This Gun for Hire (1942) - film review

Raven is a man who kills for one motive.  Money.  When nightclub manager Will Gates hires him to kill a man and then pays him in stolen banknotes he isn’t pleased.  He feels betrayed.  Now he has another motive for killing.  Revenge.  With the police on his tail, Raven follows Gates to Los Angeles.  The authorities are also interested in Gates and have sent an agent, Ellen Graham, to investigate his suspected involvement in a plot with a foreign power...

The film which catapulted Alan Ladd to stardom at the age of 28 was this respectable adaptation of the popular Graham Greene novel A Gun for Sale.  One of the best of the early film noir thrillers, it had an enormous influence on subsequent films of the genre.  The moral ambiguity of police and outlaws, the solitude and ruthlessness of a marginalized killer, notions of honour, betrayal and revenge – these are all themes which would provide the bedrock for the classic film noir crime thrillers of the 1940s and ’50s.  French director Jean-Pierre Melville drew heavily on this film for his existential 1968 policier Le Samourai, in which Alain Delon plays a lone hit man who is virtually a carbon copy of Alan Ladd’s character in this film.

Interestingly, Alan Ladd was not Frank Tuttle’s first choice for the part of Raven.  Originally, Robert Preston was considered for the role, before Tuttle decided to take a gamble and gave the part to the comparatively unknown Alan Ladd.  The actor was required to dye his blond hair black, to match his character’s name.  Whilst the film was being shot, Ladd was suffering from pneumonia – something which adds greatly to his character’s chilling lack of emotion and a sinister aura of repressed malice.

Although he received fourth billing for the film’s initial release - after Veronica Lake, Robert Preston and Laird Cregar – Alan Ladd dominates the film throughout.  In some sequences, when the psychotic nature of his character becomes apparent, he is terrifying; in others, a gentler persona can be glimpsed, making Raven a sympathetic yet genuinely disturbing anti-hero.    

As a standard Hollywood femme fatale, Lake fails to have the impact she has in many of her other films of this period, and, totally eclipsed by Ladd’s performance, Preston is reduced to a supporting role.   The bear-like Laird Cregar gets to play the second most interesting character in the film, the peppermint chomping villain Gates, who, with his gutless immorality, infantile cowardice and chubby appearance, looks suspiciously like a comic book caricature of Mussolini.  

The Ladd-Lake pairing was one of the reasons for the success of This Gun for Hire.  The two actors would appear together in a few other films: The Glass Key (1942), The Blue Dahlia (1946) and Saigon (1948).  As Lake’s career dwindled, Ladd became a major star in Hollywood, his most memorable roles being in The Great Gatsby (1949) and Shane (1953).

Whilst This Gun for Hire discards the darker, sadistic elements of Greene’s novel, it retains much of its atmosphere (even if the main setting is shifted from a dreary English provincial town to sunny Los Angeles).   The film also downplays the novel’s subversive political subtext.  In both the novel and the film, the killer Raven ends up as an unwitting instrument of the State, effectively an unpaid assassin.  He brings about the downfall of a dangerous traitor not through noble ideas of patriotism but through the baser motive of revenge.  The irony of this is somewhat lost in the film; instead, the screenwriters skewed the narrative slightly to slip in some clumsy wartime propaganda messages.  Yet, in spite of this, the film holds together very well and, if you can forgive the obligatory twee ending, is one of the most enjoyable and stylish of the early film noirs.  James Cagney remade the film in 1957 as Short Cut to Hell, the actor’s one and only directorial credit.

© James Travers 2008

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