Hollywood’s affection for sensationalized criminal exploits has long been a part of America’s steady cinematic diet, in part because of how the crime genre allows creators to explore real human drama in exaggerated, but entirely plausible, situations. For as heinous as the actions of Walter White or Tony Montana may be, they’re compelling characters because we see some of ourselves within them.The draconian moral restrictions of the Motion Picture Production Code (better known as the Hays Code) reigned supreme from its introduction in 1934 until its gradual decline in the mid-50s, and while it certainly constrained the crime film, the genre still thrived in the form of film noir. In stark black-and-white, the classics of the movement explored morally grey characters — often lawbreakers and social miscreants — during an era where legislation demanded that on-screen criminals must always be punished. But filmmakers like Billy Wilder, Alfred Hitchcock, and more pushed the Code to its absolute limits. And in 1946, director Robert Siodmak used a short story by Ernest Hemingway as a springboard for a stone-cold classic that invites viewers to empathize with the desperation and bitter mistakes that turn into a life (and death) outside the law.The bleak opening scene of The Killers is a perfect summation of the atmosphere of film noir, and it’s easy to see why it has influenced so many descendants. In a sleepy New Jersey town, suffused in inky black shadows courtesy of Woody Bredell’s stark cinematography, a pair of hard-faced hitmen drive into town with death riding shotgun. Their target: a lowly gas pump attendant named Pete Lund (a then-unknown Burt Lancaster) who also goes by “The Swede”; after terrifying the unlucky staff and lone patron of the local diner into giving him up, they execute a strangely-accepting Lund in bed with a thunderous rain of bullets.All of this happens in the span of 10 minutes, and the sequence is so jarring as to leave viewers fully at attention with a brain full of questions — the same questions on the mind of Jim Riordan (Edmund O’Brien), the life insurance investigator assigned to track down the beneficiary of Pete Lund’s $2500 policy. Film noir had a tendency to feature “investigators” outside of traditional police structures such as private detectives — the insurance industry plays a big role in another famous film noir, Double Indemnity — but here, it feels grimly ironic. A human being is snuffed out in an act of gruesome violence, and at the end of the day, their entire life amounts to a four-digit number cash payout.They might be very good at shooting people but they're awful diner patrons. | Universal PicturesClearly a workplace overachiever, Riordan tracks down The Swede’s former friends and acquaintances one-by-one, each one slowly filling in a piece of the jagged puzzle that is the murdered man’s life. He finds the mysterious Mary Ellen Doherty (Queenie Smith) mentioned in the life insurance policy, a meek hotel cleaning woman who once stopped Lund from committing suicide after a lover ran off on him. Doherty points him in the direction of police lieutenant Sam Lubinsky (Sam Levene), an old friend of The Swede’s who reveals that Lund was once a boxer who was forced to retire after a crippling hand injury. Lubinsky’s wife Lilly (Virginia Christine), The Swede’s former girlfriend, tells her own story and explains how she and Lund drifted apart after he fell in love with the alluring Kitty Collins (Ava Gardner). Each anecdote is accompanied by a flashback, and it’s in these that Burt Lancaster gets to show off his talents outside of being an Old Hollywood heartthrob — he’s an earnest oaf searching for a place to lay his head and finding it in all the worst spots.Riordan finds out that Lund spent three years in jail after taking the fall for jewelry stolen by Kitty, and a chance encounter with Lund’s former cellmate exposes the full scope of the mystery: After release, both Lund and his cellmate were invited to take part in a factory payroll heist put together by “Big Jim” Colfax (Albert Dekker), a crime boss who is now in a tumultuous and seemingly violent relationship with Kitty. Upon seeing his old flame, Pete is incapable of walking away, and decides to take part in the scheme — even though the escalating tensions in the love triangle between him, Big Jim, and Kitty spell out doom to anyone paying attention.There are two things that make the world go around in film noir: love and the almighty dollar. | Universal PicturesFor a movie made during the height of the Hays Code, the film displays remarkable empathy towards Pete’s character. He’s not a greedy mastermind or a bloodthirsty deviant, but a man who finds himself in dire straits because of circumstances outside of his control — circumstances that get considerably worse when dumb, blinding love is added to the mix. The movie never makes excuses or concessions for his actions, but it does present the honest reality of how many criminals end up that way because of the quickly compounding cost of understandable if still wrong actions.The hail of gunfire in the opening isn’t presented with the sensationalism of Hollywood crime spectacle, but instead it’s slowly contextualized as a tragic requiem for someone who might not garner sympathy if their worst actions were all they amounted to. The best part of The Killers isn’t the engaging, well-paced mystery or the ensemble — it’s in the way the script rejects the moral absolutism of the Hays Code to show a flawed human life from multiple different angles, none wholly good or wholly bad.The Killers is available to rent on Prime Video and other digital platforms.