What’s not to like? Directed by Robert Siodmark, an accomplished noir director, adapted from an Ernest Hemingway short story, and starring Burt Lancaster (the Swede) and Ava Gardner (Kitty Collins). Include a score by the masterful Miklós Rózsa and stellar minor performances by Edmond O’Brien (Jim Riordan), Sam Levene (Lt. Sam Lubinsky), Jack Lambert (‘Dum-Dum’ Clarke) and Albert Dekker (‘Big Jim’ Colfax), and The Killers effortlessly hits noir greatness. Siodmark was expert at weaving multiple parts into a whole and the plot is formally complex yet satisfyingly coherent, including several extended flashbacks––one of which ingeniously conveys the central single-shot heist through the diegetic narration of a newspaper report. The celebrated opening sequence alone is worth the ticket, with two gnarly big-city contract killers rudely descending upon a small-town diner, upsetting everything the local population has ever known about common decency. They’ve come to find ‘the Swede’, in hiding after a duplicitous caper-gone-wrong six years previously. The torpedoes execute the Swede within the first 10 minutes, and the questions that drive the remaining narrative are: who and why?
Reardon, a life-insurance investigator, digs deep and patiently, providing the audience with a calm, methodical point-of-identification from which to comprehend the
narrative as it unfolds in a series of outstanding set-pieces. The Swede is a former boxer caught up with professional gangsters after his bust hand ruins his career. He meets and falls immediately and irrevocably for the devastating Kitty Collins, an archetypal femme fatale, and is soon serving three years for her stolen jewellery. When he gets out, the Swede is called to a meeting with ‘Big Jim’ Colfax and his gangster acquaintances, including the pitiless ‘Dum-Dum’ Clarke, played by Jack Lambert, a real specialist in stone-faced movie tough guys. Kitty Collins is there too. Then the robbery. Then what? The plot is all about connecting the Swede’s murder with these gradually disclosed narrative threads.
A long movie by noir standards, the time is used expertly by Siodmark to develop the characters, major and minor, within a digressive, fractured narrative that goes well beyond standard plot exposition. Vince Barnett’s turn as ‘Charleston’ is a model of a minor character done well. Charleston is identified dismissively to Riordan as some ‘old-time hoodlum’ at the Swede’s funeral, and we soon find them in a snooker bar with Charleston, boasting he won’t talk while being plied with yet more booze. This initially cliched set-up promptly gives way to a more emotionally nuanced performance as Charleston describes his close relationship with the Swede and a seamless dissolve throws us from the snooker rooms to the prison room they shared.
In the superbly blocked and edited jail scene, the Swede lies in bed anxiously rubbing a silk scarf given to him by Kitty while Charleston gently ruminates on the stars to allay sleepless nights. This passion, he recounts to the Swede, turned into melancholic study of astronomy in the prison library: “I don’t guess there’s a better place in the whole world for learning about stars…than stir”. Within just a few moments the ‘old drunk’, seemingly easily duped by booze, is transformed into a wise and imaginative soul dreamily reflecting on his own position in a much larger drama: “Jupiter is to the earth like a football is to a marble. That big. And on the other hand, Mars ain’t no bigger than a bee. That small”.
While the gaze of the elder Charleston is external and calm, out towards the starry constellations, the younger Swede’s gaze is relentlessly internal and anxious, fixated on Kitty and her whereabouts. Charleston is getting out of prison earlier than the Swede and Barnett conveys a tremendous sense of compassion when his friend the Swede asks him to check up on Kitty. With the greatest care he tentatively recalls the times he “studied up on girls” when he wasn’t in prison, and carefully intimates that when a girl doesn’t write to a man in prison “that doesn’t mean she’s sick…not necessarily”. Barnett’s skill in imparting this potentially heart-breaking news to the Swede is a remarkable portrayal of empathy and tenderness, firmly establishing his role as a trusted confidant of the Swede.
Back in the snooker hall, Riordan enquires when a particular incident happened to a by-now thoroughly pasted Charleston. His disarming fateful candour brings a wry smile to Riordan’s face and provides another great line: “Mister, when it comes to dates, 1492 is the only one I can remember, I can tell you what was the last time but not where or when or who was present”. Nevertheless, Charleston does recall the ‘what’ when he recounts the meeting that he and the Swede attended with the gangsters (and Kitty) before the payroll job. Barnett reveals another side of Charleston when he calmly and clearly gives his reasons for pulling out of the robbery, and we realise he’s a man of proven experience treated with great respect by his peers. On his way out, glancing over at Kitty, he quietly warns the Swede that he’s about to land himself in trouble, but he knows the Swede is doomed. Outside, he hangs around the door like an old beat dog waiting for a master––a master that will never come home again.
The Killers is rightly famous for providing Burt Lancaster and Ava Gardner with their first major roles on screen, with both fantastic, especially Gardner’s deliciously casual and calculating performance as a femme fatale par excellence. Yet Siodmark’s aptitude with minor actors is renowned and Vince Barnett’s turn as Charleston displays the immense skill he developed making limited screen-time work in hundreds of (often uncredited) bit-part performances as careworn ‘little-men’ (undertakers, janitors, prisoners, bartenders and drunks). Charleston reveals the most of all about the Swede’s ill-fated arc in The Killers and this is largely down to Barnett’s compassionate and complex portrayal of a nominally careworn ‘little-man’, too often delivered as an afterthought to the main action.
Neil Gray.
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