Ernest Hemingway once said that writers selling the screen rights to their work should arrange something like a ransom payment at the California state line: “You throw them your book, they throw you the money, then you jump into your car and drive like hell back the way you came.”
“The Killers” embodies an idea much noted in Hemingway’s fiction, that a real man is one who can stare down his own death with honor and dignity; anyone who can’t is going to spend his entire time on earth either living in fear or living in denial. Nick can’t persuade the boxer to run, so he returns to the lunchroom and tells the counterman what happened. “I can’t stand to think about him waiting in the room and knowing he’s going to get it,” says Nick. “It’s too damned awful.” The counterman replies with one of the greatest closing lines in all of American fiction: “Well, you’d better not think about it.”
Siodmak may have been a master of light and shadow, but Siegel was a master of the smash cut, an editing technique in which one scene jumps violently to the next for dramatic effect. He spent 25 days editing his film, which moves like a bat out of hell, though in contrast to the 1946 version it was shot in color and, consistent with TV production values, so overlit it looks like an episode of Batman. Marvin contributes his usual steely performance, Angie Dickinson is the woman playing the race-car driver for a chump, and Ronald Reagan, in his last screen role, plays her lover, the crime boss behind the robbery. The end result was deemed too violent for television and ultimately released to theaters in 1964—in one scene the hit men pay a visit to the femme fatale, punch her in the face, and hang her out a seventh-story window. Marvin’s character is the true protagonist here, but what kind of Hemingway hero would beat on a woman?
