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- [00:11]
A
Welcome to out of the Past Investigating Film Noir, where each podcast investigates a particular film in relation to the body of film noir. Today's episode, the Killers.
- [00:46]
B
I did something wrong once. This is Richard Edwards, and I'm here today with my colleague Shannon Kloot. And today we'll be Talking about the 1946 Universal film, the Killers. This, again, is a truly great film noir, directed by the wonderful Robert Siodmak, based on a story by Ernest Hemingway. This is one of those noirs that just gets you from the opening shot and you are just riveted to the screen for 105 electrifying minutes. This film has a wonderful opening shot, a traveling shot of these two unnamed people drawing, driving down a road. That, in my opinion, is the type of shot that is later mimicked by a whole bunch of noirs that pick up on it to give it a movie. Such a great unsettling mood right at the beginning, and you don't know where the action's going to be taking you. The basic plot of this film is interesting to talk about because it's often referred to as the Citizen Kane of noirs. And it's fairly logical to understand why a lot of people refer to the film in those tones, because the film has a flashback structure that is very reminiscent of Citizen Kane and where Citizen Kane had a reporter trying to construct the life events of Charles Foster Kane, the Killers has an insurance agent, an insurance investigator, actually played by Edmund o', Brien, who plays the same type of role as he tries to construct the last few years in the life of the main character, Peter Lund, played by Peter Burt Lancaster. And in fact, Peter Lunn has a lot of different aliases in this film. It's Peter Lunn, it's Mr. Nilsen, it's Ole Anderson, and it's the Swede. And what happens throughout the story is this insurance investigator is trying to piece together what happened with the murder of the Swede, which opens this film. And it starts to tell a really lush story that involves a femme fatale, that involves a caper, and that involves a whole bunch of double crosses, such as the type we see in the Asphalt Jungle, a podcast we had a few weeks ago.
- [03:03]
C
This film is based on Ernest Hemingway's short story the Killers, and it flaunts that literary bloodline. In fact, the full title of the film for its release was Ernest Hemingway's the Killers. And moreover, in the tagline of the film, it says something to the effect of told as only Hemmingway could tell it was. What's interesting about that is Hemmingway's source material was barely 10 pages long. And it goes right up until the moment that Nick Adams, who's sitting at the diner when the killers arrive, runs to warn the Swede that the killers are there to get him. And the Swede essentially says, there's nothing I can do about it. And Nick goes back to the diner in the story and says, this is awful. There's nothing you can do about it. I'm going to get out of town. In the film, it's a very different sort of story, and in fact, it picks up that the initial moments of the film are virtually identical to the story. But the vast majority of the film is imagined by the director. And all of this flashback is a narrative device created in the film. None of that is present in the source story. You talked a little bit about the opening shot, and let's go there. Because the opening moments of this film, I would argue, are the prototype of film noir. And what we see, one of the characteristics of noir that these opening minutes remind us of are its tremendous economy in terms of moving from a general situation and feeling to a fundamental question of human existence. That's precisely what these opening minutes do in using Hemmingway's material. But where they go, then, beyond Hemingway's story is fascinating. The opening shot is indeed of two men. The shot is from the back seat of the car at night, and the men in the front seat are simply two shadows. They're hats in the front seat, black against the headlights and the pavement before them. They're driving too fast, and we have a sense of coming in from behind the action, of being caught up in something beyond our control, something too poorly illuminated and moving too fast for us to understand. And in other words, we, or the viewer is a lot like the Swede, a doomed player coming in behind the action, action moving too fast, action he can't control. The score comes in loud initially, and then when that scene of the two men driving down the road pops in, the score disappears entirely. Then, as that scene cuts, the score comes back with a vengeance. You have the opening credits superimposed on the dimly lit and heavily Shadowed town Brentwood, N.J. a quiet town, but obviously not far enough from urban corruption. And as the credits roll, the two men we saw in the front seat of the car, or so we assume, enter the frame, preceded by the long shadows they cast. Moreover, this film right away flaunts, as I mentioned, its literary bloodlines. The title pops up and it says Ernest Hemingway's the Killers. It Pushes the low key, extremely high contrast lighting to an absolute extreme. In this credit sequence and open scene and in the diner scene that follows immediately upon the credits. And there are numerous out of focus foreground obstructions. And in the diner scene, there are inexplicable shadows cast like a net over the interior. A clock ticks in the background, suggesting that time is running out. And in the presence of these two men, the two killers, everything is out of whack. Visually pushed to an extreme. In all of these senses, it's a prototype noir film. But what's perhaps most interesting about it as noir, and perhaps the most interesting characteristic of noir, is one I've mentioned, and that is that these opening scenes and these noir visual conventions are in the service of a tale and in the service of a fundamental question. They rush us headlong towards the scene of Olie's death. When Olie says, after Nick runs to warn him, the killers are there, I did something wrong once. What we see in this question, it seems to me, or excuse me, in this response to Nick saying, isn't there something you could do? Is the fundamental question of the post war era. It is, in a sense, it is Camus question that he poses in the myth of Sisyphus. The question for the entire post war world, is it worth going on? And if we abandon the struggle, what are the consequences?
