Burt Lancaster as a doomed boxer named Ole Anderson, shot dead one night by a couple of hit men, is a seminal character in film noir. He epitomizes the major characteristic of the genre, that of a person caught in dangerous circumstances beyond their control. He’s so caught he never tries to run or defend himself. He lets the killers shoot him. We didn’t spoil anything by telling you that—Anderson is dead ten minutes after the movie opens. Using Ernest Hemingway’s short story of the same name as a starting place, The Killers takes a typical endpoint for a film noir and flips the timeline around so that the drama becomes finding out why Anderson suffered such a hopeless demise. Sunset Boulevard would pull the same trick later in visionary fashion by having the dead character actually narrate the movie. We’ve shown you several posters for The Killers, but this one made for the Australian market is, well, killer. Compare it to the U.S. promo here. The movie premiered in Australia today in 1947.
1989—Los Angeles Herald-Examiner Folds
William Randolph Hearst’s newspaper the Los Angeles Herald-Examiner, which had gained notoriety for its crime and scandal focus, including coverage of the Black Dahlia murder and Charles Manson trials, goes out of business after eighty-six years. Its departure leaves the Los Angeles Times as the sole city-wide daily newspaper in L.A.