Two men walk into a diner and start asking questions about a guy called "the Swede." It's clear they've come to kill him. A kid manages to run off and warn the Swede -- but instead of running, the Swede simply waits in his room for the killers to find him. How could a man, warned about his impending death, quietly wait for it rather than flee? That is the central question of Ernest Hemingway's short story "The Killers," one of the Nick Adams series.

This two disc Criterion Collection set pairs two film versions of the story with the exhaustive special features we've come accustomed to from Criterion.

The first film is the highlight of the set, and the real reason it deserved a DVD release: Robert Siodmark's 1946 noir thriller is a defining classic of the genre. The first fifteen or so minutes retell Hemingway's story in one of the most faithful, line-by-line adaptations I have ever seen. Burt Lancaster plays the Swede, resigned to his death in a room that's even more gravely underlit than anything else in this dark, brooding film.

Once Swede has been dispatched and the ground of Hemingway's story covered, the script takes a turn: an insurance agent becomes interested in the case and conducts investigations that result in a series of Citizen Kane-style flashbacks that fill us in on the Swede's story. He used to be a boxer, we learn, who fell for a gangster's moll played by the divine Ava Gardner (who wouldn't?). By the end of the film, we understand the desperation that Nick Adams couldn't fathom: "If there's anything I hate, it's a double-crossing dame."

Unfortunately, the other version of "The Killers," Don Siegel's 1964 made-for-TV adaptation, couldn't be any more different, or much worse. Brightly lit, it stars Lee Marvin, John Cassavetes, Angie Dickinson, and Ronald Reagan in has last film role. Cruel and pointless, this version seems like a thin bastardization of Siodmark's version of Hemingway's story -- now the Swede, who is never called that, becomes a race car driver who is lured into a pointless heist. The characters are underwritten and the film feels poorly cobbled together. There are only the barest traces of the original story left. While it's interesting to see the story told from the point of view of the killers, it undermines the entire project to hear Lee Marvin's hardened criminal speak lines originally attributed to Nick Adams.

Nonetheless, this set is a fascinating experiment in intertextuality, in the way stories travel and change. Stuffed to the gills with features, the set includes a short 1956 version of "The Killers" by a young Russian film student by the name of Andrei Tarkovsky, Stacy Keach reading Hemingway's story, and enough interviews, essays, commentary, and production art to conduct a seminar with. This is a set that deserves to be studied -- it's just too bad that only one of the movies is any good.