UnowPriceless hyped garbage

Taha Avalos The best films of this genre always show a path and provide a takeaway for being a better person.

Ginger Very good movie overall, highly recommended. Most of the negative reviews don't have any merit and are all pollitically based. Give this movie a chance at least, and it might give you a different perspective.

Caryl It is a whirlwind of delight --- attractive actors, stunning couture, spectacular sets and outrageous parties. It's a feast for the eyes. But what really makes this dramedy work is the acting.

JohnHowardReid Copyright 21 August 1946 by Universal Pictures Co., Inc. New York opening at the Winter Garden: 28 August 1946. U.S. release: 30 August 1946. U.K. release: 17 January 1947. Australian release: 12 December 1946. 9,269 feet. 103 minutes. SYNOPSIS: A pair of hired killers, Max and Al, enter a small town and systematically track down their intended target, Swede. They find him silently waiting in a darkened room; and he offers no resistance. The killers leave, satisfied that they performed their job well. Riordan, an insurance investigator who learns of the murder's circumstances while following up a routine claim for a very minor amount of money, becomes obsessed with finding out why Swede would sit back and allow two men to murder him.NOTES: Film debuts of Burt Lancaster and William Conrad. Nominated for Academy Award for Best Directing, Robert Siodmak, won by William Wyler for The Best Years of Our Lives. Also for Best Screenplay - Veiller alone was nominated - won by Robert E. Sherwood for The Best Years of Our Lives. Also for Film Editing, won by Daniel Mandell for The Best Years of Our Lives. Also music scoring of a Drama or Comedy, won by Hugo Friedhofer for - you guessed it - The Best Years of Our Lives. Incredibly, Woody Bredell's brilliant cinematography was not nominated. Re-made in 1964, see Film Index 8. Number 9 on the National Board of Review's Ten Best list. COMMENT: The movie starts brilliantly - just like Hemingway's short story - with a couple of thug assassins hitting a small town and killing a garage worker who fatalistically makes no attempt to flee and offers no resistance. Why? Hemingway's original offered no explanation. But Veiller has invented an extremely convoluted flashback - or rather series of flashbacks, Citizen Kane style - which in a confusing if convincing fashion present this saga of double cross and betrayal. The structure of the plot is very similar to Out of the Past, but I think this film is less successful in maintaining tension and suspense. From its masterly high point opening sequence in the diner the film tends to run down, slowly but surely dissipating rather than increasing or at least holding the tautness of its storyline. No blame can be sheeted home for this lapse to anyone else but the writers. Siodmak's direction of his players is as tight and forceful as the script allows. Lancaster is particularly impressive in his film debut, giving such a characteristically mature performance no-one unaware of his newcomer status would be any the wiser. Ava Gardner too is effective in an early dramatic role, and there are solid support performances from the large roster of deservedly popular support players.The camerawork as already mentioned is really outstanding, the lighting contributing so dramatically to the mood, Mr Bredell deserves some sort of special citation. Also deserving of a merit certificate for outstanding work is composer Miklos Rozsa whose nervy score is a major component of the film's success.Yes, the movie is successful. Although it never recaptures the heights of its opening sequences, it still generates more than enough suspense to keep an audience on its toes.OTHER VIEWS: It reminds me not so much of Out of the Past as the later Asphalt Jungle (in its recreation of the planning, execution and cross purposes of the caper) and Sorry Wrong Number (in its elaborate flashback plot). I thought both these films had superior scripts which built on and refined upon the ideas and methods of The Killers. For instance, Wrong Number had flashbacks from a present continuously suspenseful happening - rather than one which had already reached its climax - and the events thus described were much more bizarre, unusual and eerily atmospheric (yet still as credible) as the recapitulated conflicts in The Killers.

Tweekums In the opening scene two threatening men enter a diner in Brentwood New Jersey and start inform the owner that they intend to kill 'The Swede' when he comes for his dinner. When it becomes apparent that he isn't coming they head off to where he is living. One of the diner customers runs ahead to warn him but he has no intention of running or fighting back and is gunned down in his bed minutes later! The local police aren't too interested but insurance man Jim Reardon is curious and starts asking questions that lead us to discover why The Swede was murdered and who sent the two killers.We learn that he was a boxer who had to quit when he broke his right hand. His life goes wrong when he meets femme fatale Kitty Collins; he immediately falls for her and even does time in prison to protect her. Once out he gets involved with a robbery and it looks as if he double crossed his associates and took the $250,000 stolen… a certain motive for murder; Reardon isn't so sure though and continues digging.This film gripped me from the start; the two killers' behaviour in the diner is genuinely threatening; there is a real sense of menace and when they kill The Swede it is a real shock… after all he is played by Burt Lancaster who gets top billing! Of course that isn't the last we see of him as much of the story is told in flashback. Lancaster does a solid enough job as The Swede but the real star of the show is Edmond O'Brien who plays Reardon; the character who's investigation drives the story. Ava Gardner is good as Kitty Collins although her role isn't as large as one might expect. The way the story unfolds keeps things interesting even if some of the links are a bit far-fetched… at one point Reardon listens to a delirious dying man who just happens to be talking about the robbery several years previously. Still that is a small quibble about what is otherwise a great film noir.

