THE KILLERS

New Jersey, 1946. Former boxer Pete Lunn (Burt Lancaster) is murdered by two killers in his bedroom. Insurance agent Jim Reardon (Edmund O’Brien) must track down the boxer’s heirs who left behind a $2,500 policy. With the help of a detective, a friend of the murdered man, Jim reconstructs his past and discovers that years ago Pete joined a gang of balladeers because he was in love with the boss’s charming woman, Kitty Collins (Ava Gardner)… Based on the short story ‘The Killers’ by Ernest Hemingway, starring two of Hollywood’s sacred monsters, Burt Lancaster and Ava Gardner, both still in their early days, ‘The Gangsters’ is one of the finest noirs of the 1940s, cleverly constructed in flashbacks and shrouded in darkness and gloom. Siodmak, who with this film also achieved box office success, embellishes the film with a highly refined direction, from the sumptuous opening sequence to the final one on the staircase. The Gangsters was the first film in the noir triptych produced by Mark Hellinger (before he was blacklisted by the McCarthyists), followed by ‘Brute Force’ (1947) and ‘The Naked City’ (1948). In 1964, Don Siegel made the film ‘The Killers’ from the same Hemingway story.