You won't be disappointed!

Sadly Over-hyped

The film makes a home in your brain and the only cure is to see it again.

Excellent and certainly provocative... If nothing else, the film is a real conversation starter.

Burt Lancaster, a great great actor, is very convincing even when is badly beaten as a boxer and when is tough with the other characters. I did not understand why he gave up and left himself to be shot and killed, perhaps Hemingway wanted like that, I did not read the book. Ava Gardner is too young and too beautiful for anything, too delicate to be a felon's mistress. Edmond O'Brien, very natural in the role of insurance guy Jim Reardon. The other actors are very good too, Albert Dekker, Sam Levene, Vince Barnett, Virginia Christine, Jack Lambert. Queenie Smith, in a very small role, is excellent. Robert Siodmak, good craftsman.

Burt Lancaster and Ava Gardner, at the start of their Hollywood careers, shine out against the noir background of The Killers like the stars they became. Which is perhaps the only major flaw in Robert Siodmak's version of -- or rather extrapolation from -- Ernest Hemingway's classic short story. They're both terrific: Lancaster underplays for once in his film career, which began with this movie, and no one was ever so beautiful or gave off such strong "bad girl" vibes as Gardner. But their presence tends to upend the film, which really stars Edmond O'Brien and a fine cast of character actors. Hemingway's story accounts for only the first 20 minutes or so of the film, the remaining hour of which was concocted by Anthony Veiller, John Huston, and Richard Brooks. In the Hemingway part of the movie, two hit men (William Conrad and Charles McGraw) enter a small-town diner looking for their target, a washed-up boxer they call "the Swede." They bully the diner owner and tie up the cook and Nick Adams (Phil Brown), but when they decide that the Swede isn't going to show up for his usual evening meal, they leave. Nick runs to warn the Swede, Ole Anderson (Lancaster), in his rooming house, but the man exhibits only a passive acceptance of his fate. The short story ends with the Swede turning his face to the wall and Nick returning to the diner, but in the film we see the hit men arrive at the rooming house and kill the Swede. What follows is a backstory that Hemingway never bothered with -- although he later told Huston that he liked the movie -- about an insurance investigator's probe into the killing. The Swede had left a small insurance policy, and when the investigator, Reardon (O'Brien), contacts the beneficiary he begins to find threads that lead him back to an earlier payroll heist. With the help of a friend on the police force, Lubinsky (Sam Levene), who knew the Swede from his boxing days, Reardon sorts out the tangled story of what happened to the loot and how the Swede became the target of a hit. Siodmak's steady hand as a director earned him an Oscar nomination, as did Arthur Hilton's editing and Miklós Rózsa's score, which features a four-note motif that was lifted by composer Walter Schumann for the familiar "dum-da-dum-dum" title music of the 1950s TV series Dragnet, leading to a lawsuit that was settled out of court. Veiller was also nominated for the screenplay, but the contributions of Huston and Brooks went uncredited, largely because they were under contract to other studios.

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.

. . . or two, but THE KILLERS throws in a triple- or quadruple-cross (depending on how attentively the viewer is watching). Famously plagiarized by Japanese director Akira Kurosawa for his derivative 1950 offering RASHOMON, this film is the MOBY DICK of America's private eye genre. As "Jim Riordan," actor Edmund O'Brien plays the Captain Ahab role, and his white whale-like quest is the $254,912 Prentiss Hat of Hackensack company's payroll stolen six years earlier. Furthermore, Jim is not even a licensed P.I., but rather an insurance claims investigator (like Fred MacMurray in DOUBLE INDEMNITY). Still, Jim's able to make a cop HIS sidekick, as he tracks down the elusive Mystery of the Green & Gold Bandana. "Kitty is innocent, Kitty is innocent, Kitty is innocent, Kitty is innocent, Kitty is innocent . . . !" serves as a haunting final refrain, as the author of THE KILLERS' original sin protests too much. If cinema actually had had the power to influence Society that the 1940s American movie censors claimed, there would be far fewer of us around today, as any guy exposed to Kitty wouldn't touch women again with a ten-foot pole. But the Baby Boom began with THE KILLERS filling the theaters, proving that film has little, if any, effect on real people's actions.