Seen on the Screen blogathon: The Killers in Hackensack, N.J. 

The Killers (1946) is a well-respected movie that earned three Oscar nominations, introduced Burt Lancaster and served as Ava Gardner’s career breakout. It may also be the only film noir set mostly in New Jersey, with its pivotal plot point a daring daytime robbery in Hackensack. 

Yup, Hackensack, New Jersey, located some 12 miles west of midtown Manhattan and my old hometown. Mostly residential and with a thriving retail scene when I grew up there in the 1960s and 70s, the name Hackensack has a rhyme and rhythm to it, and as such, has lent itself to the lyrics of popular songs for decades, written by the likes of Cole Porter, Steely Dan, Fountains of Wayne and Billy Joel. 

But this is about The Killers. Its one-sentence TV Guide synopsis might read, “a former boxer gets involved with a gangster’s moll.” There’s much more to it than that. Within the first ten minutes, Lancaster as “the Swede,” is gunned down by two hoods, leading an insurance investigator (Edmond O’Brien) to piece together why. 

What he discovers is that people were lining up to kill the Swede because they believed he had a $250,000 payroll stolen years before from the Prentiss Hat Company, located in Hackensack. 

The film is mostly told through flashbacks as we see the Swede and three others walk through a factory gate wearing faked employee badges before they storm the payroll office and make off with the cash. 

While plenty of pre-war architecture still existed in Hackensack when I lived there, it’s safe to say there was nothing resembling the Prentiss Hat Company. With its arched gated entryway and central road running through the site, if anything it resembles the familiar look of the entrance to a movie studio lot – which it probably was. 

In real life, the only factory in Hackensack that came close to what’s depicted in The Killers was a sprawling throwback, built in 1896, that at its peak employed a few hundred people churning out 50,000 pairs of slippers a day. On summer days, with all the loading dock doors open, we’d ride our bikes past the site and hear the machines punching out soles or stitching. 

After making off with the payroll, the gang meets later at a farmhouse eleven miles away to divide up the loot. There’s some discussion about the “hick roads” they’ll take to get to the place, leading one to think this is a totally rural area. 

Downtown Hackensack, circa 1960s

In 1940, the countryside outside Hackensack was fairly rural; there were scattered farms with apple orchards and small-scale cornfields, but nothing like the desolate farmhouse with its dirt roads pictured in The Killers. Even in the 1940s, the residential boom was beginning to eat up the available farmland. 

In the two brief scenes that take place in Hackensack, handy and somewhat generic buildings stand in for the real thing. Which is fine. Anthony Veiller’s Oscar-nominated screenplay at least treats Hackensack like something other than an old vaudeville joke. (Unlike Superman: The Movie (1978), where Hackensack was ground zero for a nuclear missile launched by Lex Luthor – more of a punchline than a destination). 

It’s probably worth mentioning one other Burt Lancaster/Hackensack reference. In The Swimmer (1968), Lancaster 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.”