(1942)

Starring Alan Ladd, Veronica Lake, Laird Cregar; dir: Frank Tuttle.

A landmark film, This Gun lays down the blueprint for the ‘existential lone hitman’ strand of thrillers we’ve been seeing on screens for years, through forgotten pulp like 1958’s Murder By Contract right up to recent excursions like Jim Jarmusch’s Ghost Dog (and even unexpected variants like Coppolla’s The Conversation [1974]).

What’s most striking is how completely we become complicit with this contract killer. We empathise with Ladd and that’s hugely groundbreaking. His character, Phillip Raven, is instantly established in the opening sequence as being shut down emotionally, blankly wreaking havoc on sundry humans while pausing to set out a dish of milk for the cat (a trope to be repeated by Richard Basehart’s psycho-killer in 1948’s He Walked By Night and countless others to come). The hint of Raven’s latent humanity is just as neatly sketched when he briefly considers – but rejects – plugging the crippled young girl who witnesses his absconding from the first hit. It’s the painstakingly slight opening of these emotional shutters through the course of the film that provides one of its key audience satisfactions.

Ladd is definitely the outsider looking in, with shots of him looking through window frames such as the dress shop and train carriage into ‘real life’ as a sanctuary from his remoteness. As Carlos Clarens says (in his Crime Movies), "a few hints of Greene’s ‘vast desolation’ remained in the psychological landscape of the characters". No wonder Ladd clicked with the public as a Romantic anti-hero. Serendipity in its WWII timing may also have yielded a resonance with wartime’s need for young men to become killing machines, emotionally shutting down in order to survive.

The Graham Greene novel A Gun For Sale, on which the movie is based, is said to bridge Anglo/Euro and U.S. crime writing. Both book and film have a strong undercurrent in the then-fashionable psychological angle (Raven’s psychosis stems from his childhood killing of an abusive relative). Yes, this psychoanalyzing feels crudely grafted on but it is (in essence) from the book, which also blames society for producing this automaton. Graham Greene really captured something of 20^th Century anomie with this ‘entertainment’ by making one of the ultimate crimes just another cog in the wheels of modern life, a mere commodity with a price tag (there’s something incredibly Keynesian in a killing’s wellspring no longer being the heat of passion but mere market forces).

Echoing this economic-oriented thread, an industrialist figures as a target in both book and film. Reinforcing the chemical background to the plot’s momentum (a smuggled formula functions as an early McGuffin), the gasworks finale is superb looking, prefiguring T-Men and White Heat (not to mention later thrillers like 1997’s City of Industry). The film version of Gun attempts to extend this by having Veronica Lake’s character convince Raven to transmute his revenge drive into patriotic fervour (this was 1942, after all) to the same end, by snuffing the industrialist whom we learn is guilty of collaborating with the enemy. If this seems far-fetched, note that in 1943 Standard Oil (the monopoly du jour) was the subject of Senate hearings accusing it of colluding with German company I.G. Farben (see Out of the Forties by Nicholas Lemann, Simon & Schuster, 1983). Such a fusion of lefty polemics and noir seems inevitable considering the screenwriting was shared between hardboiled ace W.R. Burnett (Little Caesar, Scarface, High Sierra, Asphalt Jungle, etc) and future ‘Hollywood Ten’ blacklistee Albert Maltz. (And today, the film’s search for ‘Will Gates’ has unavoidable overtones of a certain Seattle-based software industrialist…)

For its era This Gun For Hire has incredibly dark visuals for a major studio film, even one that hovered around ‘B’ status. By contrast, Veronica Lake’s entrance, for sheer kilowattage, is comparable to Rita Hayworth’s in Gilda (and that’s saying something!). Lake’s role seems quite empowering and not diminished by the period context which transformed the stereotypical invisible housewife into the ‘Rosie the Riveter’ of the war effort. Nevertheless the script’s characterisation is heavily overloaded – Lake as spy/magician/sex-bomb/chanteuse/cop’s fiancée plus Laird Cregar as industrialist go-between AND nightclub entrepreneur! Cregar is superb as always (reminiscent here, in his dandyfied large man ne’er do well persona, of Raymond Burr in Ulmer’s Ruthless).

There’s an awful lot of coincidence too. She’s engaged to the cop chasing the bad guys just as he (the fiancée) is secretly engaged by the government to spy for them; the fugitive Ladd sits next to Lake on a train, etc. But we get swept along, in time honoured Hollywood fashion as all the elements fire together.

It doesn’t always fire though. There’s some unintentional hilarity when Ladd disguises himself using a purloined gas mask like some bad Get Smart routine (stretching coincidence, the building is having a gas attack drill that very afternoon!). A bigger miscalculation comes when the film veers into ‘Old Dark House’ territory (complete with clichéd ‘Igor’ role in Cregar’s chauffeur/minder Tommy) around the middle.

Still This Gun For Hire made Alan Ladd (to become famous for Shane, The Great Gatsby and even Botany Bay!) a star. He would be quickly re-teamed with Veronica Lake in Dashiel Hammett’s The Glass Key (’42) and Chandler’s The Blue Dahlia (’46). Prior to the regrettable 90s telemovie remake with Robert Wagner, This Gun was first remade in 1957 by James Cagney (in his only directorial stint) under the marvellously pulp title Short Cut To Hell – now that I want to see!

And you know Martin Scorsese must have seen This Gun a few times. The cat/milk scene reappears in Taxi Driver and the scene on the train in This Gun where Ladd says "you talkin’ to me?" is a real pre-homage, if you get my drift. Come to think of it, that young de Niro and Ladd…