The Killers in the black and white version are not the main people in the film but in the black and version the killers are the main people in the film, this is because in the black and white version the killers don’t play a big part in it they just do their job and get out. In the colour version of The Killers the two men do their job but don’t just leave, they stay to find out the big question asked in both versions “Why didn’t the victim run?”.
Ernest Hemingway was an American writer, he only wrote about things he experienced and wouldn’t even think about writing anything that wasn’t true. He wrote short stories on things that truly happened to him e.g. him being a war correspondent, a war hero, a soldier, a tramp, a rich person, a fisherman, etc. He also wrote about his marriages and divorces. The Killers was originally about an ambulance driver in Chicago, in the 1920’s, the “Gangster” days. The first scene of the film is set in a diner called “Henry’s Diner” there you see the man behind the counter called George and another man sitting at the end of the counter called Nick Adams. That’s really Hemingway himself, but doesn’t really star in the film. If you see the name “Nick” in any of Hemingway’s short stories it’s really him, he does this because he really likes this name and wished it was his.
The two killers walked in looking for their victim, Ole Anderson, they played around with George, Nick and the cook Sam for a while before they told the whole story to George about looking for Ole Anderson because they wanted to kill him and they came into the diner to kill him. They asked George if he was going to come in the diner for supper that day but George said no, he always comes in before 6pm and never later than 6pm. So they went and left the cook and Nick tied up in the kitchen. George went to untie them and told Nick to tell Ole Anderson that he was going to get killed by two men, so Nick ran jumping over of other peoples garden fences and sprinting up the stairs to the room of Ole Anderson. In the colour version Nick is an old man which is blind who over hears everything that the killers say, so he can’t run over fences or sprint up any stairs, he phones the victim which is now called Pete Dunn and warns him over the phone. But same as the black and white version the victim doesn’t care and just stands in one place while the killers shoot him.
The films date from 1946 and since then, other films have been made, but with slightly changed characters and the jobs of the characters are changed as well, like in the black and white version Ole Anderson is a heavyweight boxer and in the colour version Pete Dunn is a racing car driver. And George is a man takes orders from behind the counter and in the colour version he waits on the customers. The director of the first ever film of “The Killers” was Robert Siodmak, he made his film in film noir. This means that the film was made in black and white, everything was dark throughout the film, there wasn’t even any sound except the clicking of the clock in the diner. The sound started in the beginning and stopped as soon as you saw the killers enter the diner. The sound was big and loud, and it sounded like a horror movie, it had sounds of a silent movie.
It was set to be in the night time, the angle of the camera was really as though you were standing there looking at everything that was happening from the top. The camera was filming from the ground to point at the ceiling, so it would look like the ceiling was getting narrower as it got to the end of the diner. Robert Siodmak was a German director and wanted everything to be perfect, so that’s why he would draw pictures of every scene before filming it, he had the whole film set out in his head before he did anything.
