The Killers (Mark Hellinger-Universal), as Ernest Hemingway wrote it, was a short story and a simple one. It told how a pair of professional assassins talked tough to some people in a lunch wagon. Horrified young Nick Adams (Hemingway as a boy) managed to warn their quarry, the Swede, but the Swede just stayed on his bed, knowing he could not escape. Within a few crisp pages of dialogue, Hemingway created a masterpiece in terror-by-suggestion.
This sinister little classic has now been blown up by Producer Mark Hellinger into a full-length movie. There is a bangup opening with a good reproduction of the short story, virtually as Hemingway wrote it. Then an insurance investigator (Edmond O'Brien) noses in on the inexplicable killing. His research takes him to the dead Swede's beneficiary, an Atlantic City chambermaid (Queenie Smith), to a Philadelphia detective (Sam Levene) and, with their help, through more & more plot-laden flashbacks of ringside and gangster life.
As it turns out, the Swede (screen newcomer Burt Lancaster) was a natural born fall guy. By the time such seasoned misbehaviorists as Albert Dekker and Ava Gardner are through with him, the double-and triple-crossings get so thick that his death seems about the only simple thing in his career.
The movie is no match for the story that inspired it, but it is an exceptionally suspenseful, crisp and lively melodrama, distinguished by shrewd casting and playing, plenty of harsh action, and an extra edge of low-life authenticity. Odd literary note: the Hemingway dialogue, well presented in the film, becomes as strangely formalized on the sound track as heroic couplets.
In the '20s, when Manhattan teemed with murdering bootleggers, big spenders, lovable drunks and chorines with hearts of gold, one of Broadway's favorite mirrors of the times was Columnist Mark Hellinger. After nine years in Hollywood, Hellinger has somehow managed to retain the wide-eyed, gaudy spirit of the old days. The Killers, his first independent production for Universal, is packed with scenes, characters and dialogue straight out of Hellinger's Broadway.
At 43, greying, blue-eyed Producer Hellinger is noted for whopping charitable donations and extravagant tipping ($15 to captains, $10 to waiters, up to $5 to busboys, with an extra $1 each for winning smiles). Reputed to be a soft touch for any & all hard-luck stories, he favors midnight blue shirts with white silk ties, drives a black Lincoln limousine equipped with siren, white bearskin rug, New York license plate (MH 1) and bulletproof glass (gift of a former gangster acquaintance). Hollywood also reveres Hellinger for his seemingly inexhaustible stock of excellent liquor, his fondness for intricate practical jokes and his small superstitions.
His life with ex-Ziegfeld Follies beauty Gladys Glad was fodder for the most sentimental Hellinger copy. Married in 1929, they were divorced three years later. In his New York Mirror column Hellinger unabashedly sampled public reaction to the divorce. After imaginary interviews with a Wall Street clerk, a taxi driver, a socialite, etc., his final paragraph was the "Reaction of the Columnist, deep down in his heart: 'It's going to be awfully tough without you, baby. Awfully, awfully tough.' "