photograph
– film still - courtesy La Biennale di
Venezia
#Venezia75 Film Festival - Venice Classics – Restored
The Killers – Robert Siodmak
The screening
of the restored, 1946 film, The Killers directed by Robert Siomak was preceded
by a video introduction from Martin Scorsese. The American film noir, is based
in part on the 1927 short story by Ernest Hemingway. It stars Burt Lancaster in his film debut, Ava
Gardner, Edmond O’Brien and Sam Levene.
Uncredited John Huston and Richard Brooks co-wrote the screenplay, which
is credited to Anthony Veiller. The
Killers was produced for Universal Pictures by Mark Hellinger with Jules Buck.
portrait – Richard Siodmak – courtesy La Biennale di Venezia
“I
always preferred purely fictional gangster films to the documentary-style one
[...]. The times when the crime movie started with banner headlines and police
cars speeding down main streets with sirens blaring are over. They are a gift
from cinema to television! These “headline pictures,” as they were called,
portrayed types, not characters. What I find more interesting than anything
else, though, are characters. The first gangster film I made in Hollywood was
called The Killers. Here the criminals were not just an anonymous mob. Each man
was an individual, an independent and separate being. For a director, I think
the best way to tackle this genre of film is to let the audience work out its
secret. Not in such a way that they have to ask themselves who did it, but to
get them to follow the story from the viewpoint of a character.”
Robert Siodmak
Director’s Statement
in
Films and Filming, vol. V, no. 9, 1959. The passage has been translated from the
Italian version
Joan Juliet
Buck, Jules’s daughter, author of The Price of Illusion introduces the film with
NBC Universal Cassandra Wiltshire and Guilia D’Agnolo Vallan, film historian
and member
of the selection committee of the Venice Film Festival introduce The Killers.
photograph –
film still - courtesy La Biennale di
Venezia
Burt Lancaster
The Killers – Robert Siodmak