- [07:35]
B
I think the tragedy of this film noir is that it's not a tragedy. And what I mean by that is as you start to invoke a kind of philosophical lens through which we should observe the action and understand the meaning of the killers. This is a very bleak world, but it's a very godless world. And you need a very God centric universe for tragedy really to happen. And in this film, more so than a lot of other noirs that I have seen, there seems to be a desire to try and map a larger world system onto what is happening. But this film can't quite move itself in that direction. You get this really strange scene that really only makes sense to me as an idea that relates to the failed systems of world meaning in 1946. Why on the other. I mean, outside of that, why would Charleston in the jailhouse sequence be talking about the stars? And as I'm listening to this convict narrate that he looks to the stars to try and understand something, I start to keep thinking again about the sense that there is no God up there. Or there's another scene where it's the barrier scene of the Burt Lancaster character in which you start to hear religious overtones and you hear talk about the right hand of God, but it doesn't seem like God is present in this film and that something is overriding all of these previous existing systems of meaning. Something that is at the center of the fate, the fatalism, the existential dread, the inability of these characters to escape the reality of one bad decision that seems to be intentionally invoked here by both Ernest Hemingway and Robert Siodmak and also with a little bit of uncredited writing by John Huston. You seem to get in this film the template for these. For the way the film noir protagonist was trapped in 1946.
- [09:50]
C
Well, the film noir protagonist was trapped, as were we all. He is everyman in that sense. And you mentioned the funeral scene and mention of or and talk of the right hand of God, and I hadn't picked up on that. But it's fascinating because of another image that I did pick up on in the Hemmingway story. The only physical detail we have of the Swede, besides him being an ex heavyweight who's too long for his bed, is that he has a mashed up face. Well, in the film, of course, you can't have a protagonist with a mashed up face. He has to be good to look at. But as Anderson is gunned down and the flashbacks begin as he's dying in his bed, he reaches up with his right hand and grasps the bed frame. And what's prominently featured is the scar on his hand, which is a very different sort of scar because it doesn't indicate that he's taken a beating. It indicates that he's given a beating in a sense, that he's gone down fighting and yet he doesn't go down fighting. And this is the fundamental question of existence and of being and of fatalism. And you talked about how the. That it sort of refuses a world with God in which it could be a true tragedy, and replaces it with a new world, godless world, and therefore it never becomes quite a true tragedy. Well, I would say, indeed it hangs in the balance between these two sorts of worlds. And Camus would have it that in fact this is a godless world and it's ultimately our struggle that replaces the need for God. And this is sort of one of the central concepts of the absurd. But it also seems that in this film there is a hint that there is something godlike. And that hint is the killers themselves. At moments when characters make fatal decisions that are dooming them, the moment when they see their action for what it is, and they make a Wrong decision. The killers appear as if out of nowhere. They just simply drop into the frame as if they were fate itself coming to take care of things once man had made the fatal decision.
- [11:52]
B
I agree with that. But I still find myself wondering why one of the lead protagonists again is an insurance company investigator. We've seen this trope before. It's the central trope of double Indemnity. And. And it starts to make me think that there's an interesting collision here when the person who's trying to track down the wrongdoing again is not law enforcement or the cops, but the insurance company investigator, who continues to be able to stay on the case for the recovery of something that seems somewhat inconsequential when you're watching the film the Money. But at the same time, it's the money that causes all of these characters to. To do things in terms of a series of double crosses that ultimately seal the fate of every single major character. What is at the heart of this story, if we start to say that, it really starts to reveal very deeply a type of philosophical attitude that's prevalent in the post war period. And I guess for me, where I have to jump to is this is a film that has one of the great femme fatales of all time, Ava Gardner as Kitty, who is just Kitty Collins, who is just one of the all time great femme fatales and spider ladies in film noir. And from the moment she appears on screen, you know nothing good's gonna happen.
