Three Dames To Kill For. Part Two: Ava Gardner in The Killers

Two professional killers roll into a sleepy town to kill 'The Swede'. He's expecting them and he welcomes his assassination. An insurance investigator pursues the case and pulls together the threads of The Swede's life, uncovering a convoluted tale of treachery, a heist gone bad, and a femme fatale, the mysterious Kitty Collins...

Adapted from an Ernest Hemingway short story, the first twenty minutes of The Killers is a faithful adaptation, even retaining the author's trademark laconic dialogue. Producer Mark Hellinger paid $36,000 for the story, making it the most expensive short story in Hollywood history at the time. Reportedly, Hellinger called Hemingway up, asking him what the rest of the story might be, to which the author replied, "How the hell do I know?"

Luckily Hellinger brought in an uncredited John Huston to work on the script with Richard Brooks, and together they improvised an excellent and solidly plotted bit of noir storytelling. Hellinger and director Robert Siodmak made the decision to light the movie in what they condsidered to be naturalistic way: four lights instead of forty for the moment the killers roll into town, no fill lights when the actor's eyes became shadowed; even Ava Gardener being sent back to her trailer to remove all make-up, save for a little vaseline applied to her skin for a sheen effect.

Film noir: phantasmagorical style in the name of naturalism. Woody Bredell's cinematography on The Killers is where all the cliches of film noir lighting spring from.

The labyrinthine plot, full of the usual double-crosses and and twists is composed of flash-backs (sometimes flash-backs within flash-backs)and is as grim and fateful in its unfolding as a film noir yarn should be. Burt Lancaster, in his screen debut plays the tough but limited Swede, doomed as the 'lucky stiff' who falls for Gardner's Kitty Collins.

I've only recently finished reading Love Is Nothing, by Lee Server, the biography of Ava Gardner. I picked it up on a whim, knowing little about Gardner or her work, and expected the book (which is a bit of a doorstep at 500-plus pages) to be a bit of work. But it was a joy from start to finish, due to the fascinating life Gardner lived, and the ultra-cool James Ellroy-like style that Server writes with.

It's fair to say that Ava Gardner lived life to the fullest. She was married to Mickey Rooney, jazz musician Artie Shaw and Frank Sinatra. She was pursued by Howard Hughes, and befriended by Hemingway (who carried around one of her kidney stones as a lucky charm).

The Killers was the first of Gardner's films that really announced her prescence in Hollywood, despite the fact that she has relatively little screen time. But when she is on screen, she is positively luminous; the epitome of the femme fatale.

My favourite line? "Don't ask a dying man to lie himself into hell!"

A quintessential piece of film noir.