Metrograph

Siegel was hired to adapt Ernest Hemingway’s 1927 short story—previously filmed in ’46 by Robert Siodmak—as a made-for-TV movie, but the sleek, nasty picture he turned in was deemed too violent for primetime, opening as it did with sharkskin-suited hit men Lee Marvin and Clu Gulager hunting down target John Cassavetes in a school for the blind, and so his cool, cynical The Killers was duly consigned to cinemas. A diamond-hard and fatalistic late noir that, told largely in flashback, lays out the circumstances leading to the liquidation of Cassavetes’s ex-getaway driver Johnny North, doomed by a fatal attraction to Sheila (Angie Dickinson), mistress of bastardly mob boss Jack Browning (Ronald Reagan, brilliantly cast against type in his final film role.) Said Siegel: “Ronnie never fully appreciated until he saw the film that he was really the most evil person in the picture.”

Distributor: Universal