The nasty meet the unlucky, and everyone comes out a loser except the viewer in this, a nifty, hard-boiled pulp mystery directed by Don Siegel with nerves of steel and a heart of lead.
We open on a home for the blind where two men (Lee Marvin and Clu Gulager) stride in. Despite the dark Ray-Bans they sport we know they are not residents as they coldly harass a frightened receptionist and make a beeline to a classroom where sighted teacher Johnny North (John Cassavetes) gives motor instructions. North is soon a corpse and the killers $25,000 richer, but Charlie, the older killer, is left wondering why the guy didn't put up more of a struggle.
"I gotta find out what makes a man decide not to run," he tells Lee, his young partner (played by Gulager, which is confusing, since Lee is also the name of the actor playing Charlie.) "Why all of a sudden he'd rather die."
Lee just wants the million dollars that Johnny supposedly made off with but didn't have. But for Charlie, those last moments of Johnny North make him want to know more. This gives "The Killers" an existential frisson not far removed from its source material, an Ernest Hemingway short story, though the plot veers from that, more widely than a 1946 film of the same name which used the same story.
Both films are great in different ways. This one plays very well in its own particular space, set in the present-day early 1960s with a kind of "Rat Pack" vibe accentuated by the cool threads, the jazzy score by a young John Williams, and the sleek presence of Angie Dickinson as one killer femme fatale. You even have Norman Fell, who was in the real Rat Pack's "Ocean Eleven," playing a bad guy.
The chief bad guy is played by Ronald Reagan in his last film role. Reagan seems to know the kind of film he was in, a twisted dark comedy using his straight-backed image as one of its many jokes. Reagan gives as good as he gets, slapping Dickinson in one memorable scene. It's not just that he hits her, but the way he hits her, casually and with almost a smile on his face. The only Reagan performance that rivals this one for ruthlessness is the one Phil Hartman gave in that famous "Saturday Night Live" sketch after Iran-Contra broke. If you still haven't recovered from that pasting Walter Mondale got in 1984, you may want to see this film.
Reagan's good, but Marvin and Gulager are better, trading Tarantino banter like when Gulager's Lee teases Charlie about his drinking and not eating enough proteins. They are so brilliantly bad you mind when the film leaves them for extended periods to deliver one of its three extended flashback sequences, when we learn how Johnny was led astray.
I think the most interesting thing "The Killers" does is present Dickinson's Sheila Farr character in three different ways, depending on the subjective view of the teller. This might seem a flaw, except in one of the extras of the Criterion DVD Siegel suggested this was a deliberate strategy. In all three she's a user, but with varying amounts of heart and cunning. It leaves us a bit unprepared for the truth, which seems to take even Charlie for a loss. Not that he's pausing to make sense of it. "I'm sorry, lady, but I don't have the time," winds up being the first thing he says, and pretty much the last.
Does the plot Johnny gets involved in make sense, the way it is planned or the way it goes down? I don't think so. I'm not wild about Cassevettes' quirky performance, while cheap sets (a blue cyclotron substitutes for a racetrack background in one sequence) betray the cheap production values of this, what would have been the first TV movie ever except for the fact it wound up being too violent for Madison Avenue. No dog-food commercials for this sucker!
Yet even its time-anchored defects give "The Killers" a kind of momentous grandeur, like the garish color scheme in tune with Zapruder's famous movie from the same period. The clipped quality of the dialogue (by future "Star Trek" scribe Gene L. Coon) has a kind of majesty worthy of Hemingway.
"You're a winner, and I don't like losers," Sheila tells Johnny. "Little men who cry a lot."
"The Killers" may not be a classic, but it's still a winner worth your while.
We open on a home for the blind where two men (Lee Marvin and Clu Gulager) stride in. Despite the dark Ray-Bans they sport we know they are not residents as they coldly harass a frightened receptionist and make a beeline to a classroom where sighted teacher Johnny North (John Cassavetes) gives motor instructions. North is soon a corpse and the killers $25,000 richer, but Charlie, the older killer, is left wondering why the guy didn't put up more of a struggle.
"I gotta find out what makes a man decide not to run," he tells Lee, his young partner (played by Gulager, which is confusing, since Lee is also the name of the actor playing Charlie.) "Why all of a sudden he'd rather die."
Lee just wants the million dollars that Johnny supposedly made off with but didn't have. But for Charlie, those last moments of Johnny North make him want to know more. This gives "The Killers" an existential frisson not far removed from its source material, an Ernest Hemingway short story, though the plot veers from that, more widely than a 1946 film of the same name which used the same story.
Both films are great in different ways. This one plays very well in its own particular space, set in the present-day early 1960s with a kind of "Rat Pack" vibe accentuated by the cool threads, the jazzy score by a young John Williams, and the sleek presence of Angie Dickinson as one killer femme fatale. You even have Norman Fell, who was in the real Rat Pack's "Ocean Eleven," playing a bad guy.
The chief bad guy is played by Ronald Reagan in his last film role. Reagan seems to know the kind of film he was in, a twisted dark comedy using his straight-backed image as one of its many jokes. Reagan gives as good as he gets, slapping Dickinson in one memorable scene. It's not just that he hits her, but the way he hits her, casually and with almost a smile on his face. The only Reagan performance that rivals this one for ruthlessness is the one Phil Hartman gave in that famous "Saturday Night Live" sketch after Iran-Contra broke. If you still haven't recovered from that pasting Walter Mondale got in 1984, you may want to see this film.
Reagan's good, but Marvin and Gulager are better, trading Tarantino banter like when Gulager's Lee teases Charlie about his drinking and not eating enough proteins. They are so brilliantly bad you mind when the film leaves them for extended periods to deliver one of its three extended flashback sequences, when we learn how Johnny was led astray.
I think the most interesting thing "The Killers" does is present Dickinson's Sheila Farr character in three different ways, depending on the subjective view of the teller. This might seem a flaw, except in one of the extras of the Criterion DVD Siegel suggested this was a deliberate strategy. In all three she's a user, but with varying amounts of heart and cunning. It leaves us a bit unprepared for the truth, which seems to take even Charlie for a loss. Not that he's pausing to make sense of it. "I'm sorry, lady, but I don't have the time," winds up being the first thing he says, and pretty much the last.
Does the plot Johnny gets involved in make sense, the way it is planned or the way it goes down? I don't think so. I'm not wild about Cassevettes' quirky performance, while cheap sets (a blue cyclotron substitutes for a racetrack background in one sequence) betray the cheap production values of this, what would have been the first TV movie ever except for the fact it wound up being too violent for Madison Avenue. No dog-food commercials for this sucker!
Yet even its time-anchored defects give "The Killers" a kind of momentous grandeur, like the garish color scheme in tune with Zapruder's famous movie from the same period. The clipped quality of the dialogue (by future "Star Trek" scribe Gene L. Coon) has a kind of majesty worthy of Hemingway.
"You're a winner, and I don't like losers," Sheila tells Johnny. "Little men who cry a lot."
"The Killers" may not be a classic, but it's still a winner worth your while.