How do you get promoted from hitman to crime boss?

How do you work your way up from lowly hitman to crime boss? Well, apparently one way is to move from movies to dramatic radio.
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It worked for William Conrad. In 1946, Universal Pictures released an adaptation of Ernest Hemingway's 1927 short story "The Killers." Hemingway's original story is a terse and very suspenseful tale about a couple of thugs who show up in a small town diner. They're looked for a guy called the Swede. When someone manages to warn the Swede about the killers, he refuses to run or fight, fatalistically accepting his death.





One of the reasons the short story has so much impact is that we don't know who the Swede is or why the two men have been hired to kill him. The movie, though, needed to provide an explanation. So the opening scenes give us a pretty faithful adaptation of Hemingway's tale, then employs a series of flashbacks to let us know the whole story behind it all. Burt Lancaster is the Swede--an ex-boxer turned crook who gets double-crossed by just about everyone, including the woman he loves. Ava Gardner is the woman and Albert Dekker is the leader of the gang to which the Swede belonged.
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It's a great film noir, with a strong script that manages to keep track of its multiple flashbacks and tell the complex story clearly. Ava Gardner is perfect as a femme fatale--managing to simultaneously be both cold-bloodedly selfish and utterly desirable. Robert Siodmak directed the film, using stark shadows to give the whole film an appropriately fatalistic look.
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But we were talking about getting promoted from hitman to boss. That's where William Conrad comes in. He has his first credited film roll is here, playing one of the killers sent to whack the Swede.
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At the same time, Conrad (with his distinctive deep voice and notable skill as a character actor) was getting a lot of work on radio. He was, of course, the star of the radio version of Gunsmoke, but he also popped up regularly on Escape. Before long, it seemed like it was impossible to tune into a dramatic radio show without hearing Conrad playing one of the roles. He could be heard on Suspense, The Whistler, The Voyage of the Scarlett Queen, and dozens of other shows.
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So when The Screen Directors' Playhouse opted to do a radio adaptation of The Killers during their June 5, 1949 broadcast, it wasn't surprising that Conrad had a part.
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But the Playhouse broadcast had to whittle the story down to fit into a thirty minute time slot. It actually managed to do so with surprising skill. Ironically, this meant the sequence from Hemingway's original story--the diner scene--disappears, leaving the lowly hitmen with little or no actual dialogue.
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So Conrad was instead cast as the crime boss, the part Albert Dekker had played in the movie. Lancaster still played the Swede, while Shelly Winters took over as the femme fatale. Playhouse's 30-minute running time meant its adaptations of movies were usually not as satisfying as those done on the Lux Radio Theater (which was an hour-long show), but The Killers turns out to be a pretty good episode all the same.
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So, if you happen to be working as a lowly hitman for a mob and you're looking to move up in your profession, the route to take is to switch from being a movie bad guy to a radio bad guy. There's a pretty good guarentee of a promotion.

The Playhouse version of The Killers is available to hear or download HERE.