- [13:29]
C
That is true. But I'm going to resist the temptation to discuss the femme fatale just yet, because I think that she is not so much the motor as she is sort of another outcome of this greater force at play. You talked about the interest of the fact that the insurance agent is the one that brings all this to light and is indeed sort of the driving narrative force in the absence of God. Existence, it seems, is now founded on free will. And that is the key question in play here. And where the femme fatale becomes interesting to me is that she confuses people into thinking that something is their free will, when in fact it's hers. And Chesterton sort of indicates this to Ole Anderson, the Swede, when he says, stop listening to those golden harps. She's given him a handkerchief sometime before with golden harps on it, and it's all that he thinks about. And obviously it's speaking to him more clearly than reality. So in that sense, I think the femme fatale is very interesting. But this is a world then founded upon and dependent upon free will. Free will is at the base of the whole existential crisis, rather than God being at the base of existence, that God has been displaced. And it's interesting, then the insurance agent would be an insurance man, because the way that free will is expressed in America in the post World War II period is as free enterprise. And he is, of course, businessman in a sense. He is at once a detective who wants to get at the true lives people lived and someone who wants to get at the money that those lives represent. But he refuses to accept that money, that lives have only financial value. He tries to get at the underpinning truths of those lives. Here I'd like to bring in a little discussion of Camus, because I foregrounded it and of course, to just throw that out. There is a weight that the proportions of which only Sisyphus could roll if I don't give you some framework for it. In 1940, Camus wrote his famous essay, the Myth of Sisyphus. And it was an essay about the absurd, the concept of the absurd in philosophy and what it means in terms of human existence. And let me give you just a couple of citations to help frame that discussion. Essentially, what Camus was interested in was the way that we recognize truths in our lives and how they guide our passions and then have to live with the consequences of recognizing those truths. To put it in Camus own words, or rather the words of his translator, but whether or not one can live with one's passions, whether or not one can accept their law, which is to burn the heart they simultaneously exalt, that is the whole question, and I think it's the fundamental question here. Now, he was articulating all of these interests about the absurd in terms of the fundamental philosophical question. And the essay begins with the words, there is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide. Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy. And it's the fundamental question of this film. And that's why I find it so interesting that what the film examines is all that precedes this moment. It examines the story behind the scar that Olie bears, and it examines the consequences of his decision to not fight any longer. He's recognized what his passion is, and it's clearly for the femme fatale. He has to turn his back on it. He can't take it anymore.
- [17:12]
B
And the notion of suicide is an intriguing one to introduce or, you know, whether or not one should commit suicide, because the killers is, I think, fairly rare within the film noir canon of having an actual suicide attempt scene. Now, there's a lot of implied suicides, you know, killers rushing, you know, Butch and Sundance style into a hailstorm of bullets, for example. But this film has a literal suicide sequence where there's a point at which Ole Anderson decides whether or not his life is actually worth living or not, with the various twists of fate that have bedeviled him so far in the film. And so that's really interesting. And the film, of course, underscores the centrality of the suicide by making it an actual early plot point and is actually pointed to because the insurance investigator begins to really get interested in the story when he realizes that the heir or the person who's going to get the payout of Ole Anderson's life insurance policy is the person who prevented his suicide. And so there is a lot of underscoring and a lot of highlighting of the role of what then propels the character of Olie, played by Burt Lancaster, to continue in the film. The one question that is in addition to the question of suicide is the Sisyphean question, why does the Greek myth of Sisyphus exist? This is the famous story of a character who rolls a rock up to the hill, but never can quite get the rock over the top and it comes bounding back down. And the fate of Sisyphus, which most philosophers read as a very negative existence, is that he is doomed for eternity to roll a rock up the hill without ever completing his task. Camus, of course, writing from an existentialist perspective, has an interesting take on it, which is he says that even though Sisyphus can never quite get the rock over the hill, that is, Sisyphus role is to actually bring the rock up. And while everyone always pays attention to his rolling the rock up the H and how bad a time he has and how the job's never completed, Camus does an interesting narrative thing, which I think Hemingway and Siadmak do as well, which is that he actually pays attention to when Sisyphus goes back down the hill to get started over again. Because, you know, there's something that is interesting when you think about, you almost get to the top, you almost make it, you almost get your way and you don't. Why do you ever get out of bed the next day to try and do it again?
