double feature: the killers (robert siodmak, 1946) and film fatales #89: the killers (marika beiku, aleksandr gordon, and andrei tarkovsky, 1956)

It used to be a big deal to try and make movies of the works of Ernest Hemingway. I feel like that time is past ... a quick look tells me there hasn't been one since 2001, although I'm sure I'm missing something. Most critics seem to think Hemingway's style doesn't translate well to film. In a story that may be apocryphal, Howard Hawks told Hemingway he could make a movie from the author's worst story ... the result was To Have and Have Not.

"The Killers" was a short story Hemingway wrote in 1927. (You can read it here.) The first movie to be based on the story came out in 1946, with Burt Lancaster in his film debut, and Ava Gardner as the femme fatale. It's an interesting extension of Hemingway's story. The film opens with a scene that closely follows the short story:

Since the movie runs 103 minutes, something has to fill in the remaining time. So we get an insurance investigator (played by Edmond O'Brien, who later spent a couple of years on radio as "Johnny Dollar", also an insurance investigator). His job is to figure out what really happened in a murder for which the company he works for is paying a beneficiary. This allows for several flashbacks that rebuild the story, effectively showing us what happened to Hemingway's characters before the story began. The screenwriters (Anthony Veiller and uncredited John Huston and Richard Brooks) do a good enough job that the characters feel close to the story.

This version of The Killers is now considered a classic example of film noir. The supporting cast includes people like William Conrad (his first credited role) and Virginia Christine, better known to Boomers as Mrs. Olson. The cinematography by Woody Bredell deserves a lot of credit for the film's success.

When I referred in the title of this post to a double-bill of The Killers, most people were probably thinking of the 1964 version, which included Ronald Reagan in his final role (he gets to slap Angie Dickinson). But I was thinking about this one:

It's the first student film of Andrei Tarkovsky, who made the 19-minute short with fellow students Marika Beiku and Aleksandr Gordon. It's fascinating, partly because, like the first scenes in the 1946 version, Tarkovsky et al followed Hemingway's story. In fact, if the English subtitles can be believed, this Russian version is an almost word-for-word translation of Hemingway to the screen. If Tarkovsky films like Andrei Rublev, Solaris, and Stalker are too long for you, The Killers is a brief way to get started on his work.

(Here is a letterboxd list of Film Fatales movies.)