WARNING: SPOILERS

I’m still unclear if producer A.C. Lyles asked James Cagney to direct this or if Cagney suggested himself for the role. Cagney’s 1976 memoir, “Cagney By Cagney,” implies it was Lyles:

When my old friend A. C. Lyles came to me in 1957 and asked me if I would direct his Paramount production of Short Cut to Hell, I was moved to do so out of friendship only.

Twenty years later, the ghostwriter for that one, John McCabe, in his biography “Cagney,” flips the script:

A. C. Lyles, badly needed a competent director for a screenplay, Short Cut to Hell, based on the Graham Greene novel This Gun for Hire. Jim said, “I knew A.C. was searching for someone, and I said to him, ‘May I suggest someone? I’ll try it.’”

To be honest, neither path makes much sense. If you’re a fledgling producer, as Lyles was, and have access to Cagney, as Lyles did, why wouldn’t you put Cagney on the screen, where he’ll help your bottom line, rather than behind the camera, where he won’t? And if Cagney had directing aspirations, well, he quickly disabused himself of them. Even this 20-day shoot was too long. “Directing I find a bore,” he says in the memoir. “I have no interest in telling other people their business.”

So it was ill-conceived either way, and made more so by the project: remaking the 1942 noir “This Gun for Hire.” Yes, the source material from novelist Graham Greene and screenwriters Albert Maltz and W.R. Burnett wasn’t bad; and since director Frank Tuttle was more journeyman than auteur, a first-timer like Cagney didn’t have too much to live up to.

But the success of the ’42 film relied upon a stunning star-turn from Alan Ladd, and, as the man said, you don’t find those around every corner. It also relied on otherworldly chemistry between Ladd and Veronica Lake. You’re basically asking lightning to strike twice. It didn’t.

Fresh young talents
Cagney introduces our new stars from the director’s chair at the start of the film. Addressing the camera, he says lights, cameras, all well and good, but it’s “the human personality” that really counts, and every few years you need to replenish them. Here they’ve found “two, fresh, exciting young talents in the persons of Robert Ivers and Georgann Johnson. … Hope you’ll agree when you meet them that they’re heading for a great future.

Auteur intro: trying to pass the torch.

They weren’t. In his fedora and trenchcoat, Ivers comes off less Alan Ladd than a kid playing dress-up. To be honest, I was reminded of Matt McCoy—Lloyd Braun on “Seinfeld.” He just doesn’t pop. But Johnson is worse. They decided to replace Veronica Lake’s sexy slinkiness with mid-50s Doris Day perky gumption, and it’s just … grating.

The story proper begins in the same spot, a two-bit dive, and with the same situation: man, cat, landlady’s sexy daughter there to clean up. In the original, though, she wanted to clean. Here, Daisy (Yvette Vickers), in a hip-hugging Monroe-esque dress, is trying to entice Kyle Niles (Ivers), and gets upset when he prefers cuddling his cat.

A few thoughts on the name changes. I don’t mind them dropping “Raven” but for Kyle Niles? Was Lloyd Boyd taken? Or Lucas Doofus? Gates, the fat man, becomes Bahrwell—to cut down on the killer’s search, one assumes. There’s just one Bahrwell in the LA phone book as opposed to six Gateses. Ellen Graham becomes Glory Hamilton. The villainous sourpuss, Brewster in the original, is here reduced to initials: AT, which … Wait, is all this a play on AC Lyles’ name? Lyles = Niles, AC = AT. To what end? 

The maguffin is changed, too. In the original, the man Raven was hired to kill was blackmailing a chemical co. selling its formula to America’s enemies. It’s a bad guy killing a bad guy for a bad guy. The secretary gets it, too, but she was hardly a secretary—more sexpot—and it’s Raven’s call. He’s getting rid of witnesses. Here, the target is a city engineer indicting AT’s company for shoddy building practices. He’s a reformer. His secretary is the real deal, but a traitor. A dirty rat, to coin a phrase. Working for AT, she gets hers at AT’s behest.

But I can’t believe they lost the little girl! It’s the most chilling scene in the original—the little lame girl who talks to Raven as he ascends and descends the stairs, and who, as a result, is a witness. You see it in Raven’s eyes: Do I kill her? He doesn’t, but it’s like 60-40. Here, no girl, no chilling moment. 

We do get the San Francisco diner where Bahrwell (Jacques Aubuchon) pays off Kyle. They add a good back-and-forth (“Don’t you trust me?” “Secretary trusted you”), but a great line in the original, “I’m my own police,” doesn’t land here, and the yin-yang of the fat man, his attraction/repulsion to violence, is lost. Peppermints are now peppermint patties and the man who recognizes Bahrwell is piano player rather than patron. Once Niles realizes he’s been betrayed with marked bills, he returns to get more info from the guy and the modern vernacular enters into it: “That’s all I know, man,” he says. Love that. Hey, here we are. The future was that guy not Ivers in a fedora. 

