From Fargo to Collateral: why films love hitmen

From Tom Cruise in Collateral to Billy Bob Thornton in Fargo, Anne Billson investigates the enduring appeal of on-screen hitmen

Fargo: not based on a true story
Billy Bob Thornton as Malvo in the TV series, Fargo

"Is this what you want?" scary hitman Lorne Malvo asks in the penultimate episode of the TV show Fargo. He's addressing Lester Nygaard, but he might as well have been talking to us, the viewers. Do we want to see a demonic stranger stroll into town and sow chaos? Do we want to see a trickster playing mean, often lethal jokes on folk who aren't as cunning as they think they are? Do we want to see a contract killer calmly shooting a liftful of people in the head? Hell yes, of course we do.

Without Malvo, there wouldn't be a story. Billy Bob Thornton plays him with the sort of Mephistophelean beard and faux-bonhomie that evoke memories of Walter Huston as Mr Scratch in William Dieterle's The Devil and Daniel Webster, a 1941 American folkloric variation on the Faust story. His nomadic wandering and almost supernatural ability to shapeshift into different personalities are also reminiscent of Randall Flagg, a recurring satanic presence in the books of Stephen King, who describes the character thus: "I think the Devil is probably a funny guy. Flagg is like the archetype of everything that I know about real evil."

And Malvo's hair, with its fringe seemingly styled after Boris Karloff's as Frankenstein's monster, inevitably reminds us of another hitman with bad hair: Anton Chigurh, the killer with the Beatle-from-hell haircut in the Coen brothers' No Country for Old Men. (Clearly no coincidence, since not only is Noah Hawley's TV show inspired by a Coen brothers' film, it also contains nods to the rest of their work.) Chigurh, so memorably played by Javier Bardem, is another peripatetic stranger without scruples, whose mere presence is enough to invest apparently innocuous conversations with almost unbearable tension.

Few of us have ever (knowingly) met a hitman, and yet they're so ubiquitous in popular culture that a Martian researching earthling lifestyles might reasonably assume it was a viable career choice, on a par with policeman or teacher. But I'm guessing real life hitmen are nothing like their counterparts on screen, who are as much symbols, or triggers to set the plot in motion, as credible characters. They're a close cousin to the western gunslinger (as played by Gregory Peck in The Gunfighter or Henry Fonda in Once Upon a Time in the West), killers who thrive in a lawless environment, who have no real place in civilised society, but whose introduction into the story ups the stakes to life or death.

And unlike in real life (though again, I'm guessing, since I've never knowingly met one), they are nearly always cool. Partly because they execute their contracts with such methodical precision – like Alain Delon in The Samurai or Tom Cruise in Collateral – and it's always a pleasure to see a task performed efficiently. And partly because they're loners, and thus seen as rebels operating outside the constraints of regular society, never mind that those constraints are all that stand between us and the void.

Screen hitmen come in two guises. There's the Superhero Hitman, like Malvo or Chigurh – an unstoppable Terminator-like force. He can emerge virtually unscathed from explosions, falls or car crashes, but is not always portrayed as a villain; in cartoony action pics such as Wanted or Hitman, he functions as a sort of avatar for couch potato spectators too lazy even to play a first-person shooter game.

But there's also the Fallible Hitman, in which the character loses his powers – often after exposure to virtuous women, small children, or cute animals - and becomes sloppy and vulnerable. The Achilles heel of Alan Ladd in This Gun for Hire is kittens; Chow Yun Fat gets sentimental about a nightclub singer he has accidentally blinded in The Killer; Jean Reno rediscovers his humanity thanks to young Natalie Portman in Léon; Colin Farrell feels guilty about the death of a young bystander In Bruges; and in The Matador, burned-out hitman Pierce Brosnan is just looking for bromance.

The hitman's human side – they're just like us! – is played up in black comedies such as The Whole Nine Yards or Grosse Point Blank which also invokes humour by treating contract killing as a regular job, with a union representative and a working day you could discuss with your therapist. Vincent and Jules talk about fast food, and the boss's wife, en route to their latest hit in Pulp Fiction.

And it's dog-eat-dog in hitman-world, populated by killers as concerned with promotion as any office-worker; Seijun Suzuki dreamt up the idea of a Hitman League Table in his 1967 Branded to Kill, a film featuring such memorable murder set-pieces that Jim Jarmusch recycled some of them in his own hitman movie Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai.

Perversely, it's the hitman's purely financial motivation that makes him a trustworthy point of identification in modern cinema; abstract emotional and ideological incentives can be hard to grasp, whereas everyone understands money. But hitmen are not so trustworthy in real life - or at least not the ones we know about. Richard Kuklinski claimed to have killed as many as 1250 men between 1948 and 1986, though his claims have been disputed by other criminals.

In recorded interviews, Kuklinksi often seems to be consciously embodying a mythical role rather than confessing to real crimes, as though he himself has been watching too many hitman movies, and while it's clear he was a bad egg, it's hard to tell exactly how much of one. Even so, it's arguable as to whether the real Kuklinski was anywhere near as scary as Michael Shannon, who played him in The Iceman. When it comes to hitmen, movies always have the edge over real life.