Critics reviews

It's the movie that made Burt Lancaster a star and cemented Robert Siodmak's reputation as one of the great noir directors. But as significant as their contributions are, the film's power really hinges on its screenplay, which is one of the cleverest in the entire noir canon. Written by Anthony Veiller, John Huston, and Richard Brooks, THE KILLERS boasts a flashback-driven structure as ambitious as that of CITIZEN KANE, employing multiple narrators and a non-chronological organization of events.

The cinematography, by the Universal workhorse Woody Bredell, offers much to enjoy, but the movie's languorous aestheticism is complemented by its spasmodic violence. The Swede is revealed to have been a professional boxer, and the jagged razzmatazz of the choreographed, closely edited fight scenes were unsurpassed until Martin Scorsese's "Raging Bull.

Siodmak's The Killers earns significant points for ambition and influence, but the incessant flashbacking doesn't command our attention as it does in the Orson Welles film, which has an obsessive, neurotic undertow that renders the rickety plot beside the point. The American crime genre is generally a forward-moving beast driven by a terse, heavily symbolic sense of present tense, but Siodmak's film is forever filling in details that we accept as a given.

[It] tackles virtually every major theme in the noir cycle, unlike many other noirs, which only focus on a particular subset of motifs. The Killers includes a haunting femme fatale in Ava Gardner as Kitty Collins, a seminal heist scene, psychiatric profiles of a network of professional gangsters, a devastating double cross, the spirit of heavy fatalism, and a hard-boiled protagonist doomed by existential fate in Burt Lancaster as Ole Andersen. Each motif is developed with precision and style.

Robert Siodmak's 1946 noir staple plods lethargically through its double, triple, and quadruple crosses, but its marvelously expressive black-and-white photography puts the story's despairing tone in purely visual terms.

That Siodmak chooses to focus the crux of his Killers through the character of Reardon is no shocker. Compared to Lancaster's sweaty, sexy swagger and Gardner's subdued and sensual menace, Reardon is one of those blank slate characters inserted to add a moral counterbalance to the amoral goings-on. Think of him as a personification of the end title crawl of The Public Enemy, which goes out of its way to reassure the viewing public that the film producers do not condone the violence onscreen.

Siodmak evokes an atmosphere of impending disaster, and as the insurance investigator assigned to the case (Edmond O'Brien) pieces together the story of the fighter's rise and fall from grace with the mob, the film becomes an example of film noir at its most expressive.

Though there is a cheapness about "The Killers" that reminds you of five-and-ten jewelry, its scenes of sadism and menacing action have been formed and filled with a vitality all too rare in current movies. It is a production that is suspense-ridden and exciting down to tiny details in the background. The stolid documentary style; the gaudy melodramatic flavor; the artiness (most noticeable in the way scenes are sculpted in dark and light) are largely due to Director Robert Siodmak.

There is a good strident journalistic feeling for tension, noise, sentiment, and jazzed-up realism, all well manipulated by Robert Siodmak, which is probably chiefly to the credit of the producer, Mark Hellinger. There is nothing unique or even valuable about the picture, but energy combined with attention to form and detail doesn't turn up every day; neither does good entertainment.