Lover without a heart...killer without a conscience!
Incredibly efficient opening, establishing Alan Ladd’s character, Philip Raven, as a probable hired killer about to set off on a mission. Within the first few minutes, the boundaries of his character's moral code, and his natural sympathies, are defined by the choices he makes, in a rapid succession of encounters with a kitten, a woman who is mean to the kitten, Raven's intended victim, the attractive young female companion of his intended victim, and a little handicapped girl. Who or what will he kill, hurt or treat well? (Raven's relationship with the kitten is reminiscent of the character-defining opening scene in Robert Altman’s The Long Goodbye, with Elliott Gould’s modern Philip Marlowe.)
Although a youthful Veronika Lake, playing stage performer Ellen Graham, rightly has top billing as the central protagonist (in itself quite amazing in a male dominated genre), the "male gaze" is very much on view here. Certainly, with her slim figure, long wavy white blonde hair (happily without the later trademark curtain over one eye) and exquisite facial features, Lake is a great beauty worthy of our gaze, but her character is much more. In a stunning entrance, she shows that beyond her good looks, she is an expert magician, a smart comedienne and a gifted singer (in reality dubbed by Martha Mears) - a real professional. Like a prototype Sydney Bristow (Jennifer Garner in TV spy series Alias - Google it!), she is well regarded enough to be recruited by the government for espionage work. She is clearly no dumb blonde, and principled and courageous enough to put herself in danger working undercover to sniff out a traitor selling state secrets.
How ironic it is then that her boyfriend, Michael Crane (Robert Preston), a Californian police detective, puts to her a marriage proposal couched in terms essentially indistinguishable from an offer of domestic slavery, and protests against her intention to do one last job, as her role from now on will be to put all her efforts into staying at home, serving and caring for him. This underlines Keith Hopper's theory (lecture at St Clare's, Oxford, 2014) that the key subtext of film noir is one of gender, of a tension between the former domestic role of women and the new reality of independent workers who had staffed the work places while men were abroad during the Second World War.
Interestingly, at least initially, Raven does not turn his "male" gaze upon Lake; we have already seen what turns him on! Although Lake is top billed, it is Ladd's character who has the film's key developmental arc, and really, it is his character and his character's relationship with Lake's character, that is of greatest interest, though Laird Gregar is excellent as Raven's cowardly employer, Willard Gates. (Would his childhood friends have called him "Bill Gates"?) This very credible and ultimately sympathetic performance really is a stunning debut by Ladd. In supporting roles, Tully Marshall and Marc Lawrence are also very good.
N.B. Is Ladd's portrayal of Raven the prototype for Alain Delon’s assassin in Le Samurai? I have to confess that I found that film disappointingly dull. Ladd, by contrast, sizzles in this, apparently his first starring role. Frank Tuttle (director) and Ladd show how it is done. [Trivia: Isn’t Frank Tuttle the heroic plumber character played by Robert DeNiro in Terry Gilliam’s Brazil?]
Compared to the excessively lengthy productions of today (think of Peter Jackson's The Hobbit, dividing a single book into three 3-hour films), in a masterclass of economy of story-telling, the total running time of This Gun For Hire is 80 minutes!
- Director: Frank Tuttle
- Writers: Albert Maltz and W. R. Burnett, based on This Gun for Sale by Graham Greene
- Starring: Veronika Lake, Alan Ladd, Laird Gregar, Robert Preston, Tully Marshall, Marc Lawrence
- Rating: Full price
- When seen: 24 Jan 2014
- Where seen: Home
- More information: IMDB | RottenTomatoes | Wikipedia
Written in My Writing app, formatted using HyperEdit, posted from my MacBook Pro
