大象传媒

"I did something very wrong... once," sighs Burt Lancaster as he waits for The Killers of the title to put him out of his misery. Taken directly from Ernest Hemingway's original short story, it's a haunting opening that unspools a gripping tale of desire, duplicity and double-crossing rooted in a hard-boiled cynicism that's almost nihilistic. With Ava Gardner sizzling as the prerequisite femme fatale and a brilliant robbery sequence shot in one unbroken take, Robert Siodmak's noir is as good as it gets.

The intro is pure Tarantino: a pair of laconic assassins drifting into the small town of Brentwood to terrorise the staff and clientele of a humble diner before heading off to pump some lead into Lancaster's boxer turned crook. Enter Edmond O'Brien's dogged insurance investigator, whose quest to find the beneficiary of Burt's policy enables scriptwriter Anthony Veiller and an uncredited John Huston to reveal his involvement in an unsolved heist.

"COMPELLING AND SUSPENSEFUL"

Through a complex series of interlocking flashbacks we meet his partners in crime and the voluptuous siren who played him for a fool - a devastating turn from Gardner in her breakthrough role. As gripping as the plot is, though, it's the movie's bleak, fatalistic mood - aided throughout by Elwood Bredell's chiaroscuro visuals and Miklos Rozsa's menacing score - that makes it such a compelling, suspenseful experience. The fact that two of Lancaster's co-stars would both meet unpleasant ends (Charles McGraw fell through a glass shower door, while Albert Dekker died from autoerotic asphyxia) provides a grisly postscript.

The Killers is out in the UK on 15th February 2008.