a blanket, that has been assosciated with the genre (and Frank Miller’s try-hard reproduction of it). You’ve just got a mystery to solve and a collection of bad people doing bad things to each other, and that’s it. A bit simplistic on the surface, but in spite of a lack of these more artsy touches Siodmak has made up for in strong characterization and story (although I suppose some of that credit goes to Hemingway). Pretty much every major character that comes on screen, from Rearden and Ole all the way to the nameless Killers are visually distinct, with clearly defined characters, relationships and motivations. There’s no muddled narrative here, no confusion as to why characters are doing what they’re doing (aside from what the mystery requires), it’s all very straightforward, and that’s great. It’s amazing how calming it can be to sit down and watch a movie that isn’t trying to blow your mind or reinvent the wheel , but just wants to tell a story about love and murder. No pressure, no sense that you just didn’t ‘get it’, and so easy to get invested for a while with these people’s lives. What a time.
That’s part of the reason why The Killers is such a great movie, and if you want the rest of it you’ll just have to see it for yourselves. Highly recommended, whether it’s the Halloween season or not. Probably would make for a far easier cosplaying challenge than The Avengers, if we’re being honest.
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