LEE MARVIN'S GANGSTER QUARTET Part One

Ernest Hemingway's THE KILLERS (1964: Dir. Don Siegel)

Lee Marvin has a mystique all his own, a cool cat with a threat of menace buried under his sonorous baritone utterances. Marvin had seen combat and the horrors of war haunted his every performance. As if rushing headlong toward a precipice, his most memorable characters were always looking for a way out with booze, money, or women. It was a personality molded during the course of his earlier roles, particularly starring as driven Detective Lt. Frank Ballinger on the TV Series M Squad ( 1957-1960). By the early Sixties Marvin had only achieved co-star status in features and was considered a long shot at leading man. His big break and the beginning of his jump to stardom would be a unique film entitled Ernest Hemingway's The Killers. This was a pet project of Lew Wasserman's, the former uber agent turned head honcho of Universal Pictures. He prophetically envisioned a market for films made directly for television using lesser names and smaller budgets than the studio's theatrical releases. To inaugurate this new small screen genre Wasserman hired journeyman director Don Siegel (Invasion of the Body Snatchers) to produce and direct Universal's pioneering first effort, a very loose adaptation of Hemingway's famous short story. Siegel cast Lee Marvin, Angie Dickinson, and his close friend John Cassavetes, while Wasserman called in a favour by asking his old client Ronald Reagan, who was already making the leap into politics, to play the villain. Deserving of its cult reputation, the film was Siegel at his best, delivering a compelling hard-boiled story with grit and verve. Slightly undermined by a limited budget which forced him to sacrifice location work for in-studio process shots, Siegel nonetheless fostered emotionally powerful work from all of his actors, including supporting players Claude Akins, Norman Fell, and youthfully eccentric Universal contract player Clu Gulagher. Not surprisingly it was Marvin who impressed the most. With his steely eyes hidden beneath stylized sunglasses, he effortlessly embodied the cold brutality of Hemingway's hit-man, while at the same time effectively establishing the cornerstones of his future on-screen persona. In tribute to Lee's disturbingly remorseless behaviour, the film was deemed too violent for broadcast, so it was released to cinemas instead, where its dark tone clashed with the depressed mood of a public recently traumatized by the assassination of their President. Denied a starring hit, Marvin had nonetheless delivered the first in his series of legendary juggernaut protagonists. DVD & BLU-RAY