This Gun for Hire (dir. Frank Tuttle, 1942)
Raven (Alan Ladd) is a contract killer. In addition to being a murderer, he’s violent toward the overdressed housekeeper at his apartment, but is kind toward animals and children, which sort of endears the audience to him. On orders from his employer, an industrialist named William ‘Not Bill’ Gates (Laird Cregar), he murders a chemist and steals a notebook. Gates double crosses Raven, paying him in marked bills that he tells the police were stolen from his company. The lead detective on the case is Michael Crane (Robert Preston), whose girlfriend Ellen Graham (Veronica Lake) is a nightclub performer and stage magician who is coincidentally hired by Gates, who in turn is under investigation by the federal government as a traitor against the US. A senator named Burnett (Roger Imhof) employs Ellen as a spy to gain evidence on Gates, and soon enough Ellen becomes entangled with Raven as something between a hostage and ally.
It’s a lot of plot for something that’s barely eighty minutes long.
The film is based on Graham Greene’s 1936 novel A Gun for Sale, a thriller set on the European continent and in England and whose plot foreshadows the Second World War. Six years later, the setting became America during wartime. While the novel can be read as prophetic in retrospect, the film reflects a sort of ambient paranoia about collaboration between Big Business and the Axis. I have no idea how aware anyone at Paramount Pictures would have been about, for instance, IBM and Nazi Germany, but it’s interesting to consider. Ladd and Lake are both good, and more films could have used Veronica Lake doing magic tricks while singing.
oliveresque 