The Worst Film Ever

Good movie but grossly overrated

A lot of fun.

It's a good bad... and worth a popcorn matinée. While it's easy to lament what could have been...

I am increasingly becoming a bigger fan of noir, still rather new to this genre even though I love classic movies and have seen my fair share of them. I love the intense build-up of this movie in the very beginning, that diner scene is really something! I was just talking to a customer at my workplace about the movie and I told her that if I ever decide to get into the food business, I'd want to open a diner just like the one in The Killers. What a lot of movies today lack is a very good storyline. Sadly with the advancement of CGI, the amount put into creating a very strong storyline in a movie has declined over the years. The old classic Hollywood glamour rarely exists in today's movies as well. This is something that I hope that Hollywood would bring back one day.Black and white movies certainly teach you how to really appreciate the story, and how to appreciate the cinematography of black and white film. Noir can't be replicated in color like it was done in the 1940's because there was more that added to the films other than being in black and white. There was the style and sex appeal of the characters, this is very evident in Ava Gardner's role as the main femme fatale in the movie. Although film noir focuses on the female sex appeal, there is certainly sex appeal in the male characters as well. I definitely found this in Edmond O'Brian's portrayal of the main detective. Very dashing, handsome, and masculine. I do wish that they would give Ava Gardener a more lengthy song to perform like they did in Dark Passage with Lauren Bacall.Ernest Hemmingway certainly scored my interest in continuing to read his writing with this one. After seeing the movie, I made sure to buy the collection of Hemmingway's short stories. If you are new to film noir or just thinking about getting into classic movies seriously, I'd recommend starting with this one.

Incredibly an exciting beginning of a movie. The murderers who kill without explanation and victim calmly awaits death. THE KILLERS is out of sync movie, which does not affect much on a very good story and a solid noir atmosphere. Flashbacks are chronologically nonlinear, are manifold, but are quite clear. Most attract attention, because the reconstruction of the victim's life. Looking at the other side, they are only an attempt to illuminate the case in which the robbed factory. The heart of the story is certainly not an insurance investigator. He is only an intermediary.The story is quite complicated and tense. Therefore, conclusions can be multiple. Why man quietly waiting for its own liquidation? For love or fraud. The victim of femme fatale or just a criminal who fell in love with the wrong woman.One of the protagonists patiently solve the mystery. He waits until all the attributes are not in his hands. Burt Lancaster as Pete Lund/Ole "Swede" Andreson is handsome and muscular actor who in all solid pace. For the first important role quite decent. Although I think it director spared some embarrassment. Several times he was close. Ava Gardner as Kitty Collins was prickly as a femme fatale. The lady who cut the flow of the story. Although I was fascinated by her beauty, I have not regretted the fate of her character at the end of the film. Edmond O'Brien as Jim Reardon is cunning, cold and relentless investigator in the style of a real detective. On one side is a bad copy of the Bogart, on the other hand the result of the popularity of such characters in film noir.The film has a slow tempo with a lot of uncertainty and tension. The sharp dialogues, gloomy atmosphere and fatalistic tone determined work on which the movie is based.

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.

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.