Beautiful, moving film.

In truth, there is barely enough story here to make a film.

Excellent characters with emotional depth. My wife, daughter and granddaughter all enjoyed it...and me, too! Very good movie! You won't be disappointed.

Unshakable, witty and deeply felt, the film will be paying emotional dividends for a long, long time.

Story about an antisocial hired killer who goes after an employer who double crosses him. While tracking down the men who hired him he gets involved with the female lead a night club singer on her way to Los Angeles. In the end revenge is extracted.It is fast paced and keeps your interest especially the first hour. When the action moves to LA it starts to bog down a bit and get a little squirrelly. There is a long scene in an air raid shelter of some huge giant factory that is completely implausible...dozens of police scour the plant for hours but overlook an obvious staircase to the airraid shelter??Still it is worth a watch I give it a 6.The other reviews are by people much more knowledgeable about the actors and period than I...am reviewing it as a naive uninformed viewer.RECOMMEND

Not TOO many spoilers but better safe than sorry!I love James Cagney the actor and was looking forward to seeing something from James Cagney the director. Unfortunately, Mr. Cagney was no Charles Laughton. Since most people interested in this film are probably Cagney fans, I will cover the direction first. Cagney had one strike against him going into this: he was remaking a popular classic, This Gun for Hire. That film launched Alan Ladd as a star, solidified Veronica Lake's popularity and created a powerful (albeit diminutive) screen team. (Plot for both films: A hit-man does a job but is double-crossed by his employers by being paid off in hot, marked bills. On the run from the police for a robbery he didn't commit, the hit-man plans revenge. His only lead; a fat man who loves pretty women and peppermints. Meanwhile, a nightclub singer gets caught in the middle, first as one of the hit-man's intended murder victims, then as his hostage and finally as his friend/girlfriend/mother/sister figure.) Remaking a popular and successful film meant that Cagney had to work twice as hard to meet or surpass the original material. There is not a single scene that works more effectively in this remake than in the original. However, the movie has flaws that are evident even if you have never seen This Gun for Hire. One of the main problems of this film is the pacing. Suspenseful scenes are rushed along while dull ones are allowed to linger.A few scenes do have interesting camera work but the novice director seems enamored of this and pushes is a bit too far and long. Then there is the woeful hamminess and just plain bad acting. The leads aren't terrible, just not that good. Robert Ivers is OK as the hit-man but he doesn't come off as dangerous as he should. Alan Ladd had this frostiness that served him well in tough guy roles. Ivers is less glacial and more petulant. Further, the script waters down his character. You see, in the original novel, the hit-man had a cleft lip. In This Gun for Hire, it was turned into a disfiguring arm injury, the result of child abuse at the hands of his aunt. This bid to preserve Ladd's handsome face actually turned into a powerful character trait. In Short Cut to Hell, the hit-man's important physical trait is that he is a bit small. That's it. By giving the hit-man a very distinguishing feature, the novel and the original film made his plight more desperate. This was a man who could not just disappear. You can issue a general call for men with cleft palates and mangled arms. Being a small-ish just doesn't cut it. You can hardly have a police dragnet looking for all small-ish men. Robert Ivers was 5'8" according to IMDb. Hardly lilliputian. As for the heroine, Georgann Johnson acts well enough but her demeanor is too "gosh-gee-whiz" for the dark material. Veronica Lake (Sorry to keep harping on the original but I just can't help it) gave a street- smart performance. Maybe she was never Oscar-worthy but she was certainly believable. Lake always gave the impression of being a pretty girl who grew up on the wrong side of the tracks and never lost her toughness (which is what she, in fact, was). This element makes her eventual friendship with the hit-man much more believable. She understands him because she probably had a rotten childhood too. Georgann Johnson's take on the character is more maternal and some of the complexity of the relationship is lost.Finally, the villain played by Jacques Aubuchon seems rather out of place as well. The original film had the delightfully squeamish Laird Cregar in this role. Aubuchon does a pale impression of Cregar but simply doesn't match him. Cregar's character was fussy, eccentric and way too fond of peppermints but he was also paranoid and it was this paranoia that endangered Veronica Lake's character. Aubuchon, on the other hand, simply follows paint-by-numbers villain motivation.So, this film is mainly for film buff and Cagney completists. From me, it won a resounding "meh" Would I have liked it better if I had never seen This Gun for Hire? Maybe a little. But not enough for me to give this film any kind of recommendation to general film enthusiasts. Stick with the original.

This is a very unusual film for two reasons. First, it's directed by James Cagney--the actor. It's his only film as a director. Second, when the film begins, it opens with Cagney himself addressing the audience about the film. And, to prove that he IS the director, he stands next to a chair with "James Cagney. Director" written on it! The movie is a remake of "This Gun for Hire". To me, this is an odd choice, as the Alan Ladd film was very good and very famous. Cagney already had an uphill job as director putting across his own version of a film that is already a familiar classic.Like "This Gun for Hire", this film is about an assassin that does some killings for a horrible man. When he is paid off, the stupid guy sets up the assassin to get arrested--a very, very bad idea. That's because the killer escapes. Now, he knows he's been set up and is out to exact revenge. And, along the way, he kidnaps a woman and forces her to go along for the ride.The film isn't bad, but you can't help but think that the originals, Alan Ladd and Veronica Lake were simply better. Instead, Cagney uses complete unknowns--and his introductory remarks come off like he's almost apologizing for using them and insists they are exceptional actors. Well, considering that unlike Ladd and Lake, they did NOT go one to great careers in films, we must assume Cagney was mistaken. Overall, a decent film (since the plot is very good) but a relatively uninspired film and one you could easily skip. Of interest mostly because of its Cagney angle.This film, I give a 5. The original is strong and earns an 8.

Short Cut to Hell (1957)A strained effort all around, including James Cagney giving a personal introduction standing next to an imposing movie camera, assuring us his two new leading actors were terrific, before we get a chance to see for ourselves. We can wonder about his motivations, but on the surface two things seem clear. One, he's trying to move from being an actor to being a director (he sort of says he's getting too old to act, interestingly). And two, he's going about it in a cheap and sort of safe way, as if Hollywood knew it wasn't going to go very far.The result is pretty awful in enough ways to say you might just skip it. I'm a junkie for noir films, and "This Gun for Hire" is a true, early, formative classic from 1942. That one, with Alan Ladd in the lead, and Veronica Lake and Laird Cregar as support, is terrific in all the little ways that add up to something uniquely memorable, even in the hands of little known director Frank Tuttle. Now, fifteen years later, Cagney in his first and last directorial effort, remakes Tuttle's version. He sometimes matches it scene for scene (a few curious substitutions, like an air raid shelter instead of an empty railroad car) and actor for actor (the man taking Cregar's role seems to be vainly imitating him). And he leaves out a few of the key quirks that made the original more, well, original and disturbing (like Ladd's relationship to cats). One stark difference is the different kind of female character Cagney casts, avoiding the sultry version of Veronica Lake for a very Doris Day kind of lead. And it's probably telling that these terrific new actors Cagney is using had very little in the way of careers after this. Cagney did act in a few more films, living until 1986.If you have little patience, I think you might not make it through the first painful scene of a woman overacting her weariness in the motel hallway, but that's not fair. It does have faster and more interesting moments. In general, the filming and lighting has brightened up, losing at least the noir visual quality, maybe keeping its tonal range in line for television rebroadcast (an important concern by the late 1950s). If you want to know the possibilities of the story at its best, start with Graham Greene's 1936 book (A Gun for Sale) and then to the seminal 1942 movie. Short Cut to Hell is an asterisk at beset, a curiosity.