‘The Killers’: A much loved noir that’s the spitting image of another American classic

Ava Gardner, Burt Lancaster, ‘The Killers’ (1946). 

By Paul Parcellin

“The Killers” (1946)

Some say “The Killers” is the “Citizen Kane” of noir, but how can that be?

One is a beloved noir, the story behind a brutal murder of a washed up prizefighter. The other, a fictional biography of a media tycoon, loosely based on the life of William Randolph Hearst. It’s like comparing doughnuts with dirigibles, isn't it?

Not exactly. The key to their kinship is the way the two films tell their stories. 

Here’s the rundown on 'The Killers':

The violent death of the Swede (Burt Lancaster) in the first dozen minutes or so of “The Killers” launches an investigation. But it's the preamble to the murder that draws us in. It starts when two hitmen come looking for Swede at the diner he’s known to haunt. 

Charles McGraw, William Conrad, Harry Hayden, ‘The Killers.’

They terrorize the staff and a young customer and announce that they’re going kill the former boxer turned filling station attendant. The customer, Nick Adams (Phil Brown), gets to Swede’s rooming house before the killers do, but his warning to the condemned man is pointless.

“Once, I did something wrong,” Swede tells the youthful Adams. 

The Swede (Lancaster) awaits dark visitors.

Swede doesn’t budge, but instead awaits the inevitable as the gunmen creep up the stairs. He grips the bedpost until the two torpedos burst in and fire. In one of noir's most famous close-ups, we see his grasp on the post release as his life slips away.

Based, in part, on a Hemingway short story

The film is based on an Ernest Hemingway short story of the same title. The opening sequence in the diner is faithful to the book, but the rest of the script is original material. The screenplay was written by Richard Brooks and then heavily re-worked by Anthony Veiller and his frequent collaborator John Huston. Only Veiller is credited on the final film. Huston went uncredited due to his contract with Warner Bros.

Everett Sloane, Orson Welles, Joseph Cotten, Ellen Lowe, ‘Citizen Kane’ (1941). 

Hemingway’s part of the story, just the tip of the iceberg, is the culmination of a years-long series of events. The bulk of the film, which explains what led to the murder, owes a lot to “Citizen Kane” (1941). In both strikingly similar films an investigator pieces together the story a deceased man, around whom a mystery swirls. 

Investigator steps in, post mortem

After newspaper publishing magnate Charles Foster Kane (Orson Welles) dies of natural causes at an advanced age, newsreel company reporter pokes his nose into Kane’s life, interviewing those who knew him best. 

Swede’s death barely captures the attention of local law enforcement. The only one interested is insurance investigator Jim Reardon (Edmond O’Brien), who needs to find a mystery woman who’s due to collect the payout from Swede’s life insurance policy. 

Cryptic final utterances

Both Kane and Swede utter puzzling last words just before they die, and both films involve a quest to find the meaning of those words. Swede’s “Once, I did something wrong,” contrasts with Kane’s short and sweet one-word finale, “Rosebud.” It turns out Kane’s last gasped syllables are packed with delicious meaning and irony (which I won’t go into here lest I dish out two spoilers for the price of one). 

Both stories are told in a series of flashbacks, a noir staple, that we see as each interviewee spills his or her chunk of the story. All of the fragmented, nonlinear pieces coalesce into complete, or near complete, portraits of the two men. 

Witnesses speak, but are they reliable?

Mind you, there’s good reason to question the reliability some of the witness’s accounts of the facts. Yet both films seem to take those recollections at face value, each building toward a revelation about those cryptic last words both men spoke. 

Edmond O'Brien, Ann Staunton, 'The Killers.'

Reardon figures out what Swede meant about his doing “something wrong.” It isn’t like the Sphinx-like riddle that the newsreel reporter is tasked with unscrambling. He discovers a richly detailed story of Kane, but never finds out what “Rosebud” means, and he gives up, defeated. 

A revealing view of Kane's clutter

But when the camera takes a God's-eye view of the grim cleanup of Kane’s earthly possession, we see the humble object, which obviously held great symbolic importance to the fabulously wealthy media magnate, and occupied his final thoughts. It’s as sad and touching a moment as you’re likely to see on screen, describing the core of the man and what drove him forward in his remarkable life. 

