Burt and Ava visit Hackensack

The 1946 film The Killers is best known today as the movie that launched the careers of Burt Lancaster and Ava Gardner. We can also definitively say it’s the only film noir set in New Jersey, mostly played out in the fictional town of Brentwood and the very real Hackensack. 

In the first ten minutes, Lancaster, as “the Swede,” gets gunned down by two hoods, leading an insurance investigator (played by the underrated Edmond O’Brien) to piece together why (back in the days when crime movies often substituted insurance investigators for detectives – O’Brien’s character even packs a gun in a shoulder holster).

O’Brien works for “Atlantic Casualty” and when he calls in to the home office from a pay phone, he asks the operator for a number in Newark. He later references Prudential as a company that might want his services if his boss won’t let him pursue the Swede case and later orders an assistant to pass on information to a reporter from “the Ledger.”

People are after the Swede because they believe he has the $250,000 stolen years ago in a payroll robbery at the Prentiss Hat Company in Hackensack. In a flashback, we see Lancaster and three other gang members lined up at the factory gate wearing faked employee badges – and because it’s 1946, they fit right in with the other employees, all white and all male. 

Like most film noirs (films noir?), the plot gets a little twisty, but a telegram to O’Brien from “Hackensack Fire Department Chief Kenney” marks a turning point in solving the case. 

The Prentiss Hat Company of Hackensack was strictly made up, but it had a real-life parallel in S. Goldberg’s Slipper Factory, built in 1896, and located on River Street behind the county courthouse and jail, once employed more than 600 people churning out 50,000 pairs of slippers a day. On summer days, all the loading dock doors were open, and you’d see (and hear) the machines punching out soles or stitching.

(And I know from bike rides past the plant and office supply deliveries I made in the seventies, that unlike the Prentiss Hat Company, Goldberg’s employees were mostly women and Hispanic).

An uncle liked to tell me that if I didn’t start concentrating on my grades, I’d be attending Goldberg’s Slipper College after high school. Big joke, although there were probably worse places I could have wound up. The factory was torn down in 2008, but today it’s known as SG Companies, a multi-national footwear and apparel corporation with factories and warehouses around the U.S. and Asia.

Here’s one other Burt Lancaster/Hackensack reference. In The Swimmer (1968), Lancaster plays a man with a fragile grasp on reality stranded in the suburbs. He looks up at the blue summer sky and marvels, “It’s beautiful, as if we’re on the bow of a ship – Lisbon, Naples, Istanbul,” to which a neighbor flatly adds, “Hackensack.”