The Killers (1964)

A couple of months back when TCM did a spotlight on the Film Foundation. One of the movies they showed was the 1964 version of The Killers. It's going to be on again as part of Noir Alley, overnight tonight at 12:30 AM and then again tomorrow morning at 10:00 AM. So I sat down to watch it and do a review here.

As you may know, there's a 1946 movie called The Killers based on a short story by Ernest Hemingway and building a fuller story around that short story. This 1964 version is a sort of remake in that it takes the original Hemingway story and, like the earlier movie, extends it, although as it turns out not in quite the same way. John Cassavetes plays Johnny North, who is teaching at a school for the blind. Two men come in, Charlie (Lee Marvin) and Lee (Clu Gulager), looking for Johnny. It turns out that these two are contract killers, with a $25,000 contract to kill Johnny. They find him, and Johnny seems strangely resigned to his death.

That's more or less where the Hemingway story ended, but both movies decided to add a much bigger story: why was Johnny so accepting of his fate that he doesn't do a darn thing to keep these guys from killing him? Charlie is the brains of the operation, and realizes that there must be something much more than the $25,000 out there or else why would anybody want Johnny dead? So Charlie decides he and Lee are going to find out what the bigger payoff is, to see if they can get at it themselves.

This leads them to Miami, where they meet Earl Sylvester, a mechanic working on muscle cars and other sports cars. Earl had known Johnny out on the west coast when Johnny was a racecar driver. But Johnny got in a smash-up that more or less ended his career. Along the way, he had met Sheila (Angie Dickinson) and fallen in love with her, but Earl warned Johnny that Sheila was the kept woman of Jack Browning (Ronald Reagan), so any romance was doomed.

But there's more to Johnny and Sheila's relationship. At some point after the smash-up, Johnny has been reduced to doing demolition derby and short dirt track racing, but as related by Mickey (Norman Fell), Browning's right-hand man at the time, Sheila finds Johnny again. He would be perfect as the driver in a scheme Jack is cooking up. That plot is a heist of a mail delivery which will be carrying the takings for a bunch of resorts on the Pacific coast, and should be close to seven figures. Johnny could use the money, and this is a chance to see Sheila again. Not only will he get to see Sheila; perhaps he can figure out a way to double-cross Browning so that he and Sheila can run off with the money and live happily ever after.

Now, we know from the beginning of the movie that Johnny and Sheila don't live happily ever after. But what happened to sour the relationship? Well, for that, you're going to have to watch this version of The Killers.

There's a lot different between this movie and the 1946 original, but both are absolutely worth watching. The 1964 version was originally conceived as a TV movie, but the network rejected it because of the amoral violence, so it got pitched as a movie, turning out to be Ronald Reagan's final film before he would switch to politics and run for Governor of California.

There are any number of places in which the TV movie origins are evident, most notably in the interiors, which really look like they've got a TV budget, as though they came out of episodes of the 1960s Dragnet, even though that series debuted later. There's also some scenes that are obviously done on the Universal backlot.

But the movie itself is solid, with Cassavetes good, Marvin playing a character similar to the one he essayed in Violent Saturday, and Reagan being surprisingly good cast against type since his forte was really good guys. Here, Reagan acts and delivers his dialogue as though he's channeling Jack Webb's Joe Friday, if Webb had believed that the cops weren't your friend and instead on the take. It might be a strange characterization but it works; after all, somebody like Browning wouldn't be the sort of oafish hoodlum that Clu Gulager comes close to playing (rightly, I think).

So despite the low budget, the 1964 The Killers is a very entertaining way to spend an hour and a half. Criterion released a DVD with both versions of the movie.