A mountain and a molehill? Perhaps not

The Swede’s story, tragic as it is, isn't as broad in scope as the newspaper mogul’s sprawling, tainted saga. It’s a gritty story of a wounded, gullible has-been who was putty in the hands of a gorgeous, evil woman (Kane had his women problems, too). But, so what? “The Killers” is top shelf noir that set a standard for the classic era of films like it.

And as it turns out, both Swede and Kane also had this in common: Despite living widely disparate lives, both men, once mighty, go out lonely and haunted, not with a clap of thunder but with a whimper.    

D.O.A.: Small Town Man Visits Big City, Murder Follows

Frank Gerstle, Edmond O’Brien, “D.O.A.” (1949).
The doctor delivers some astonishingly bad news.

Frank Bigelow needs to find the truth,
but he's driven by a deeper motivation

By Paul Parcellin

When you think of noir, it’s probably not 18th century British author Samuel Johnson who first springs to mind. But his most famous quote really nails the crux of “D.O.A.”: “When a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully.”

Apt words for Frank Bigelow ( Edmond O’Brien), the cursed hero of “D.O.A.,” who is under a death sentence, but not the kind that involves a rope. His is a story of rotten luck, an obsessive search for the truth and the mind’s nimbleness as the final grains of sand funnel through the hourglass.

But first, the top reason to see “D.O.A.” is the opening sequence, perhaps the greatest setup in all of noir. Bigelow arrives at Los Angeles City Hall at night, as if drawn in by its illuminated spire, a beacon in the dark. He enters and makes the long trudge through the hallways leading to police headquarters and the camera follows him all the way. Arriving at the homicide bureau, he reports a murder.

Bigelow tells his story.

“Who was murdered?” the head detective asks. 

“I was,” he says.

Thus begins one of noir’s most definitive existential crises. A man living under a death sentence has mere hours before he expires. What will he do with his remaining time, we wonder? The lowdown comes in a long flashback in which we learn that the past few days have been a frenzied struggle. Bigelow, a small town accountant, first got sucked into a dark vortex of doom some months ago, long before he realized his predicament. He accidentally landed in the middle a scheme to sell stolen iridium, a valuable metal. He’s innocent of any wrongdoing, but fate cares not about culpability. 

Details of the story behind this delayed-action murder get a bit complicated and difficult to digest as the story winds toward its harrowing conclusion. But the backstory is less important than Bigelow’s frenetic struggle to get to the bottom of the mystery that torments him to distraction. 

At the story’s core is a powerful obsession with finding the truth and a frenzied investigation that seems imperative, yet pointless. He could have gone to the police immediately but chose to go it alone. You might correctly assume that Bigelow’s head-first dive into the nitty gritty of the case is his way of shutting out thoughts of the Angel of Death’s inevitable visit.

His downward spiral begins when he leaves his loving girlfriend, Paula (Pamela Britton), behind in their small desert town. Frank plans to let down his hair in the big city, San Francisco, while deciding whether or not he will walk the plank with Paula — a plan that, frankly, is a bit on the cruel side. She hates the idea of him cavorting around town, yet feels she has no choice but to let him go get his freak on.

House band, The Fishermen, drive the beatnik crowd wild.

Once in the confines of his big city hotel room he’s up for a bit of sinning, and it turns out he’s come to the right place. By chance, he meets a group of traveling salespeople who are partying like it’s V-J Day, and he’s invited to join the fun. 

“Jive-crazy” hipsters dig
the crazy beat at
the Fisherman jazz club.

Drink flows freely and this group of inveterate squares lands at a beatnik jazz bar, of all places. It’s the film’s most surreal and fun sequences as the hep crowd grooves to the frenzied beat of a live sextet blowing hard bop.

Clearly, it’s a square’s idea of what a jazz club is like. The joint is a cartoonish den of iniquity where loose morals and uninhibited self-expression are on display, a place where oddballs and commies probably smoke “marihuana.” Above all of that, it’s a spot to meet “jive crazy” girls, and Frank’s game for that.

