Friday, January 29, 2021 at 1:05:00 P.M. EST
TCM’s Film Noir of the Week Saturday Night-Sunday Morning at 12:30 and 10 a.m. ET is Don Siegel’s The Killers (1964), with Lee Marvin, Angie Dickinson, Ronald Reagan, John Cassavetes and Clu Gulager.
This was on TCM a few months ago. Supposedly based on the Ernest Hemingway short story, Don Siegel wrote in his autobiography, “The only Hemingway in it is the title ‘Ernest Hemingway’s The Killers.’”
The plot resembles the 1946 film, which started with Hemingway’s story and constructed a back story of why Burt Lancaster’s character wouldn’t run when he knew hit men had come to kill him. John Cassavetes has this role. Marvin and Clu Gulager play the hit men. Lee Marvin’s character is the philosophical criminal you see in movies.
Angie Dickinson plays the Ava Gardner character. To me, Angie is an improvement. Ronald Reagan plays the only Bad Guy of his career in his last film. He did some Death Valley Days episodes after.
The Killers was supposed to be the first ever made for TV movie, but was deemed “too violent,” and was released in theaters.
[N.S.: Imagine that!]
During filming, President John F. Kennedy was assassinated. Angie Dickinson, according to Siegel, went into hysterics upon hearing the news.
In his outro last week, Eddie Muller indicated he would use the future president as the bad guy to do some Reagan-bashing. Two years after The Killers came out, Ronald Reagan was elected Governor of California by nearly a million votes.
2 comments:
The ghost of Marilyn Monroe must have invaded her--and a few other JFK mistresses too--to make her go berserk.Angie got better though after a while--took Sinatra and Carson and many others to make her forget that presidential timber.
--GRA
TCM's Film Noir of the Week Saturday Night-Sunday Morning At Midnight and 10 am ET is The Killer That Stalked New York (1951), with Evelyn Keyes, Charles Korvin, William Bishop, Barry Kelley, screenplay by Harry Essex, directed by Earl McEvoy.
Film Noir Guide: "The killer that's stalking New York isn't the mad-dog kind you might have thought. It's actually smallpox being carried by a nightclub singer and part-time jewel thief (Keyes), who picked up the dreaded disease while in Cuba stealing diamonds for her husband (Korvin). Bishop is the doctor who misdiagnoses her condition and sends her on her way to infect millions of New Yorkers. When health officials become aware of the disease, Bishop is appointed head of an investigating team to find the unknown carrier. Unknown to him, T-man Kelley also is hunting for Keyes, who's becoming progressively sicker as she wanders the city searching for her cheating husband (he's taken off with the diamonds). Broadcasting the motto 'Be safe, Be Sure, Be Vaccinated!,' the city begins the almost impossible task of vaccinating all New Yorkers, some of whom, in cynical Big Apple fashion, are dead set against it, believing it all to be hype. But when the vaccine runs out, city officials are faced with a possible panic. This effective little suspense noir, with Keyes doing a fine job as a latter-day Typhoid Mary, was made the same year as the similar Panic in the Streets. When Panic hit the theaters first, Killer was held by the studio and not released until the following year."
Last week in his outro, Eddie called this one "timely."
Post a Comment