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CHAPTER 4: THE KILLERS (1946): QUINTESSENTIAL NOIR?
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chapter 4 THE KILLERS (1946): QUINTESSENTIAL NOIR? The second evening we wanted to see The Killers, the film based on the new Hemingway novel, which was playing in an outlying district [of San Francisco]. We set out on foot in the evening. . . . Suddenly, we were on a dark road lined with tracks, unmoving trains, and hangars, crossed now and then by other deserted streets. . . . It began to rain violently, and in the wind and rain, we felt as forlorn as on a treeless plain—no shelter, no cars in sight. At last we saw a light and rang the bell at the gate of some kind of depot. . . . Men busy with boxes and bales of merchandise led us to a telephone so we could call a taxi, and we waited a good quarter of an hour under their roof. After two miles we were again in a district full of lights and drugstores. We even arrived in time to see The Killers. simone de beauvoir, America Day by Day At nightfall, in a peaceful American small town, two men with cruel and scornful expressions have just arrived by the main highway. After a brief scene of clipped violence in one of those diners that in the United States spring up alongside the road, they make off for the house of their victim. The man they are going to kill listens, panting, to footsteps resounding on the stairs. The door is suddenly opened, a blast of air obliterates the darkness and the silence, then the shadows are restored. raymond borde and etienne chaumeton, A Panorama of American Film Noir, 1941–1953 39 The Killers (1946) features nearly all the elements constitutive of noir—a white cast of mostly working-class characters that includes the doomed homme fatal alluded to in the second of the opening epigraphs; a femme fatale who, true to type, destroys both the male protagonist and herself with her duplicity; a femme and an homme attrapé functioning within the patriarchal system, both of whom offer the protagonist a redemption he cannot accept; and a depiction of domestic life that does not glorify that realm.The film has an investigator seeking to discover the mystery of the femme fatale and a cadre of low-life thieves and hoodlums working for a suave criminal mastermind. Half of what makes The Killers classic film noir includes this typical cast of characters. Indeed, Film Noir: An Encyclopedic Reference to the American Style identifies The Killers as ‘‘a quintessential noir,’’ citing the ‘‘disjointed and at times overlapping’’ narrative threads that contribute to the ‘‘alienating disjunction felt by Swede [the protagonist] and his subsequent surrender to the nightmarish trap of a classic femme fatale, Kitty Collins.’’1 But the other half of the film’s appeal lies in the ambiguity with which it treats manyof the tropes of noir.The femme fatale, although narratively locked in position as a duplicitous, sexy woman by her initial appearance on the screen, takes on more and more of the trappings of a femme attrapé as the film proceeds. The femme attrapé herself becomes more domesticated, but her allure early in the film belies her label, which generically insists she be visually dull and unappealing . This film noir also includes the male characters common to classic noir: an homme fatal and an homme attrapé. The homme fatal pays with his life for his desire to escape working-class existence; the homme attrapé acquiesces in the demands of society and survives. The investigator, unlike the private detective characters played by Bogart in The Maltese Falcon and The Big Sleep, arouses almost no interest. Spectators can scarcely remember what the investigator in The Killers looks like, nor do we care that much about him. The Killers is classic noir, and what makes it quintessential is how interestingly and ambiguously its supposedly classic characters develop. Based on a short story of the same name by Ernest Hemingway, directed by German émigré Robert Siodmak, and starring Burt Lancaster and Ava Gardner , The Killers reconstructs the past of Swede (Lancaster), a man who, in the opening sequence of the film, passively allows himself to be shot to death by two killers, one a burly Hemingway look-alike, the other a menacing tall man (Figure 4.1). In their formative A Panorama of American Film Noir, 1941–1953, French cultural critics Borde and Chaumeton describe the ‘‘dark absurdism’’ of the opening scene: ‘‘a couple of hired gunmen walk into a small-town...