Directed by Don Siegel. Written by Gene L. Coon
The good die young, or in the case of Don Siegel’s The Killers, the good die early, so you can spend the rest of the movie hoping everyone else gets what’s coming to them. Featuring doomed lovers and a slew of damnable men, it presents a black heart and a world where spilled blood covers the scales of justice.
Two men pull up to a home for the blind, looking for someone. They enter, assault a blind woman working there, keep looking. They’re bad hombres. In a classroom, Johnny North is tipped off to these men’s presence and purpose, but decides not to flee and accepts his fate. They walk in and blow him away, nothing said.
Later, the older of the two killers is troubled by this man who didn’t run, and discussing it with his partner, they decide to investigate why there was $25,000 in it for them to shoot him dead, suspecting there are much greater sums of money involved. These men are murderers for hire and they’re greedy. Morality is a city in Russia.
As they investigate, The Killers splits its structure into two: one flashback-led story detailing the tragedy of Johnny North, explaining how a hefty price tag like that came to be placed on his head (it involves a woman, as it so often does), and another chronicling the current-day rampage of these two onerous men. An ill-fated romance bracketed by misanthropy.
If you can’t tell, The Killers is a cynical affair. Crime is one thing, but the eponymous characters in this movie based on an Ernest Hemingway short story move through the world with such venom and worse yet, they do seemingly uncontested. It’s an amoral universe, and anyone who’s not a viper is chewed up and churned out. Anyone decent gets it even worse.
It’d be a hard watch were it not for the excellent performances that shine in their own right. Lee Marvin stars as the older hit man, his baritone flat and even as he terrorizes crooks and civilians alike. Marvin’s no stranger to playing tough guys, but he’s an unthinking evil here, appearing as some blind monster who feels the world and its rules to be some smoke screen that he waves aside with disdain. At his flank, Clu Gallagher stars as Satan’s sidekick, a demon giddy in its wrongdoing.
Were it just these two men we’re stuck with, The Killers would be a menacing, but monotonous affair. Providing its heartbeat is John Cassavettes as Johnny North. An ace race car driver, he’s soon racing out of his class when Angie Dickinson shows up in the pit lane as Sheila Farr. Most mysterious women can be solved by the audience, privileged as we are with our observational remove, but Dickinson keeps you guessing. Or perhaps just wishing.
Together, Cassavettes and Dickinson prove an irresistible pairing throughout the tumultuous relationship. While Dickinson remains a cypher, Cassavettes lays it all out: heartbroken, jilted, elated, brutal. Ironically, the only place the coupling struggles is in their initial casual flirting. Cassavettes doesn’t do cheap thrills like that, instead bringing his trademark brooding intensity.
The parts of The Killers are simple. Bad men doing bad things, relationships running aground like we’ve seen in many film noirs twenty years before. It’s in their combination and its structure that The Killers keeps you interested, going non-linear so as to build a mystery you already know the ending to, but want to understand. When the performances are this good as well, you’re in for a ride.
Mikkel Frederiksen 