The director Don Siegel’s 1964 version of Ernest Hemingway’s darkly comic story of death and its dealers (which I discuss in this clip) was Ronald Reagan’s last feature film, and the only one, it’s said, in which he plays the bad guy. The screenplay, by Gene Coon (who was mainly a TV writer—he worked on lots of Westerns, then did “Star Trek”), doesn’t keep much of the story—just its essence, about two sardonically brutal hit men and their intended target, who knows there’s no point to fleeing. One of the joys of the grimly suave film is the interplay between the sleek gunsels—played by Lee Marvin and Clu Gulager. Here’s what Siegel told Peter Bogdanovich about them (in the great interview collection “Who the Devil Made It”):
Siegel conveyed the ugliness and the horror that often lodges beneath alluring surfaces, whether of behavior or of objects; the luminous delights of his sleek and allusive direction convey a terrifyingly cold worldview.
