“The first ten minutes of The Killers are a test case in the uneasy relationship between film and literature. Very faithful to the mood and language of the Hemingway short story, the opening launches a full-length film which one believes Hemingway might have written. Perhaps the trick works so well because the short story is always like a thing seen, never forgotten but never fully explained. As it is, though the movie is coherent and exciting, its eventual explanation is flat and plain compared to the sudden enigma of the opening, in which a small-town diner out of Edward Hopper is taken over by two supremely hard men--Charles McGraw and William Conrad--who seem never to have known home, innocence or hope. They establish the mythic menace of the larger world as if they were a new kind of tough shadow invented by photographer Woody Bredell.
“Robert Siodmak was so good at handling this gloomy action that one easily overlooks the visual grace of the fatal inquiry. Edmond O'Brien is the insurance man whose doubts and wonderings guide the story, and his rather soiled, tired energy makes a human being out of the stooge figure. There's more to enjoy in Sam Levene, Albert Dekker, Phil Brown, Jack Lambert, Jeff Corey, as well as the wide-eyed treachery of Ava Gardner's Kitty Collins. Burt Lancaster is the center of the story--a hero going numb with sadness, just like Hemingway's forlorn Swede.” David Thomson