the ending (spoiler)
Why do they kill Frank in the end?
shareI believe he'd committed the hit-man's worst crime - to pull out , or even threaten to pull out, of a contract. Once you're in, you're in. Or your dead.
And surely Frank knows this, but he still goes to a remote location where it should be obvious he's being set up for the kill. Was he subconciously suicidal?
This is the same question I had in The Friends of Eddie Coyle, where Mitchum gets drunk at the Bruins' game and then later falls asleep in the car before he's shot, almost as if he knew on some level that he was toast and wanted to make it easy for himself, though the simpler interpretation is that Eddie was just dumb. Incidentally, Criterion released a DVD of TFEC last week.
Frank never seems dumb until the end; pretty disturbed, but not really dumb, which makes his behavior hard to accept. Of course on the other hand, it works dramatically and thematically to have him die.
"And surely Frank knows this, but he still goes to a remote location where it should be obvious he's being set up for the kill. Was he subconciously suicidal?"
That's exactly what I thought too...I think he just got tired of the life, realized he was emotionally crippled, and decided to let fate decide what would happen.
Rule #1 in the hit man world...if the person you're working for wants to "pay" you in the middle of nowhere, expect to be killed. :)
Like somebody else says on this thread, he was not dumb, but he may have been a tad naive about the whole thing he was in. I have seen his ilk in movies before, I've seen him in Le Samourai and even in Drive (and possibly elsewhere). They are hardened killers and exquisite professionals of their trade, but they exhibit a strange degree of naivety and somewhat odd social skills - our Frank almost rapes a nice lady, although he never seemed to be the rapist type.
Then again, he suffers a pretty nasty emotional shock right before the murder, when the lady turns out to have never been romantically interested in him. And we see him give that phone call after the deed - but, unlike the last time he spoke on the phone, he closes the door on us. My initial take was that he was somewhat aware that his fate was sealed, but got tired of fighting and went through with it anyway. We do see him running away from the killers, but perhaps it was just the survival instinct kicking in (he did have that, it's what kept him alive until then). But I'm not so sure of this reading, it COULD have been done more clearly if that was the intention.
Anyway, like you say, it does work thematically - even more so since he gets discarded by his employers just like he had discarded the murder weapon a few minutes earlier.
there's a highway that is curling up like smoke above her shoulder
johne23-1 pretty much said it. Once he said that he wanted out that was it. Even if he completed the job he was toast. Liability. He should have just kept his mouth closed. Either do the job and retire after which sounds like the best route to take or just runaway.
shareYeah, I agree. Once he told them that he wanted out, he became a liability. They couldn't use him for other hit jobs and they were afraid he'd squeal one day on the ones he did in the past.
What's touching about the movie is that Frank the hard boiled killer is actually pretty naive about getting out of the racket and about having a relationship with the girl... it makes the movie more human.
You actually feel for him, that he's just a decent person that got swept up into the wrong business and realized too late there was no way out.