Word: swedes
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...picture opens in the lunch wagon where Nick Adams is eating his supper. The two men in the overly tight black overcoats come in looking for the Swede. From then on, for the next five or six minutes it is straight Hemingway. Except for editing out a reference to the cook as "nigger," Director Robert Siodmak plays Hemingway's tough, tight little story straight and to the letter...
...elevens behind that board fence are running from a straight "T" this year. Gone is the "Harlow Wing", the "Semi-T", or whatever by any other name was a modified single-wing. Gone, too, are the days of the long-suffering Harvard blocking back, men like George Helden and Swede Anderson who went a season through without carrying the ball. Today's quarterback has got to have a touch of Vernon Struck in him, a touch of the fullback who made the Harlow system famous in 1937 with his spins and weaves and fakes...
...Killers (Mark Hellinger-Universal), as Ernest Hemingway wrote it, was a short story and a simple one. It told how a pair of professional assassins talked tough to some people in a lunch wagon. Horrified young Nick Adams (Hemingway as a boy) managed to warn their quarry, the Swede, but the Swede just stayed on his bed, knowing he could not escape. Within a few crisp pages of dialogue, Hemingway created a masterpiece in terror-by-suggestion...
...Producer Mark Hellinger into a full-length movie. There is a bangup opening with a good reproduction of the short story, virtually as Hemingway wrote it. Then an insurance investigator (Edmond O'Brien) noses in on the inexplicable killing. His research takes him to the dead Swede's beneficiary, an Atlantic City chambermaid (Queenie Smith), to a Philadelphia detective (Sam Levene) and, with their help, through more & more plot-laden flashbacks of ringside and gangster life...
...turns out, the Swede (screen newcomer Burt Lancaster) was a natural born fall guy. By the time such seasoned misbehaviorists as Albert Dekker and Ava Gardner are through with him, the double-and triple-crossings get so thick that his death seems about the only simple thing in his career...