- [19:49]
C
Well, and of course, Ole Anderson doesn't. He finally has had enough. But this is the key part of Camus argument about the absurd is exactly this. The absurd allows us to recognize that in the words of Camus, our solitary effort Our day to day revolt gives proof of the only truth, which is defiance. And so it's at the moment that Sisyphus turns and looks back down at the rock that has crashed to the plains below and decides to take that first step back down to retrieve it. Then in a sense, he becomes greater than his fate. And fate itself as a concept is sort of undone. Ole Anderson doesn't take that step. Finally, he gets to a point where he's too tired and he can't take the step.
- [20:33]
B
That's where it ultimately ends up, that there becomes a point in which Robert Siodmak, who very much would be influenced by European intellectual thought in this period, actually says that for most of the film though, he keeps trying and he doesn't give up right away. And he actually does certain things that are actually counterintuitive, especially out of a type of belief in, say, situational ethics in which some of the early actions of Ole Anderson might not be fully understandable, because you get a really interesting ambivalence early in the film between those actions that are outside of Olie's control and those actions that are within his control. And so, on one hand he no longer can box for reasons that he cannot control, which leads to a very interesting identity crisis, which is framed by one of the great shots in the film of him walking down the quintessential noir alleyway into a fog shrouded future that no one can quite see clearly, versus that he takes the collar for Kitty Collins, which is an action he can control, but that has disastrous consequences.
- [21:51]
C
Well, and there is something that allows us to understand why he could live that dichotomy, why he could be such a contrast and never seem to bring those two different themes together. And that is that he seems to be the only film if I've watched carefully, excuse me, he seems to be the only one in the film, if I've watched carefully, who doesn't really ever see himself. And that's important. Thus he's able to be both a tragic character, flawed and failed, and a success who keeps fighting in a sense.
- [22:20]
B
But do we ever really get any sense of Ole Anderson? Because the thing that I am amazed by, and I just think that this film again should put to rest all questions about innovations in nonlinear storytelling in contemporary cinema, because you have it all here, the great disjointed story that is told in a narrative sequence that is dazzling, is that none of the narrators in this film are reliable at all. I mean, this film is the quintessential modernist Noir because it has the delirious narrator, the unreliable punch drunk narrator, the narrators that have a lot to hide. And even more so than the subjective narrators of Citizen Kane. At the end of this film, I feel the only time I was glancing, the real Ollie Anderson was in the opening 10 minutes. And in a certain sense, to go back to your narrative, your Hemingway narrative comment, in a certain sense, it seems like after the first 10 minutes of both the story time, the Hemingway short story, like after the first 10 pages, Siodmock's riffing on an idea versus, you know, trying to be, you know, elongate the Hemingway story. It seems like there's an essential theme that comes out of the first 10 pages of the story and the 10 pages of the film, which would be the first 10 minutes in which you just set into play what is it about a man in the dark, knowing the killers are coming, who just takes a hailstorm of bullets?