Spondonman It's an almost perfect film noir, starting out near the end and flashbacks its broody way through a labyrinth of stories from the various participants of the drama. Along with Double indemnity, The Big Sleep, Build My Gallows High and a few others it's textbook stuff, high entertainment and almost high Art.Two burly thugs with strange senses of humour show up in a small town intent on killing someone they didn't know as part of their job. Burt Lancaster is the guy with the murky past who puzzlingly and philosophically resigns himself to his impending doom, but ends up being shot to bits and pretty cut up about it along with his insurance company who send investigator Edmund O'Brien to unravel the mystery. And it takes some unravelling during the series of short flashbacks as he gets to the truth, from a fine collection of character actors expertly directed by Robert Siodmak to a typically stirring and inventive score by Miklos Rozsa. The production values were also skyhigh, the photography brilliant and atmospherically monochrome. I thought Jeff Corey was perfect as usual in his supporting role, but everyone was very good – Ava Gardner could maybe have done with a little longer screen time during the picture so as to underline the denouement for the femme fatale - but nothing matters much as everything works so well anyway.Favourite bits from so many: the tense opening scenes that hook you in so easily; the ballet-like scene in the restaurant where Lancaster takes the rap for stealing Gardner's jewel; Vince Barnett and Lancaster discussing the heavens; the big payroll heist – made to feel like a voice-over newsreel showing how easy it is (sometimes!) to rob a candy store; the killers violent but brief re-appearance in the bar – don't blink! It's a film which although obviously made a couple of generations ago still feels if not looks modern to me, and if you can jettison any prejudices and preconceptions it's still a must-see.

Bill Slocum Often praised as quintessential film noir, "The Killers" holds up well as an absorbing, existential murder-mystery in its own right. It asks the question what value a man's life has, after that man is gone, and suggests it is well over a $2,500 life insurance claim.Ole "the Swede" Andreson (Burt Lancaster) is already lying on his back when we first meet him, waiting for the hearse. Warned he is being sought by a pair of hardened criminals, he seems barely interested. A few moments later, Lancaster's film debut comes to a sudden end, at least in real time. Flashbacks carry us the rest of the way."I don't want to know what they look like," he tells the guy with the warning. "I'm through with all that running around."The rest of the film is devoted to the investigation of insurance detective Jim Riordan (Edmond O'Brien), who learns who the Swede was mixed up with and how it sped him to his doom. Riordan discovers a green handkerchief emblazoned with harps, ("angels play 'em") and figures how the Swede was played himself by femme fatale Kitty Collins (Ava Gardner).The existential nature of the film is made clear early and often, in the Swede's acceptance of his doom, in the ink-stain-like lighting design, and in the gallows humor of the two men who fix to blast the Swede into eternity."He never had a chance to do anything to us," one of them tells a luncheonette owner. "He never even seen us.""He's only going' to see us once," the other killer says.The doomy mood is so pervasive it seems no one has a chance in this film. People face death so much its like Ingmar Bergman's "The Seventh Seal," except no one has time for chess. But there's also an odd Christian message buried in the subtext. A cleaning woman stops Swede from killing himself by pleading with him so as to "sleep in consecrated ground," and later, we hear one of the culprits get told, while trying to get someone else to take the fall, "don't ask a dying man to lie his soul into hell."It's a strange movie for that, and other intriguing things as well. Based on an Ernest Hemingway short story, it quickly wanders off into its own territory by building out a story of multiple perspectives that fits together only for Riordan and the viewer's sake. I don't think "The Killers" is hard to follow at all, just a bit complicated in places where it works rather well.Riordan's actual mission is not exactly understandable. He's congratulated at film's end for having reduced the basic rate of the Atlantic Insurance Co. by one-tenth of a cent. But we care about what happens, and for that, the bringing of "The Killers" to justice feels a bit sunnier by its conclusion.There's another film version of the Hemingway short, made in 1964, which is nearly as good, albeit not as film noir but rather pulp fiction. What this version of "The Killers" has is magnificent scenics, a gripping story, and a firm command of the material by director Robert Siodmak which never lets you go from the first frame to the last.