This Gun For Hire (1942)

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!

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• 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

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• 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

Dances With Wolves (1990)

Inside everyone is a frontier waiting to be discovered.

I have to say I love this film.

Funny seeing this film again after recently seeing Avatar, nicknamed "Dances with Smurfs", at the cinema. The revisionist take on the Western here reaches an apex, with the army officer protagonist, Lieutenant John Dunbar (Kevin Costner), arriving from the Civil War torn east coast, having volunteered for this post, (naively?) wanting to experience "the frontier" before it disappears.

The story stands up very well, and is more sophisticated than may appear at first glance. Dunbar's courage is established at the outset, contrasting with the malaise of the rest of the Union troops, in an act of (possibly fever-fuelled) bravado that pre-figures the bravery of the native American warriors later in the story, counting coup.

The early part of the story functions mainly to establish the crappiness of white Americans, who are almost all either cowardly, deranged, or boorishly ignorant, strengthening the contrast with the character of Dunbar, and the American Indians he meets, heightening their bravery, dignity, ferocity and/or humanity.

The scene where he reports for duty to his superior officer is very interesting too. It functions as a sneakily innocuous bit of staging, with the deranged officer apparently living in a fairy tale, so that Dunbar receives his orders as if he were a medieval knight being sent on a crusade.

As well as courage, further character-building devices include the contrast between Dunbar, with his appreciation of nature and his literary and artistic ability, revealed through the first person narrative voiceover and his use of a journal, and his boorish undignified guide, with his poor personal hygiene, his childish practical jokes.

At three hours in length, the style is unhurried.

Costner plays it just right. Mary McDonnell (brilliant too later in her career as the President in Battlestar Galactica) is luminous in the role of Stands With A Fist, and does a great job of playing someone reaching for a language they haven't spoken since they were a small child, even later speaking it with curious inflections, as would someone for whom it was a second or foreign language.

The native American actors are great, in particular Graham Greene as Kicking Bird, also the chief, Ten Bears, played by Floyd 'Red Crow' Westerman, and Kicking Bird's wife, Black Shawl (Tantoo Cardinal), and the Pawnee villain (Wes Studi). Their makeup and costumes are really impressive.

• Rating: Exceptional
• When seen: 21 Aug 2010
• Where seen: Home
• More information: IMDB | RottenTomatoes | Wikipedia

Amendments: Added writer tag: "Michael Blake."; actor tags: "Mary McDonnell, Graham Greene, Rodney A. Grant". Removed link to Wikipedia-sourced image. Added ranking image.