- [24:06]
C
Well, and that's an existentialist theme, but the story I would mention puts the emphasis elsewhere. It really follows Nick Anderson back to the diner and it puts the emphasis on what a terrible knowledge it is to know that somebody's about to die. And it follows Nick saying, I'm going to have to leave town now. Whereas the film clearly goes back and examines what it is that could get him to that point. And that's a different sort of exploration. You mentioned that you sort of asked the question, how do we get a sense of what the Swede is thinking? And it's hard to get that sense. But more importantly, I think the question becomes, does he ever get a sense? And you mentioned that none of these narrators is reliable. But there is a visual clue, I think, in the story that lets the viewer know when it is that their narration, the narration of each of these characters has gone astray. And when they are no longer reliable, that visual clue is a mirror and mirroring. And part of what is interesting about saying that Olie never gets a sense of himself is I don't think he ever looks in the mirror. All the other characters do. At some point in the flashback narration, they look in the mirror. And it's right after they look in the mirror that we start to get the moment of their story that undoes them, that brings them to their death. I could give a couple of examples. There's the one twitchy little man who's in on the heist, and I can never remember his name. Dum. Dum. Nope. Dum. Dum's the tough guy. It's the other one. Not Dum Dum. Blinky. Thank you. So Blinky's in on the heist. He's telling on his deathbed the moment of his fatal decision, in a sense, and he's telling his story is the flashback to the scene where the. Where Big Jim puts together the team to pull off the heist. And at the end of that scene, Dum Dum's fixing his mirror in the tie before he. Or excuse me, his tie in the mirror before he goes out of the room. And it's that seeing of himself and realizing that he's just taken a fatal decision, a decision that could go astray and go awry, that really lets the viewer know that he has done something wrong and that death is going to descend upon him. There's a similar mirror scene for just about everyone in the story, but not for Oli. And it makes me wonder if indeed the Siyodmak Siyadmak is saying that the real tragedy of his character is that he never has a real self awareness that would allow him either to continue the fight or to simply cash it in and commit suicide. And instead he has to take an intermediary action. It's closer to suicide in some ways because he gives up the fight, but it isn't exactly that either. And it's because he lacks self knowledge that he can't be self determinant in his actions. One of the best mirror scenes is right at the end when Kitty Collins agrees to meet the investigator Reardon and they go to the Green Cat restaurant. And one wall of the restaurant is a mirror essentially. And it's right after she's told the lie in flashback of what she did to get Ole Anderson in On the Double Cross, that it then cuts back to present time and you see the killers in the mirror as they come in. Or initially it's a shot in the mirror and then it pans to them coming in and again you see that each time the character makes a fatal mistake, decides that they're going to take a definite action in terms of the double crossings of this film, that they're doomed by that decision. And at that moment the killers descend on them like fate itself. It's a fantastic visual clue throughout the film for I guess it would be a visual metaphor of self awareness in a way. And Olie lacks it. And so he never can become the existentialist hero, he can never be Sisyphus. Deciding to rule, to take that step and roll his rock up the hill once more, he simply struggles with the rock for a long time and finally he grows tired.
- [28:08]
B
That's a tough act to follow up because that's a very powerful reading that I think is also very elegant because I think it does start to indicate why this film still dazzles 60 years later. I think what you bring up there really becomes one of the questions that if I can pull it back even a little farther, is then the other mirror is the film itself, that the film is offering 1946 Society a look at itself. And you know what? Things ain't pretty. All of a sudden. You get in this film maybe one of the truly baroque but at the same time inexplicable endings in film noir. Fine. Everyone still gets it in the end. You know, you got the grand death sequence on the staircase where all of the major plot threads are resolved and for what? So that this insurance agent can go back to his home office and as opposed to Edward G. Robinson's little man while during the war saying, I knew it was you and you broke my heart. And. And there was a lot of at least personal investment. All of the rewards that Edmund o' Brien gets for going through all of these machinations and finding out all the truth about Ole Anderson and the caper and the femme fatale and all the murders and where the money is, is that the policyholders of the insurance company are going to save one tenth of a cent in 19.
- [29:43]
C
When I think it may be Siodnak's most biting commentary, in a sense, because if he seems to say, we all bear this scar together and we all have to decide whether we're going to fight with a broken hand or whether we're going to cash it in, and if the only reward in the end is a financial remuneration, then we're in trouble.
- [30:19]
A
You have been listening to Richard Edwards, assistant Professor of communication at St. Mary's College, and Shannon Kloot, assistant Professor of modern languages at St. Mary's College, we would encourage you to visit our website@outofthepast.libson.com Today we discussed the Killers, released in 1946 by Universal, directed by Robert Siodmok, Written by Anthony Veller, with uncredited writing help by John Huston, based on a story by Ernest Hemingway, cinematography by Woody Briddell, starring Burt Lancaster as Ole Anderson, the Swede, Ava Gardner as Kitty Collins, Sam Levine as Lt. Sam Lubins, Albert Deckard as Big Jim Colfax, and Edmund o' Brien as Jim Reardon. Next podcast, we will discuss a Thanksgiving double feature, the Big Sleep and the Big Lebowski.
- [31:24]
C
Don't look back, baby. Don't ever look back.