Killers Done to Death

Ernest Hemingway wrote The Killers before breakfast one morning in 1927, cabled it that day from Madrid to his editor, Maxwell Perkins, at Scribner's Magazine in New York, and has never changed one of its 2,000 words. Seen through the eyes of Nick Adams (i.e., young Hemingway), it is a brief, spare story that tells--mostly in a well-wrought ladder of dialogue--about two hired gunmen who have come to a small Michigan town to rub out a doublecrossing Swedish prizefighter. When The Killers appeared on CBS's Buick Electra Playhouse last week, the story's reading time of six minutes had been blown up to 90, and it sagged like an Add-A-Pearl, between an elaborate preamble and a rambling finale.

Adapter A. E. Hotchner almost managed to make it to the first commercial before introducing the killers. By the time he reached the ending of the original story, the TV play still had 41 minutes to go. Scenes minced on and off screen without coming to terms with the story or adding to its significance: a cop with a TV announcer's hairdo trying to lead a lady cashier into adultery, the problems of ambitious adolescents who want too much too soon, a priest who unknowingly gives the fighter's address to the killers. It all had the sound of wooden cymbals.

As Nick Adams, Dean Stockwell gave the impression that he had learned The Method at Hotchkiss, but Dane Clark and Robert Middleton were smooth and competent as the killers, and so was Ray Walston as the frightened owner of the lunchroom in which the killers reveal their plot. Beyond the brief Hemingway dialogue, the show was distinguished only by the Swedish fighter. In a flashback to a Chicago gym, where he was coached in the art of taking a dive, and in the scene from the original, in which he decided that he is "through with all that running" from death, the part of Ole Andreson was naturally and credibly managed by Amateur Actor Ingemar Johansson, world's heavyweight champion.

In Hollywood Johansson has completed another acting chore in Columbia's All the Young Men. He plays a Swede who joins the U.S. Marines to get his citizenship and is shipped to Korea. So excited is Columbia Bigwig Sam Briskin that he hopes to cast Ingo in a western.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.