At least the great coincidences of the original are fixed. The girl isn’t auditioned in SF, she isn’t asked to be a spy for the feds, so when Kyle sits next to her on the train to LA it doesn’t seem absurd that these two strangers are both gunning for the same man.

Georgann is the big difference in casting. Everyone else is almost a mimeograph of the original actor. Aubuchon could be the younger brother of Laird Cregar. Ditto Richard Hale for Tully Marshall, and you could tell they were going for a Ladd type with Ivers. But Georgann Johnson is about 1,000 miles from Veronica Lake. As mentioned, she’s a Doris Day type, and, sure, Doris ruled the box office in this period, but so did Marilyn Monroe. But they moved away from sex toward—I almost hate to say it, given “White Heat”—a mother figure.

And a weird mother figure. There’s that moment when Glory, boarding the train to LA, says goodbye to boyfriend Sgt. Stan Lowery (William Bishop). He gives her a box lunch, says mother packed it, and Glory responds, “Well, here’s one for your mother,” and gives him a long, slow kiss. Ewww.

Half her lines come off like a “Fargo” character:

• “Now when did you last eat? Go on, put some meat on those bones.”
• “You know, you could get yourself in quite a jam taking money. Might’ve ruined your whole future!”

Worse is when she thinks she’s clever. Kyle pulls a gun on her to force her off the train, and she tilts her head and says, “Well, my mother always told me not to talk to strange men…” When she refuses Bahrwell’s invitation back to his place in the Hollywood Hills, she says, with a triumphant smile, “It’s cold in them thar hills.”

Eventually our two heroes are chased by the cops, including Sgt. Lowery, but no railroad yards this time. It’s a factory and a WWII-era air raid shelter. (When they go below, she sees an old newspaper with the headline: ALLIES POUND SIEGFRIED LINE.) It’s a wait-it-out situation, and sadly this means they have time to bond, which means we get lines from her like: “I keep thinking about your hands—so strong and so gentle. … There is so much more to you than you’ll admit!” It was all I could do not to yell “Hey lady, give it up!”

We get less backstory this time, a reprise of the accidental smothering of the cat—in both versions, the most wrenching death in the story. Cagney gives us a couple of good shots of Kyle’s fingers reaching above a sidewalk grating, but they seem swiped from “The Third Man.”

I do like this back-and-forth:

She: Isn’t there just one thing about yourself that you like? That you’re proud of?
He: Yeah. I never miss.

Whaddaya hear, whaddaya say?
The final scenes aren’t in a factory/office building but on AT’s veranda, where Kyle has no reason to get them to confess—in the original, he did it for the girl, and maybe for country on the eve of WWII—but he does it anyway with a Dictaphone running. He dies next to some small steps. There’s nothing grand in it. No top of the world. 

When it was released, “Short Cut to Hell” was put on a double bill with “The Devil’s Hairpin” and quickly forgotten:

Great futures for the two exciting young talents didn’t exactly emerge, though both did well enough. Ivers had a memorable turn as Elvis’ friend Cookie in “G.I. Blues,” and he kept getting bit parts in Jerry Lewis vehicles. He even turned up in two episodes of “Mister Roberts,” them mid-60 TV series based on the Cagney film; but his last screen credit is in ’66. Then he moved back to Yakima, Washington, and became a TV newsman. 

Georgann Johnson, whose face didn’t make the poster (that’s Yvette Vickers), got screen credits into the 21st century. She was one of Joe Buck’s conquests in “Midnight Cowboy,” starred in 1,000+ episodes of a soap opera I’ve never heard of (“Somerset,” 1970-76), kept going. Good for her.

As for AT Nyles/A.C. Lyles? He produced ’60s movies on the cheap, with passé stars (Rory Calhoun) in stale genres (westerns) whose very titles seem tired: “Black Spurs,” “Town Tamer,” “Apache Uprising,” “Johnny Reno,” “Red Tomahawk,” “Fort Utah.” It’s a string of 5.0 IMDb ratings. In ’68, he finagled more work out of the now-retired Cagney, convincing him to narrate “Arizona Bushwackers,” starring Howard Keel and Yvonne De Carlo. In the 1980s, a bit of a switch: a passé star gave Lyles work. He served on a private-sector initiatives council in the Reagan administration.

In the 1950s, Cagney kept doing favors for friends—TV work for Bob Montgomery, etc.—but there was such a shrug to it I don’t know if it was much of a favor. I mean look at this March 1957 headline. Not exactly the publicity you want. Not exactly going to make you drop “I Love Lucy” to run out and see it.

At least the article contains new details. The way Cagney directs, for example—with a soft voice, prefiguring Clint Eastwood—along with Cagney’s concern, via Ivers’ work in “The Delicate Delinquent,” that he would imitate not Alan Ladd so much as Cagney himself. Well, give the director his due. Kid didn't come close to Cagney.