Although it pales beside Andrei Tarkovsky’s version of the same 1927 Ernest Hemingway story, “The Killers,” ten years hence, Robert Siodmak’s version is entirely different. Whereas Tarkovsky’s film conforms to the story, exhausting it and being exhausted by it, only the opening of Siodmak’s film conforms to the text, which is a springboard for the […]
Daily Archives: June 26, 2009
Andrei Tarkovsky was a 24-year-old film student when he co-wrote and co-directed, along with fellow student Aleksandr Gordon, this gripping, suspenseful, philosophical version of Ernest Hemingway’s 1927 “The Killers,” a short story that consists almost entirely of dialogue—dialogue so craftily repetitious and, given the deadly situation in which it arises, piercingly comical that one wonders […]
Dennis Grunes 