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SHORT CUT TO HELL

 

Robert Ivers, Georgann Johnson, Jacques Aubuchon; dir: James Cagney

 

From its uber-pulp title to its classical Hollywood via English Lit heritage and solitary star-as-director turnout, Shortcut To Hell is a Hollywood curio par excellence.  How leftfield is a Poverty Row remake 15 years on of the breakthrough Alan Ladd-Veronica Lake vehicle This Gun For Hire (1942) made from Graham Greene’s ‘entertainment’ A Gun For Sale, and directed by no less an eminence than James Cagney in his sole directorial stint??

Though not a shot-for-shot remake a la Gus Van Sant’s Psycho (1998), there’s several sequences here which Cagney does lift straight off the 1942 template.  And because one such comes early, when we see our unmistakable protagonist lying on his back in a cheap rooming house bed, idly smoking up at the ceiling, the experience of watching this film becomes inextricably bound with that of its forerunner, This Gun For Hire, where the same scene occurs.  This appears to be an iconic moment, elaborated extravagantly by Jean-Pierre Melville in his homage to This Gun, Le Samourai (1967), which he opens on a similarly recumbent Alain Delon inertly smoking in bed, idly gazing up at nothing… suggesting that between hits for the modern day contract killer there is only the absence of life, an ellipsis that mirrors their negation of life when on duty.  

Graham Greene really started something with A Gun For Sale when he extended the production line analogy of Modernism to its ultimate conclusion, by commodifying life through the commercialisation of death in the paid assassin.  But to work as art, this archetype needs a fatal flaw, a chink in their armour and this comes via a touch of humanity which repudiates the Fordism of their assignment killing.  Inevitably, as with the machine-made man in Frankenstein (1931), this human feeling provides their undoing, satisfying the needs of tragedy. 

In cinema this same trope reappears consistently throughout the decades, taking in the films Murder By Contract (1958) and Le Samourai (1967) through to Jim Jarmusch’s Ghost Dog (1999), and encompassing along the way, by analogy, Coppola’s 1974 The Conversation (where the directional microphone is a clear stand-in for a sniper’s rifle, and just as deadly).   

Alan Ladd’s fatally human moment in This Gun For Hire created another iconic scene in this paradigm, when he feeds a stray cat a bowl of milk in the same breath as offing a human target.  So when Cagney introduces a cat here we can’t help but sit up and pay close attention, which is rewarded by one of Shortcut ‘s intriguing distinctions from This Gun For Hire as here the puss interpolates sex, getting in the away of the slatternly housemaid (whose sexy posterior Cagney opens this movie on) when she tries to make a play for our emotionally shutdown anti-hero lying on the bed. 

The cat is crucial, with Cagney tying it structurally to his hitman as a virtual spiritual doppelganger.  When next we see this feline its narrative purpose is to show the central characters a possible escape route.  I say ‘characters’, as by then our guy has been effectively partnered with a woman.  The core section of both of the Greene movie adaptations subtly turn audience sympathies to the anti-heroic assassin, rendering him, as in the book, a mistreated victim of an uncaring society, from which he bitterly cowers in the shadows.  Call it The Stockholm Syndrome, but his female hostage inexplicably quickly turns into his ally, and together they are portrayed as sleuths on the trail of the true villain, like a fugitive Nick and Nora Charles. 

Here another vital distinction of the Cagney iteration emerges, as the heroine, Glory Hamilton (Georgann Johnson), fulfills not the cool semi-androgynous sidekick role of Veronica Lake but rather a wise-cracking motherly type more reminiscent of a 1940s tough egg like Ginger Rogers. 

Amazingly all the strands come together in a key scene late in the piece where Glory extols hitman Kyle’s sensitive hands, ample proof of his inherent artistic sensitivity, so cruelly misunderstood by society.  This body image symbolism entrenches the truth of the corresponding evil in the double-dealing instigator of the killing, whose overweight frame and decadent sweet tooth mark him as the real cancer in society.  

Oddly enough, the maternal energy in this film’s central relationship is more believable than the Ladd/Lake chemistry, even if it’s less pleasing to our gaze.  Lead Robert Ivers is a big reason for this, looking like a rat-faced James Dean, which paradoxically hews closer to the vision of Raven (killer Kyle’s original name) which Greene crafted in his novella. 

Cagney’s inflections on the original movie go still further, with an extraordinary series of industrial setpieces in a gas factory that inevitably is strongly redolent of his own immortal White Heat (1949).  But when, in the climactic scene of this film’s final showdown, where our artistic, misunderstood hitman moves towards his inevitable demise, realising “I’m not a man, I’m a gun”, Cagney underpins this tension-wracked scene with the music from nothing less than Double Indemnity (1944), evoking the grim, purposeful assembly-line doom of that film’s signature phrase ‘straight down the line’.  Shortly thereafter Kyle kills the cat, on its fourth appearance after its previous (third) appearance was the catalyst that enabled Glory to see his soft side. 

Other, less useful, aspects of the 1942 original like Glory’s boyfriend being the cop on their trail are here elided by Cagney with great economy to the background where they belong.  Though he does re-use some identical visual set-ups, such as the phone booth and the train seats, Cagney demonstrates a highly fluid camerawork that unexpectedly prompts comparisons with the work of Max Ophuls.  And there’s even a curio within this curio when a newspaper is unearthed in the course of a chase through the factory, showing a World War II Battle of the Bulge headline to no real effect, despite its suggestiveness. 

By fusing the dehumanising impacts of industrial Modernism of This Gun For Hire and Double Indemnity in a visual setting analogous to his own iconic destruction of same – ‘top of the world, Ma!’ – Cagney revitalised not only several key texts but also film noir itself in this tragically lost exemplar of reflexive cinema.

 -           Roger Westcombe