The Killers

The box art refers to the release as "Ernest Hemingway's The Killers,"
but that possessory title is quite misleading. This Criterion Blu-ray contains two feature-length adaptations of Hemingway's story, as well as numerous other works created in its wake. And the collective fire lit by those involved in these adaptations will burn for centuries-Ava Gardner, Burt Lancaster, Don Siegel, John Huston, Andrei Tarkovsky, and Lee Marvin, just for starters. Hemingway was merely the spark.

That may be by necessity: The original Hemingway short story "The Killers" wouldn't fill much more than a single reel of screentime. Two hit men walk into a bar, waiting for their mark. Upon finding he won't be arriving, they set out to his house -- but Nick Adams, a favorite in the Hemingway canon, gets the jump on them. He warns Ole, their target, a Swede, of the coming intentions. But he waves off the result as an inevitability, and simply waits for the bullets to start raining in. The minimalism of the story allows for numerous interpretations -- the outside-Depression-era-Chicago setting has led many to read it as a nihilistic parable about gangland life -- and this Blu-ray collects more than a few of them.

Robert Siodmark's feature-length adaptation of the film, from 1946, feels like an intrigued reader's imagined fleshing out of the original text. The first 20 minutes are pure Hemingway: Under the harsh palette of black-and-white photography, the hit men move through their paces, until the Swede (Burt Lancaster) has seen his last sight. The rest of the film is taken up by non-linear flashbacks, via a structure borrowed from "Citizen Kane": An insurance agent connects the Swede to a long-ago heist, and questions all his acquaintances-cops, co-workers, and his seductress, Kitty (Gardner) in an attempt to put together the story leading up to his death. It's a mystery film, and the mystery is what happened around the margins of Hemingway's prose.

Next up is Don Siegel's 1964 adaptation, which borrows elements from the original text and from Siodmark's film, makes a few changes, and emerges with a Frankenstein's Monster made out of tellings of "The Killers." The Swede becomes Johnny North (John Cassavettes), a race car driver who agrees to play wheelman for a local gang boss (Ronald Reagan) after falling for his wandering lady (Angie Dickinson). And the killers themselves become the detectives: Lee Marvin, as one of the hit men, tracks down those who can tell North's story post mortem, because he's fascinated by the idea of a man too depressed to run for his life. He has to understand what kind of heartbreak could cause that. It's romantic existentialism.

Siegel's film is characterized by an aesthetic approach as direct as Hemingway's minimalist prose. Close-ups are used constantly, allowing us no reprieve from the frustrated faces of those involved. As opposed to the stark economy of the '64 effort, Siodmark often had many events occurring in the frame simultaneously. Check the way he composes the initial barroom encounter, giving the hit men, the bartender, and the terrified patron their own planes of the visual field. That's far removed from Siodmark's eye, which, true to the noir tradition it emerged from, often took a more detached perspective. Like their color palettes -- Siodmark's film in monochrome, Siegel's in vividly realized color -- the difference between the two films is night and day.

As though two separate movies didn't offer enough points of comparison, Criterion has included other takes on the material in this brilliant release. First there's a radio play, adapted from Siodmark's film, featuring Lancaster and Shelley Winters. There's also a student-film adaptation of the original text, running 17 minutes, and directed, in part, by a young Andrei Tarkovsky. Finally, actor Stacy Keach presents the original work itself, via a recorded version of Hemingway's text. (The disc also features other extra features: An interview with actor Clu Gulager, an audio recording from a pertinent section of Siegel's autobiography, and an interview with writer Stuart Kaminsky about the various adaptations.)

Both of the features have outstanding qualities to call their own: The terse realism of the performances given by Lee and Marvin, or the densely layered cinematography that characterizes Siodmark's film. (Unlike Siegel, he rarely makes use of the close-up.) Together, though -- as a package -- they become almost profound. Watching the two back-to-back provides an essential insight into the nature of film adaptations. These differing versions are marked and changed by every collaborator and circumstance: By the nation of origin, by the style of actor, by the compositional preferences of the director, by every single thing.

That possessory "Ernest Hemingway's" continues to seem ludicrous. The only things that truly possess these movies are the moments in time that gave birth to them.

"The Killers"
Blu-ray
$39.95
Criterion.com