Based in part on the 1927 short story of the same name by Ernest Hemingway,[3] it focuses on an insurance detective's investigation into the execution by two professional killers of a former boxer who was unresistant to his own murder.

Released in August 1946, The Killers was a critical and commercial success, earning four Academy Award nominations, including for Best Director and Best Adapted Screenplay.

Rejecting Lubinsky's suggestion to join the police force, the Swede becomes mixed up with crime boss "Big Jim" Colfax and drops his girlfriend Lilly for the more glamorous Kitty Collins.

When Lubinsky, now married to Lilly, catches Kitty wearing stolen jewelry, the Swede confesses to the crime and attacks him, leading to three years in prison.

She admits having taken the money after her meeting with the Swede in Atlantic City and agrees to offer Colfax as a fall guy to save herself, believing Reardon's revelation that he has evidence against her.

The first 20 minutes of the film, showing the arrival of the two contract killers and the murder of "Swede" Anderson is a close adaptation of Hemingway's 1927 short story in Scribner's Magazine.

The initial screenplay was rewritten by Richard Brooks, then a contracted story writer for Hellinger, and then heavily re-worked by Anthony Veiller and his frequent collaborator John Huston.

Only Veiller is credited on the final film, Huston went uncredited due to his contract with Warner Bros. Siodmak later said Hellinger's newspaper background meant he "always insisted on each scene ending with a punchline and every character being overestablished with a telling remark" which the director fought against.

[7] Other actors considered for the part include Van Heflin, Jon Hall, Sonny Tufts, and Edmond O'Brien, who was cast in the role of the insurance investigator.

Gardner had difficulty achieving the requisite histrionics necessary at the end of the film when Sam Levene memorably tells her "Don't ask a dying man to lie his soul into Hell."

He wrote "With Robert Siodmak's restrained direction, a new actor, Burt Lancaster, gives a lanky and wistful imitation of a nice guy who's wooed to his ruin.

"[9] In a review of the DVD release, Scott Tobias, while critical of the screenplay, described the noir style, writing "Lifted note-for-note from the Hemingway story, the classic opening scene of Siodmak's film sings with the high tension, sharp dialogue, and grim humor that's conspicuously absent from the rest of Anthony Veiller's mediocre screenplay...A lean block of muscles and little else, Burt Lancaster stars as the hapless victim, an ex-boxer who was unwittingly roped into the criminal underworld and the even more dangerous gaze of Ava Gardner, a memorably sultry and duplicitous femme fatale...[Siodmak] sustains a fatalistic tone with the atmospheric touches that define noir, favoring stark lighting effects that throw his post-war world into shadow.

[14] Wins Nominations—1947 Academy Awards American Film Institute Lists The Killers was dramatized as a half-hour radio play on the June 5, 1949, broadcast of Screen Director's Playhouse, starring Burt Lancaster, Shelley Winters and William Conrad.

In 1956, director Andrei Tarkovsky, then a film student, created a 19-minute short based on the story which is featured on the Criterion Collection's release of the DVD.

[20] The Killers has come to be regarded as a classic in the years since its release,[21][22] and in 2008, was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant.