The Killers

I've recently been spending my evenings watching a selection of some really old movies which my lovely wife, Joy, bought for my birthday.

Last night, it was the scorching, tortuous noir thriller, The Killers, which saw the big-screen debut of former circus acrobat, Burt Lancaster, alongside Ava Gardner.

The movie was released seventy years ago, in August 1946, and grabs you from the minute the opening credits finish rolling, when two heavies enter a diner in a backwoods town and announce their intention to murder a gas station attendant called 'the Swede' who will soon be arriving for his regular evening meal. 

However, when their target fails to show, the men go looking for him at his lodgings, and Nick Adams, a workmate of Ole 'Swede' Anderson, who happened to be in the diner, rushes to warn him of the imminent danger. 

As he lays on his bed, fatalistically accepting what is about to happen. 'I did something wrong, once' is all he will offer by way of explanation. 

The Ernest Hemingway short story on which the movie is based ends at this point, but a writing team which included an uncredited John Huston fleshed out this dark tale of foreboding, that uses Citizen Kane-style flashbacks to show how the doomed victim landed himself in his deadly predicament.

The movie collected four Oscar nominations and was a big hit for Universal, showing that crime thrillers could also be artistic triumphs - so long as they were as perfectly constructed and executed as this, of course!

Of all the Ernest Hemingway works that made it to the screen, this was said to be his favorite. He was even said to have entertained friends with private screenings of the film, giving the seal of approval to the screenwriters who had taken up the ball which he left in his 1927 short story.

Burt Lancaster reprises his role as the hapless victim, 'Swede' Anderson, in a dramatized radio play of The Killers on June 5th 1949 broadcast by the Screen Directors' Playhouse. 

Happy listening my friends,