Robert Siodmak’s The Killers is perilously overwhelmed by a cynical, fatalistic attitude, embodied by Ole ‘the Swede’ Andersen but also reflected in both the plot structure and the visual style. Using flashbacks as its driving force, Anthony Veiller’s screenplay reinforces the Swede’s defeatist outlook and metaphorically suggests that while he knows how to escape, he is simply incapable. Furthermore, Siodmak uses mirrors, shadows, oblique angles, camera movement and the overall mise-en-scène to create an alienating atmosphere that expressively communicates emotion and anxiously distorts perspectives.
Structured curiously similar to Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane, The Killers depicts a mysterious man’s death in the present and then reverts to acquaintance flashbacks in order to slowly assemble the pieces of his life that help to explain his strange death. As in Welles’ film, The Killers’ conventional protagonist is impersonal; Reardon is a stand-in for the viewer, as our knowledge is limited to what can be obtained from others’ memories. Moreover, the plot’s flashback structure is formally appropriate to the film’s theme of fatalism and noir’s motif of the past inevitably catching up with people. The Swede’s admission that “there’s nothing [he] can do” conveys the presence of a troubled past that has led him to believe that life is no longer worth fighting for. Every flashback that Reardon elicits henceforth ultimately leads to the same conclusion of the Swede being killed without resistance, and this is reinforced by the constant discussion of his brutal death between Reardon and the Swede’s acquaintances.
While the Swede’s cynicism is obvious from his deathbed conversation with Nick Adams, the extent of his defeatist attitude is only understood through a boxing metaphor inserted somewhat deceptively into the film. In Lt. Lubinsky’s flashback of the Swede’s last boxing match, the fighter is getting pummeled and his trainers repeatedly urge him to throw his right, advising him that it’s his only chance to win. The Swede gets battered over and over, and the viewer waits impatiently for him to throw his right. It never happens. It’s later revealed that his hand was broken, rendering him incapable of using it. This sequence gives a crucial explanation for his attitude toward his death—he knows that he can keep running, but he’s been emotionally wounded and is simply no longer capable. Nick repeatedly urges him to flee, but he can’t. He has a fractured heart, or pride, or perhaps both.
While the film’s structure is built to reflect its themes, Siodmak creates a visual style that works to both reinforce the alienation and fatalism of the content as well as to expressively translate emotion. Robert Porfirio argues that The Killers expresses itself most formatively through the use of the moving camera and the long take. While both of these stylistic approaches are important, I contend that Siodmak is most interested in manipulating perspective (via mirrors and strategic camera angles) as well as the flattening and sculpting of space through the use of camera movement, lighting, and composition (178).
Throughout the film, Siodmak uses various techniques to carve out and flatten space in the frame—sometimes even simultaneously. An example of this co-occurence is established early in the film, when Nick warns the Swede of his assassins. The camera pans right from the Swede’s bed to Nick arriving at the door, and then back left as he alerts him, sculpting the space of the Swede’s room. The camera then settles on a static shot of Nick and the Swede, though, and a low-key light throws Nick’s silhouette onto the wall, as if his shadow were standing over the Swede from the opposite side of the bed. The dissonance of the three-dimensional Nick and the flattened double creates a deeply unsettling tone.
In the scene at Colfax’s party, Siodmak uses these ideas to more expressive ends. Shot in deep focus, Lilly watches the Swede as he stares, transfixed, at Kitty during her song. Each character on a different plane within the frame, the camera pans right as the Swede walks toward Kitty, positioning himself on the other side of a lamp between them. Building up passion with a few more shots, the film then cuts to a fixed shot of the Swede right beside Kitty, with the lamp literally representing a passionate fire between the two future lovers. The lamp is clearly in the foreground, but the fixed frame flattens the image and reinforces the symbolism as it splits the frame between them.
Siodmak also employs mirrors to manipulate and distort space, most notably in the climactic scene at the Green Cat. As Reardon and Kitty enter the café, the camera watches them through a mirror from an ostensibly canted angle. When the pair finally sit down in front of the mirror, it’s realized that the angle is not canted, but rather the mirror is leaned forward, creating an oblique spatial perspective of the room (a possible homage to the perspective dissonance of Manet’s “A Bar at the Folies-Bergère”). Furthermore, a feline statue, flattened by the mirror, appears to be glaring at Reardon forebodingly, an apparent metaphor for Kitty. The combined effect of these elements creates a palpable sense of insecurity and discomfort, priming viewers for the sudden outburst of violence.
The unsettling, fatalistic thematic content of The Killers is reinforced by both its structure and its visual approach, which work hand-in-hand to express a feeling of indomitable dread. Anthony Veiller turns murder into a ubiquitous topic of discussion, and Robert Siodmak creates an expressive environment with the spatial and dimensional discordance of a carnival funhouse. Although the film’s cheerful, Code-influenced ending suggests resistance to such cynicism, its false reassurance cannot alleviate the visceral bleakness of everything before it.
