Trailer
Plot summary
Two killers, Al and Max, arrive in Brentwood, New Jersey, and shoot gas station attendant Pete "Swede" Lund, who makes no attempt to flee. He held a small life insurance policy, so investigator Jim Reardon looks into the case with Philadelphia police lieutenant Sam Lubinsky, a childhood friend of the dead man. Their talks trace Swede's past: he boxed under the name Ole Anderson until a hand injury ended his career, he served three years for robbery, and he fell for Kitty Collins, a singer he met at a party in an apartment belonging to Big Jim Colfax. Reardon's questions bring him to Lilly, the dead man's former girlfriend and now Lubinsky's wife.
Cast
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Did you know?!Facts and trivia about The Killers (1946)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Ava Gardner, cast as femme fatale Kitty Collins, could not manage the histrionics for the scene where Sam Lubinsky tells Kitty not to ask a dying man to lie his soul into Hell, so director Siodmak chose to bully her into the emotion, barking at her and threatening to hit her if she did the scene wrong.
- Ernest Hemingway called The Killers the only good picture ever made from one of his stories, and his biographer Carlos Baker wrote that it was the first film from any of Hemingway's works that he could genuinely admire.
- Producer Mark Hellinger reportedly wanted two or three unknowns because known actors were so typed they would telegraph the threat to audiences; Burt Lancaster was not his first pick for the Swede, since Warner Bros. would not lend Wayne Morris, and Van Heflin, Jon Hall, Sonny Tufts and Edmond O'Brien were also considered.
- Only the first 12 minutes of The Killers, the arrival of contract killers Al (Charles McGraw) and Max (William Conrad) and the murder of boxer Ole "Swede" Anderson (Burt Lancaster), follows Ernest Hemingway's 1927 short story closely; the rest of the film, Jim Reardon's investigation, is wholly original.
