An impressive Re-Make of Robert Siodmak's 1946 Film Noir classic The Killers with i.a. Burt Lancaster and Ava Gardner and the
great Don Siegel for sure knew how to make Crime Action movies, and in my eyes his Magnum Opus of this genre was the 1971
Dirty Harry with Clint Eastwood as the loose cannon cop. Well, he was married to Viveca Lindfors too, an achievement perhaps.

The film starts with 2 Hitmen, Charlie (Lee Marvin) and Lee (Clu Gulager) chit-chatting amiably - something that Quentin Tarantino
borrowed and made his trademark, as in i.a. Pulp Fiction - before running into a School for the Deaf and killing the teacher (John
Cassavetes, the fine actor and the legendary indie filmmaker). The name of the teacher is Johnny North, an ex-car racing driver and
he calmly (just as The Swede in the 1946 original) waits for his killers to arrive.

In a bit contrived plot device this makes Charlie to start wondering about why Johnny behaved like that and why they were so well
payed to make the Hit on Johnny. They suspect that he may have been involved in a huge million dollar Heist, and they start to
investigate Johnny's doings as they want to get the money for themselves.
The people they meet tell them about Johnny in .... surprise .... Flashbacks. There are Johnny's mechanic Earl (Claude Akens), his
bombshell of a girlfriend, the gangster-connected Sheila Farr (yummy Angie Dickinson) and there are the gangsters Micky Farmer
(Norman Fell) and Jack Browning (Ronald Reagan in his last film role and his first Bad Guy role ever) with the latter as the boss.

The Original 1946 version

Supposedly this film was originally to have been made for american TV but was stopped due to being too violent, and instead it had
an unimpressive run at the cinemas before being rediscovered and hailed as a Cult movie. A Big reason for it to become Cult is
probably that Ronald Reagan here played the first Bad guy of his whole career and ... was so good doing it, hey, this must be
the greatest role he ever did. But here are some other GREAT actors too, the one and only Lee Marvin, a King Actor that you just
couldn't take your eyes off when on screen, a scene stealer, the great John Cassavetes and Angie Dickinson as a femme fatale.
Reagan as an ice cold, slick and very unlikeable gangster boss, is utterly believable. It's said that he regretted doing the part, but
he was elected Governor shortly afterwards anyway and later elected as President.

This film has almost everything, a cool ending that is notched up to a crescendo, flashbacks, a yummy femme fatale, a Set-Up and
a Double-Setup. A Great Noir Crime Action that's supposedly based on a 1926 Ernest Hemingway story and it was filmed in 1946
and in the Soviet Union in 1956 by Andrei Tarkovskij as The Killers his first film

The film was presented in 4:3 fullscreen original ratio, color, english 5.1 audio, no extras