Robert Siodmak's classic forties noir took the bare bones of a short story by Ernest Hemingway and layered it with black-and-white fatalism. The essence is in the predicament: two sneery thugs turn up at a diner, giving grief to the owner and trying to catch sight of an ex-boxer called Ole Andreson who they know works there. The other diner staff soon glean that the men want to kill him; Andreson knows they want to kill him, but doesn't make any attempt to run away, resist, fight back or even leave his room. No one knows exactly why they want to kill him but they engage in passive supposition: "Must have got mixed up in something in Chicago double-crossed somebody that's what they do." In Siodmak's film, the fatalistic victim is the young Burt Lancaster as 'the Swede'; the story is rounded off with insurance investigator Edmond O'Brien's attempts to find out why he met his death so resignedly. It leads to the classic tale of the boxer who welshed on a deal to throw the fight, the type of twice-told tale pastiched by Tarantino in the 'Gold Watch' section of Pulp Fiction. By the time celebrated hardboiled director Don Siegel came to remake the movie for TV in 1964, the all-American capitalist hitman had become a laconic antihero. This time it was Lee Marvins sharp-suited, grizzled Mob assassin who conducts the posthumous investigation into why his victim - racing driver John Cassavettes - gave up the ghost so easily. It's a strange conundrum: the living instrument of murder reflecting on the reason for it, with Ronald Reagan, then just a couple of years away from becoming Governor of California, as a slimy corporate gang boss who somehow rings truer than all the nice guy roles 'the Gypper' played in his career. Marvin is the iconic, emotionless hit man in thin-lapelled suit and skinny tie, his archetype echoing down the decades as a very recognisable 90s pastiche...
Writer/editor/ghost-writer transfixed by crime, cinema and the serrated edges of popular culture. Those similarly afflicted are invited to make contact.
