A Brilliant Conflict

For having a relatively low budget, the film's style and overall art direction are immensely impressive.

The movie turns out to be a little better than the average. Starting from a romantic formula often seen in the cinema, it ends in the most predictable (and somewhat bland) way.

Story: It's very simple but honestly that is fine.

Philip Raven (Alan Ladd) is a harden killer hired by Gates to kill Baker who was a blackmailer. Raven recovers a chemical formula for Gates but he is double-crossed when he is paid with marked bills that have been reported to the police. LAPD detective Michael Crane (Robert Preston) has traveled to San Francisco to track down the bills for Gates and his boss Brewster who runs Nitro Chemical. Meanwhile Crane's girlfriend Ellen Graham (Veronica Lake) is a magician/singer who auditions for Gates's nightclub. She is approached by Senator Burnett who tells her about a plot to sell a deadly toxic gas formula to Japan. He asks her to spy on Gates and his boss after getting the nightclub job in LA. By coincidence, Ellen Graham happens to sit right next to Raven as he travels by train to LA to track down Gates and find out who is behind his double-cross.I love some of the hardboiled dialog. Overall, it's a compelling fun thriller noir. I love Veronica Lake although she has an unusual job as a magician in this movie. Maybe it's in the Graham Greene's novel, but they should have just changed her into a simple singer. Also the story has a few too many coincidences. The gas masks in the last act are a bit too much. Alan Ladd is a little too babyfaced to be that hard character. Even with all of these minor problems, the overall sense is one of thrills and spills.

While the 'film noir' genre was still in its earlier stages (back then they were generally referred to simply as melodramas), This Gun For Hire, an exciting, violent thriller from Frank Tuttle, probably shares more thematically with the Pre-Code gangster thrillers. There is no femme fatale to manipulate the film's anti-hero, nor is the lead a hard- bitten private dick or a dead-beat trying to make some cash. In fact, there isn't really a lead at all. It's arguably three inter-linking stories that intertwine and finally come to a head at the climax. Such is the curiosity of This Gun For Hire, one of the finest examples of the B-movie noirs.Stoic hit-man Philip Raven (Alan Ladd) guns down chemist Albert Baker (Frank Ferguson) and his innocent secretary, and takes what he came for - a chemical formula. His employer, the effeminate and cowardly Willard Gates (Laird Cregar), pays Raven in marked bills and then reports the bills stolen from his company. Nightclub entertainer Ellen Graham (Veronica Lake) is in town to audition for a nightclub spot owned by Gates, but is pulled aside by a senator hoping to gain information on Gates, who is under investigation for treason. Graham's boyfriend, LAPD detective Michael Crane (Robert Preston) is assigned to the case of Raven and the stolen money, but Raven has plans for revenge.Although only fourth-billed, this made a star of Alan Ladd. His dead- eyed, cold-blooded gun for hire is what you take away from the film. Like Richard Widmark as Tommy Udo in Kiss of Death (1947), his character displays such a shocking lack of ethics, quite alarming for its day. His brief moment of humanity comes when he chooses to spare an child who sees his face after a murder. Yet Ladd makes him undeniably compelling, even when he's smacking his girlfriend around for messing with his cat. Veronica Lake, an actress who has yet to completely win me over, does a decent job with a rather unexciting character, performing a couple of nice musical numbers (even though she is lip-synching) while performing magic.Made during WWII, the overseas menace plays a definite part in the film. While by no means a political thriller, the chemical formula that Raven unwittingly steals is for poison gas, intended to be sold overseas to the highest bidder by Gates' mysterious, wheelchair-bound boss Alvin Brewster (Tully Marshall). America's need for corny patriotism damages the film in the end, used as a tool to allow its mean anti-hero some one-dimensional sympathy. It's my only real problem with the film, which without the ending, come have been up there with the greats of film noir. It's still a damn fine film, as hard-edged as you would want your noirs to be, with a truly enigmatic character (and actor) at its centre.www.the-wrath-of-blog.blogspot.com

Nice tale of Alan Ladd as an all-business bravo. He rubs out somebody for Laird Cregar but Cregar double crosses him, tips the police and they're after Ladd. And Ladd is after Cregar and after the old dude who hired Cregar as well, the motive being revenge. It all has to do with the fact that the ancient tycoon has funded the invention of a poison gas which he has sold on the global spot market to the highest bidder, in this case the Japanese.Kids, this was 1942, see, and the United States was at war with Japan, Germany, and Italy. So selling poison gas to our enemy was not the most patriotic thing to do. Also it was illegal. That makes Laird Cregar and all those associated with him -- whether ancient boss or tough subordinate -- traitors. Look up "traitor" in the dictionary. You can see here how it's spelled. PS: We won the war.Well, Laird Cregar may be a fat and unscrupulous eater of peppermints but he's the most interesting character in the movie. There are no more gripping shots in cinema than the ultra-short Alan Ladd standing next to the abundance of Laird Cregar. He's a Mount Everest of Jello. He shivers with fear when his body guard, Marc Lawerence, describes with relish what's going to happen to Veronica Lake's dead body after it settles to the bottom of the reservoir, weighted down with iron. "It's revolting," he wheezes. What I'm getting at is that the writers have provided the movie with one of the essentials of any successful production -- the interesting villain.Ladd is kind of interesting too, but not so much. He's a killer because he was beaten as a child. (Ho hum.) I made a point of beating my kid every day whether he needed it or not. That kid is a famous orthodontist today. He never kills anybody, though he does smile slightly when he plies his syringes, hacksaws, and monkey wrenches and watches his patients writhe and scream.In any case, Ladd develops a sympathetic friendship with Veronica Lake. They belong together. Ladd was five feet, six inches tall. Lake was four feet, eleven. Neither was a bravura performer but they got the job done. Robert Preston appears as the police lieutenant who is engaged to Lake. Preston had a film career that lasted from 1938 to 1985. That's pretty long. He played everything from treacherous villains to musical comedy.Actually it's a pretty enjoyable movie with some nice location shooting and particularly effective lighting and photography. Shot in Los Angeles, there are few middle-class houses here, but rather gas works, industrial plants, and railroad yards. The imagery carries a lot of unusual texture.

By coincidence, the cop's girl gets involved with the mad-dog killer that he is pursuing. Alan Ladd is the killer, and by film's end you're given the liberal line about his poor upbringing and brutality that led to his life like this. Let's not forget that he gunned down a man and the woman who witnessed the murder in cold, ruthless blood. Stop the sympathy angle already.The fact that espionage is part of the story could have been made more interesting, but the writers chose that merely as a by-line. Too bad. Ladd is appealing, but the script basically isn't. How come Lake didn't have her hair covering her one-eye? She was known for that?