Tarantino

I always thought so. Prior to The Killers, movie 'hitmen' were all generally anti-social, morose loners or psychopaths, none of whom had any social skills. But the interaction and Hemingway's well-written dialogue for Robert Conrad and Charles McGraw, by itself, is a ground-breaker. As someone else said, the rest of the movie was essentially contrived to give the Hemingway short-story somewhere to go. It was okay with a few bright spots (I loved the tense confrontation between Dum-Dum and and Big Jim Colfax at the card game), but it mostly paled in comparison to the first few minutes of Conrad/McGraw in the diner.

Tarantino seems to have picked up on this and perfected in Pulp Fiction what The Killers should have originally been (and what Don Siegel tried to do later with the remake).

Reminds me more of "Miller's Crossing."