Like Billy Wilder, who he collaborated with in 1920s Berlin, Robert Siodmak was born into a Jewish family and also like Wilder, he fled Germany with the rise of Nazism. In Siodmak’s case, it was following a public attack by the Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels of his 1933 film Brennendes Geheimnis.
Siodmak worked in Paris for six years before making his way to American and Hollywood. Once there he established a reputation for making economical sharp B features with a distinctive expressionist style which would inform and influence the evolving noir mood of American cinema.
Adapted from a Hemingway short story, The Killers is essential post-war existential cinema where our doomed hero (Burt Lancaster in his screen debut starring alongside Ava Gardner) awaits his inevitable violent death. The opening scenes are still breathtaking in their taut depiction of small-town America visited by trouble from outside.
