Spoiler Alert: Everyone dies and no line from the Hemingway short story appears. In Don Siegel's 1964 film noir "The Killers," death is inevitable. Like a Shakespeare tragedy, this feeling is almost inherent in the tone.
In the brilliant opening scene, the second shot we see is kids playing "Bang! Bang! You're Dead!" in front of the Sage School for the Blind. Siegel stages a classic introduction for his title-laden protagonists walking into a place where they will never be seen. Shot for television, Siegel keeps the camera moving constantly as if it were a pair of eyes darting around for detail.
When Lee Marvin and Clu Gulager enter the Administration office of the school, the pair seeth with menace from behind their sunglasses. It is no wonder that Quentin Tarantino drew inspiration for John Travolta and Samuel L. Jackson's oddball thug pairing from this dastardly duo.
As they turn over this institution looking for their true prey, Johnny North (John Cassavetes,) Siegel's POV hits all the oblique angles and framed shots that capture the tension of their arrival. However, his best is an overhead shot of Cassavetes in a circle of students with a distributor cap. North needs to be lost in the crowd. Even we as viewers, do not need to easily identify him. Cassavetes plays him from caring to funny to frightfully demanding. And then, he falls like the kids on the front lawn.
While not as stylish as classic films noir, "The Killers" transfers much of the craft to a smaller screen. The editing is fast, but the dialogue is clipped and even faster. Siegel's script puts us in the minds of Marvin and Gulager. We learn about Johnny North through the (forced) recollections of others. In Act One, North's best friend Earl Sylvester (Claude Akins) provides the backstory on how Johnny went from promising racer to washout almost overnight even providing foreshadowing. Between Siegel's romantic capture of Cassavetes and the femme fatale Sheila (Angie Dickinson,) and the cuts back to Akins struggling with the news of the death of his best friend, a duality emerges where both Earl and Sheila possibly subconsciously reveal their shared use of Johnny as a vehicle for their needs.
Siegel, as a director, uses his years of experience to make the outside set pieces at the racetrack look documentary-style real. Before finally ascending to the director's chair (which coincidentally he rarely used because he liked to move around so much,) Siegel cut his teeth in the art of montage (The famous sequence that opens "Casablanca" is just one of his.) These long pans and almost seamless use of stock footage (to lower cost, of course,) give the racing portion true redline energy.
His in-studio work is more refined. In a casting coup (at the direction of Universal's boss Lew Wasserman,) Ronald Reagan plays the heavy here. As Jack Browning, we skillfully meet him gazing upon new lovers Johnny and Sheila from binoculars. In the stands with his capo Mickey (Norman Fell,) given their future roles, any snickering quickly dissipates with their dissatisfied gaze. Fell, future Mr. Roper on "Three's Company" is the storyteller for Act II where the heist is detailed. While it is too easy to pick apart the planning of this crime (there is a cut to a drawn map that is meme-ready,) when Browning takes on Johnny as his getaway car driver, the chemistry alteration becomes everything you need to watch. In his last role before entering politics for good, Reagan cocks his eyebrows and carries himself with a different intensity than he ever showed previously on screen.
Finally, the main criticism between the 1946 Robert Sidomak version (which Siegel originally wanted to direct but was denied by Jack Warner) and this one, trading Ava Gardner for Angie Dickinson. Gardner exudes sexual tension and energy regardless. Entering the Sixties, Dickinson carries herself with newfound freedom (a possible facet fueling the resentment of all those watchful eyes) and the capacity to outrun any man away from the racetrack. When she meets Cassavetes for the first time in Earl's memories, there is both the epic romantic sweep and a visible thrill-seeker need to top the other person. When she is pushed back into her role as a classic gangster moll, her deception often results from how she subjugates herself to Browning. Dickinson is not an archetypal femme fatale here. She gives you the feeling that she is playing a role within the role. When she is there to see Johnny in the hospital, there is a newfound sense of detachment which demonstrates for the first time how plastic she can be. In Dickinson's defense, Gardner could never have accomplished that - she was far too dominant onscreen.
The final act (which we will not spoil) is the reason "The Killers" did not become the first two-hour-long made-for-TV movie. The level of violence (not by today's standards) was enough to make Universal TV pass it over to the film division. As a movie in theatres, it did well enough. In hindsight, "The Killers" along with other true-to-form crime dramas and foreign films may have been what chipped away at the Hays code. Just three years later, at the urging of Lew Wasserman, Jack Valenti left the administration of Lyndon B. Johnson to head a new film commission that would prevent what they called at the time censorship of what movies could show on the silver screen.