Of course, he’s out of his element here. The music makes his head spin, but the possibility of connecting with some counter-culture female companionship makes it tolerable. When at last he’s about to hook up with a mysterious blonde, someone slips him a radioactive mickey that sends his life into a tailspin.

It’s as if he’s being punished for his carnal cravings, and the penalty for straying from his girlfriend is death. But beyond that, we wonder who fed him a nightcap of hot nuclear soup. 

We’re left to ponder whether the raucous group that brought him to the bar had any part in the scheme. After all, the head sales nerd persuaded Bigelow to join the group and organized the bar hop. He’s got his wife in tow and at one point he gives Bigelow the stink eye for getting too cosy with the missus — a rather weak motive for murder, but people have killed for less.

It’s not until the next morning that Bigelow realizes that something is off and gets himself examined. The terrifying verdict is in: he’s been dosed with a slow-acting luminous poison and has only several days left to live. 

A couple of medical establishments confirm that he’s a goner, and at first he’s in denial. From the dimly lit confines of a physician’s office, Bigelow bolts into the vast, sun-filled concrete cityscape that is somehow as claustrophobic and airless as the doctor’s office. He’s a man trying to outrun fate and it’s hard not to gasp for breath along with him as he scrambles toward points unknown. 

Pamela Britton, O’Brien. Frank and Paula meet all too briefly.

A cool factoid is that the shots of Bigelow running down San Francisco’s Market Street were taken without city permits. Those he bumps into are not hired extras but pedestrians who are visibly confused about the jostling they get. Director Rudolph Maté shot the film on a small budget, around $500,000, and made the most of limited resources. 

Frank ponders Life.

We witness Bigelow go through the stages of impending death in an extremely compressed timeframe. Pausing at a newsstand bedecked with copies of Life magazine, he watches people interact, but he seems all but invisible to them. He’s like an apparition who observes others but cannot interact with them. His initial terror dissipates and he seems to be wistfully picturing a world in which life will go on without him.

Once the initial shock is absorbed he accepts the bitter reality and snaps into action. In his final hours he’s determined to find out who poisoned him and why they did it. And then … who knows what? Maybe he’ll bring the killer to justice or perhaps he’ll take matters into his own hands. Along the way he acquires a pistol, so both options are open.

This is a drastically different Bigelow than the one who embarked on his junket to San Francisco. He’s focused, emotionally high strung and determined to get answers. 

The film's climax takes place in the Bradbury Building in downtown Los Angeles.

His investigation takes him abruptly from the Bay Area to the City of Angels, and at every turn he encounters another mug or two-timing dame. As the dust begins to settle it becomes clear that there’s a network of people behind the plot against him. But why would they go to so much trouble to kill an accountant from jerkwater USA?

The film’s answer is a bit more complicated than it needs to be, but not quite as byzantine as “The Big Sleep,” perhaps the most convoluted plot in all of noir. 

Neville Brand as Chester. He takes
Frank Bigelow for a wild ride.

Bigelow traces the iridium dealers, meets the widow of the man who tried to warn him about impending danger and tracks down the shady characters behind the illegal sale. He gets taken for a ride by psychotic thug Chester (Neville Brand), and survives a shootout in a pharmacy. 

Bigelow’s mind has become wonderfully focused as the shadow of death hovers over him. He later expires in the homicide bureau after spilling the story to a roomful of enthralled detectives.

Facing certain death can clear cobwebs from the brain, all right, but too often clarity arrives at the eleventh hour.  It’s ironic that had he not gone through this ordeal he might never have realized his feelings for Paula, but by then it was too late. Alas, romance often doesn’t work out in noir. 

Frank Bigelow gains a sliver of self awareness only to die an untimely death. That’s a Pyrrhic victory you might say, and Samuel Johnson would undoubtedly agree.

Originally published in the Nov./Dec. 2024 issue of The Dark Pages. Check out The Dark Pages newsletter at: www.allthatnoir.com/newsletter/

Paul Parcellin writes about crime films and TV. Follow him on Bluesky: @paulpar.bsky.social