What are you going to kill him for? What did Pete Lunn ever do to you?
Once again, toddalcott has shown me the way. I've been meaning to get around to Criterion's back-to-back edition of Hemingway's The Killers (which includes Robert Siodmak's 1946 version and Don Siegel's 1964 remake) for a while, but since Mr. Alcott has beaten me to the punch, I figure now is as good a time as any. I've seen the Siodmak film before, but it never hurts to reacquaint oneself with a seminal film noir like this.
Burt Lancaster makes his film debut as "the Swede," a former boxer and petty thief hiding out in Brentwood, NJ, under an assumed name who lies in bed, waiting for the cold-blooded killers (William Conrad and Charles McGraw) he knows are on the way to off him. (The scene where the killers roll into town and take over the diner where they plan on ambushing Lancaster is a model of soft-spoken menace.) Upon his final exit, insurance investigator Edmond O'Brien arrives on the scene and tenaciously tracks down everybody who knew him in an effort to find out who wanted him dead and why. As is often the case in noir, everything comes down to a femme fatale, played by Ava Gardner, who once had a thing for Lancaster but left him for crime boss Albert Dekker, who brought him in on a lucrative payroll robbery. If you think that job went off without a hitch, then you haven't seen enough film noir.
I wish I had time to see Siegel's remake right now so I could compare and contrast them, but I have another film to fry this afternoon. In particular, I'm keen to see how Siegel handles the robbery scene, which Siodmak allows to play out in an unbroken two-minute take which is remarkable for having complicated camera moves -- all on a crane -- and action requiring split-second timing on the part of both the actors and the technicians. I doubt Siegel had the time or the budget to pull off a similar feat (his film was originally made for television), but I'll see for myself soon enough.