So this isn’t the new David Fincher movie (that’s The Killer, singular), it’s a 1946 noir based on an Ernest Hemingway short story. But it is about hitmen, sort of: As the movie opens, two guys come into a small town diner, make some trouble, and say that they’re here to kill “the Swede,” this quiet unassuming guy who works at the gas station (they kept saying “filling station,” which confused me for a minute) across the street.

It’s not too much of a spoiler to say that they succeed in their goal, because this is all just setup, and the movie is about an insurance investigator digging into what happened here to try to figure out why this guy got rubbed out. (“Why an insurance investigator, of all people?” you might ask. Well, the movie establishes right upfront that the cops aren’t going to do shit about it, and he’s just personally intrigued well beyond what’s necessary to do his job — a kind of running through-line is that he’s arguing with his boss that he should stay on this case instead of doing his real work. The boss is annoyed by this, but basically lets him as a morale/retention move.)

The storyline is actually fairly complex, with a structure that’s reminiscent of Citizen Kane, where this guy goes around and talks to people and gets little bits of the story achronologically, and then has to assemble it all together into a complete narrative that solves the mystery. Unlike Citizen Kane, he ultimately does solve the mystery, and the insurance company gets back some money. The dude is all chuffed that he saw justice done and all that; meanwhile his boss is like “thanks to your work, our clients’ rates will be 0.01% lower next year, great job, take the whole weekend off,” which is an amazingly nihilistic ending.

Stylistically, this is very noir, contrasty black and white with sharply angled lights and deep shadows that have strong German Expressionist vibes — which makes sense, as the director, Robert Siodmak, was German and directed a bunch of movies there before fleeing first to Paris and then to Hollywood for Hitler-related reasons.

So this was apparently successful at the time, and even got Siodmak a Best Director Oscar nomination (as well as nominations for the screenplay, editing, and music). But I’ll be honest and admit that I’d never heard of it, nor Siodmak, before it popped up on a Criterion Channel list of noir films. (I had heard of the movie’s stars, Burt Lancaster and Ava Gardner, before — but apparently this was Lancaster’s debut and Gardner’s first leading dramatic role, so they weren’t yet big famous stars when this was made.) I keep having these experiences where I watch some completely random movie I’ve never heard of, and it’s actually really good, and my first takeaway is “man, old movies were really good, I guess!” but of course, I’m not really randomly watching old movies, I’m watching old movies that have been carefully curated for me by people who know their shit and have good taste, and I guess the real takeaway is that knowledgeable curation is good?

But yeah, it is good. It’s not like mind-blowingly great or anything, this quite rightly doesn’t belong on any list of all-time excellent movies. But it does what it sets out to do with skill — it’s well-written, well-acted, and visually interesting. And of course it’s also now a time capsule from 1946, which always adds another layer of fascination for me (like: A hat factory plays a prominent role! Hard to believe that’s even a thing, except that every character wears a hat all the time). Recommended if you just want to chill with an interesting noir.

As a random aside, this was apparently remade in the ’60s as a made-for-TV movie (starring Lee Marvin, Angie Dickinson, John Cassavetes(!), and Ronald Reagan(!!)) as an apparently very loose adaptation that makes significant changes to everything, and is also brightly lit and colorful as you’d expect for a TV movie but wouldn’t for a noir. It was also remade by Andrei Tarkovsky(!!!) as a student film; I clicked on this (it’s on the Criterion Channel as an extra) out of curiosity, and from the first scene, it seems to be a very faithful (like, nearly identical dialogue even) lower-budget version in Russian; I didn’t want to spend a whole movie’s length rewatching a story I’d just seen, but I see now that it’s actually a 20 minute short, which makes me both more curious (how do you compress this down that far?) and significantly cuts the time investment to satisfy that curiosity, so I expect I will watch it.