The Killers (1946)
Directed by Robert Siodmak
Two hit men walk into a diner asking for a man called "the Swede". When the killers find the Swede, he's expecting them and doesn't put up a fight. Since the Swede had a life insurance policy, an investigator, on a hunch, decides to look into the murder. As the Swede's past is laid bare, it comes to light that he was in love with a beautiful woman who may have lured him into pulling off a bank robbery overseen by another man.
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What critics compared The Killers to
More formally and narratively conventional than 2002’s Spider (or anything in the Canadian auteur’s oeuvre, for that matter), but nonetheless similarly preoccupied with bifurcated identities, personality reinvention, and the constantly shifting borderline between reality and fantasy, Cronenberg’s latest begins, like Robert Siodmak’s The Killers, with the arrival of two thugs at a Norman Rockwell-esque small-town U.S.A diner.
In an electrifying sequence that begins like the opening bravado-dialogue section of Ernest Hemingway’s “The Killers,” then escalates with the flaunting of a gun and the manhandling of a terrified waitress, the soft-spoken Tom hurls boiling hot coffee in one assailant’s face and springs over the counter to seize his gun, which he swiftly uses to kill both men.
With both its urban and rural-cornfield milieus marked by consuming bleakness, Looper harkens back to both Blade Runner and The Killers while nonetheless crafting its own unique spin on noir fatalism.
Its allusions to lots of movies—Walter Hill’s The Driver, Taxi Driver, Bob le flambeur or The Killers, as well as Sixteen Candles (according to Refn ), even The Maltese Falcon and Treasure of the Sierra Madre, are more substantive than the hero’s emotional or moral trajectory.
All the same, Hossein Amini’s adaptation of James Sallis’ short novel feels more threadbare than bracingly terse; he's clearly aspiring to the sort of spare muscularity in crime writing pioneered by Hemingway in The Killers and subsequently employed by many others.
Burt Lancaster, be it in Criss Cross or The Killers, was never able to shake off the inevitability of fate.
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But the witness is murdered in spite of Bullitt's best precautions, gunned down by two professional hit men right out of Hemingway's "The Killers," complete with shotguns.