Two versions of a Hemingway story

Watched parts of 2 versions of The Killers, two movies, one from 1946 the others from 1964, both based to varying degrees on the excellent Hemingway story from, I think, the 1930s. The '46 version is considered a classic or at least an early instance of American film noir. In this version, the director and screenwriter stay very close to the text of the Hemingway story - which is the movie's strength and its downfall. For a while, I was completely engaged, thought this was an absolutely terrific noir movie: the first 10 minutes or so show the H story: to hired guns enter a small-town diner and make it clar they're waiting for the arrival of a regular patron and that they're going to kill him. He doesn't show, and a young man who was in the diner - Nick Adams, a frequent H alter ego - goes off to warn the man; the man is dull and listless and says he'll just wait for them to come and kill him, there's nothing he can do. All of this is handled beautifully - the dialog (all almost direct from H) is of course shart and perfect and scary, the lighting is gloomy and sinister, everything's good. The only thing they changed was not telling us the target was a prize fighter (presumably he threw a bout, or failed to do so). But once they're done with the Hemingway part the start to build what becomes pretty quickly a conventional police procedural, as an investigator sets off to figure out who got killed and why. Here the contrast with the Hemingway dialog and scripting does the movie in - what we'd probably tolerate if it were in and of itself, looks and sounds tepid and forced and strained compared with some of H's best writing. The 1964 v., directed by Don Siegel and starring a great Lee Marvin as one of the killers, changes the story radically: now the fighter is a race-car driver, and the killers gun him down in the first 5 minutes or so and spend the rest of the movie trying to track down a million $ that the race-car driver may have absconded with and stashed away. There's a lot of back story about the driver, and it's not all that interesting. The highlights, I hate to say, are the violent acts of the killers - esp the first sequence in which they corner the driver at a school for the blind where he's working as an instructor - so against convention to have these thugs push around a bunch of blind adults to get at their quarry. Another side highlight is R Reagan as the heavy. Hah! The love story is dull and distracting; the movie's OK but it's only very loosely based on the Hemingway original, and the original is much, much better.