The Killers: No Regrets

4 December 2025

Insomnia has its uses.

Last night, I couldn’t get to sleep for about two hours after a late evening viewing of the 1946 Hollywood film noir, The Killers.  Directed by Robert Siodmak, and starring Burt Lancaster, in his film debut; along with Ava Gardner, Edmond O’Brien and Sam Levene, The Killers takes place in Brentwood, New Jersey.

Now, I, a NJ-native/refugee, never heard of Brentwood, New Jersey, but that oddity is of a piece with this movie, based on the 1927 short story of the same name by Ernest Hemingway.  The screenplay was masterfully written by Anthony Veiller, with uncredited contributions (and undoubtedly terrific touches of dialogue and narration) by John Huston and Richard Brooks.

Lancaster plays an incredibly passive victim and erstwhile, though small-time, villain.  Gardner, whose voice never matured beyond the sound of a little girl, plays a real stinker.  My gut instinct tells me the portrayal didn’t require much acting from her.  (What was Frank thinking?  Was he thinking?)

The plot is tightly woven and succinctly played out, shot in black-and-white, and directed with film-noir techniques that became standard for the genre.  All in all, it’s an outstanding film.  It is so outstanding, in fact, that the inevitable, inferior remake was done, in 1964, with an entirely different, and screwed-up, plot line:

Two professional hit men are so stunned that their contract victim didn’t attempt to flee them, they try to discover who hired them, and why.

How boring can this we-done-it get?

The flick is done in that too vibrant and garish-mid-1960s color.  The characters have been completely changed.  The actors playing them were either at the start of their careers (Lee Marvin, Angie Dickinson, John Cassavetes, Claude Akins), or at the end, as in Ronald Reagan.  He plays a heavy.  I don’t how good or bad he was in this role, because I haven’t watched this movie, nor do I intend to.  Just looking at the promo-pix, I can see this production veers (and wildly, I might add) toward slasher-cinema.

The Killers of 1964, was Reagan’s last film.  Judging from its messed-up plot and graphic violence, I’d venture to say that he asked himself, out loud, “What the heck am I doing here?”

Ah!  The telling difference that the order of two numbers makes!

1946 sure ain’t 1964.

In 1966, the time for choosing had already come for Ronald Reagan, and that choice became only more obvious as the 1970s, Jimmy Carter, and his Misery Index dragged the USA toward the dumpster.

I was a very young woman then, on my own, with other very young Americans, on their own.  We worked hard, and we watched our older peers (the Boomers) play hard, and work minimally.  We decided the time for choosing had passed those spoiled brats by.  We weren’t about to get caught up in their lazy foolishness and pompous self-destructiveness in the booming economy of the 1980s.

The 1990s then arrived, and, with those years, now known as the Holiday from History, we felt a sense of loss that, for me, became measurable only during the Reagan funeral in June 2004.  My children watched their mother cry in a way they’d never seen.  I am proud to this day that I allowed them to witness my grief.

Tens of millions of Americans felt that grief.  It’s a void that, for me, still goes unfilled.  The months and years ahead will prove just how that void becomes enriched.

During the 2000s, but particularly post-9/11, there were many times when friends would ask me, “Where is our Reagan?”

I’d calmly, but sadly, state:  “Ronald Reagan couldn’t get elected today.  You need to let go of those years.”

And that was the end of that conversation!

Patriotic Americans didn’t want to let go of those abundantly inspirational years, eight of them, that went by so fast.  I forced myself to let go of those precious moments, even though I didn’t want to.  I knew, however, that We the People were riding the crest of a humongous wave, but wherever it was going, I sure couldn’t say.

I could say that we needed to believe in the hand of God.  We needed to trust that a hero would come forth.  And, then, when he did, in 2016, this nation, or the heroic citizens of this nation, started down a path that is still miraculously and magnificently unfolding.

Experience has its cost, and so does knowledge.  I realized during my insomnia last night that the audacity of Ronald Wilson Reagan was to actually do what he said he was going to do.  He dared to dream, and then he dreamed to dare — and he doggedly went up against what has since become known as The Deep State, and the Swamp.

Without an assassination attempt on his life on 30 March 1981 (and The Media of that Era got much of that factual information wrong), President Reagan might not have accomplished so much of his powerfully historic agenda.

For me, the 1990s were about the rude, callous shoving aside of people of merit, phenomenal talent, hard-earned achievement, abundant technical prowess, and long-standing and revered authority — by the pushy pushy parasites so they could feast upon the Peace Dividend, and the America that Ronald Reagan & Company saved from its own dustbin of history.

I was disgusted afterward, for decades. by the likes, and the sights, of those parasites — the politicians, talking heads, and other assorted weirdo traitors — who are now feeble, old, decrepit, dissipated and wizened by their corruption, deviancy, and freaky life-style-choices.

Last night, after a lengthy confrontation with my conscience, and my highly accurate and detailed memories, between midnight and two a.m., I arrived at a state of zen.  I feel no regrets for the past thirty-five years that transpired in America.  God used the ignoble in this nation to arrive at the most noble of purposes.

There wasn’t any plan of succession after the end of the Cold War, in the USA, in the Soviet Union, in Western Europe, anywhere on the face of this unchanging and changing earth.  Power hates a void.  Into that void rushed the greedy parasites of the political class, the corporate sphere, and the tag-along camp followers, called The Media, and re-named Fake News.

Those parasites have had their fill of the detritus that they thought were the sumptuous spoils of winning a war, any war, all those endless wars that glutted the rotten ruling class that is crumbling as I type these words.

Once again, the Elites were wrong in their presumptions, but those bloodsuckers, boot-lickers, leeches, hangers-on, takers, sycophants, deadbeats and flunkies usually are.

America is entering the golden era that Ronald Reagan foresaw, and worked to set into motion, in the 1980s.  He did not live to see that shining city on the hill shine, brighter than ever before, on this earth.  He, and his faithful, protective wife, presently admire this blessed nation, and the multitude of patriots, from the celestial dimension that was of their choosing.

Let the betrayers call us Killers whenever we defend our liberty, our sacred honor, our children, our nation, and ourselves.  The blood is on their hands.  That blood only gets more crimson, indelible, and increases with each savage consequence of their crimes against America.

I’ve no regrets for being proud to be an American, or for asking God to bless the U.S.A.