The Killers (1964)

". . . because it’s Don Siegel and film noir at its best. And because Lee Marvin is outstanding in it. Marvin became a friend after The Dirty Dozen [in which Cooper was one of the dozen]. Sadly, I failed to make a political thriller that Lee and I wanted to do, which had been coscripted by Christopher Hudson, with whom I co-wrote Overlord."

"My wife got a big crush on Chow Yun-Fat after seeing these two John Woo gems (and she doesn’t get starstruck very easily). A movie star is a movie star—if you’ve got it , and Chow has got it. And John Woo knows how to work it. It’s one of the great collaborative pairings between star and director, along with Eastwood/Leone and De Niro/Scorsese. I have some very jealous friends since I have these two out-of-print beauties, which I hear are now next to impossible to find."

"Ernest Hemingway’s superb eight-page short story is the jumping-off point and inspiration for these two essential and very different movies (Stacy Keach reads the story magnificently in one of the DVD extras). I don’t understand why more people don’t know the 1946 Siodmak film. For my money, this is not only the best noir movie of all time but is just about my favorite Hollywood drama from the 1940s. The complex narrative structure begins as a jumbled Rubik’s Cube, and, slowly but surely, each piece falls into its precise place by movie’s end (the stuff Quentin Tarantino’s dreams are made of). The moody atmosphere provided by Siodmak and his technicians is a marvel. The cinematic execution of a heist has never been better. Here marks the birth of two glorious stars: Burt Lancaster (a beautiful caged animal, all teeth) and Ava Gardner (wow). Paul Schrader’s seminal essay on film noir, as a DVD extra, is invaluable. For those of you who wonder why Siegel’s 1964 violent, stylish, quirkily entertaining B version (the first TV movie ever made) is on this list, I have two words for you: Lee Marvin. There has never been a star like him before or since. Words simply cannot do justice to the magic of this guy—the timbre of his voice, the calm, paranoid, roughneck danger in his physical moves. In a spectacular extra on this DVD, fellow actor Clu Gulager gives a very moving (and, one feels while watching it, very truthful) account of working with Marvin, Siegel, and Ronald Reagan (who hated the movie—yet another reason to see it!)."

"The father of a good friend of mine back in Canada used to own a video store in the VHS days. Once it closed down, he let me pick from a bunch of leftover, discarded movies nobody else wanted, which led me to my VHS copy of this that I still own (with Ronald Reagan on the cover!). Though they’re both great, I prefer this 1964 version to the 1946 version, largely due to its unique focus on the story through the hit men themselves (though I’ve never read Hemingway’s original story)."