More like: with a gat or a cat.

WARNING: SPOILERS

Growing up, I didn’t get Alan Ladd. How did he ever become a star? He didn’t seem like much. I guess this wasn’t based on much, either—“Shane” maybe?—but his 1940s-era stardom still perplexed me. He had a blankness to him. And wasn’t he also very, very short?

Now I get it.

“This Gun for Hire” is the movie that made him and man does he pop. I’m curious if this happens often: an actor hits it big playing a villain, graduates to hero roles, and becomes less interesting as a result.

The credits read “And introducing Alan Ladd as Raven” but he’d been knocking about Hollywood since the mid-1930s, getting bit parts here and there: cadet, soldier, reporter in “Citizen Kane.” The movie itself had ben knocking around Hollywood just as long. It’s based on a 1936 novel, “A Gun for Sale,” by Graham Greene; Paramount bought the rights and intended to put it into production with Peter Lorre as Raven; then the dithering. This pair of writers was brought in, then that pair. Maybe Lorre was wrong for the role? Maybe Paramount London would take it on?

It finally got a kind of push from Veronica Lake. They wanted to cash in on her popularity and this was just sitting there. Who tapped Ladd, I don’t know, but he had to dye his blonde hair black to play Raven. As a tough guy with a soft spot for cats, he’s perfect. It’s also a perfect role for me. I have a soft spot for cats. The misanthropy is a bonus.

Hi mister
The movie opens on a sweaty, hapless man taking an afternoon nap in a two-bit dive in San Francisco. As he wakes and looks at his assignment (Albert Baker, 122 Bridge Street #2), something like steel enters his eyes. It’s as if he’s reconstructing himself; it’s as if he’s remembering who he told himself to be.

A stray kitten meows at his windowsill and he lets it in for a bowl of milk, talking to it gently. When Annie (Pamela Blake) comes in to clean, and swats at the cat, he talks to her less gently. He spins her around, accidentally tearing her dress, and slaps her. “You and your cat!” Annie howls.

Yes, him and his cat. Right away I’m sold.

The target, Albert Baker, turns out to be a dull man who thinks he’s clever. When Raven goes to his satchel, Baker expects the blackmail money but gets a gun, and it goes off quickly. Baker’s “secretary,” smoking on the couch in a slinky dress, is also killed. Then Raven rifles through the blackmail papers: something about Senator Burnett, “Preparation for Bromine,” a lot of chemical symbols.

The key to the scene is its entrance and exit. On the stairs, a lame girl with leg braces says “Hi mister” when Raven shows up. He stares back and you can read his thoughts. She’s a witness. So does he kill her on the way out? He seems to think it but walks past instead. Except she says “Mister? I dropped my ball,” and you’re like “Shit” He stops, turns, gets it for her, stares with cold eyes, and goes to his satchel … only to snap it shut. “Thanks, mister.”

It's a creepy scene that lingers. For the rest of the movie, you think: This is a guy who could kill a little girl…

Raven’s unspoken code gets spoken in the next scene. At a diner, a fat man named Gates (Laird Cregar) pays him $1,000 in tens, which Raven looks at through the light. “Don’t you trust me?” says Gates. “Who trusts anybody?” Raven responds. Gates acknowledges the wisdom.

Gates: If the bills were bad, you couldn’t very well complain to the police, could you?
Raven: I’m my own police.

Ladd says the lines quietly, with an edge, all but prefiguring Clint Eastwood. The fat man, meanwhile, is both fascinated and repulsed with the act he’s paying for. He wants to know but doesn’t; he can’t bear to look but can’t help himself.

Raven does need to be his own police. While the bills aren’t counterfeit, the serial numbers have been flagged as part of a payroll robbery/murder at Nitro Chemicals, for which Gates is vice president to a bitter husk of an old man, Alvin Brewster (Tully Marshall, b. 1864). They’re pressuring police, Det. Crane (Robert Preston, second-billed), to solve the case and kill their killer.

As if being involved in upper management and murder isn’t enough, Gates also runs a nightclub, the Neptune in LA, and while in SF he auditions some talent, Ellen Graham (Veronica Lake), who does a combo singing/magic act. He’s properly wowed, but the man who arranged the audition has his own ulterior motives. He’s acting at the behest of the man whose name we saw on the blackmail documents, Sen. Burnett (Roger Imhof), who, in a backseat meeting with Ellen, comes off as homespun and patriotic. His committee suspects Gates of selling secrets to foreign agents but they can’t nail him, so could she…?

Right. When the feds can’t nail someone, call in the sultry singer-magicians.

This is where the coincidences begin to pile up. Turns out Ellen is engaged to Crane, the cop working the payroll robbery/murder case. And guess who sits next to her on the night train to LA? Raven. Both of them are after Gates but neither knows the other’s mission. It’s just a coincidence they sat together. Wouldn’t it be funny if everyone on the train was after Gates? I guess that’s “Murder on the Orient Express.” 

On the train Ellen doesn’t squawk when he tries to steal $5 from her (since all his money is tainted), and she helps him escape when Gates wires ahead for the cops; but then we get a reprise of the lame girl scene: Just how bad is this man? In LA, he takes her to a shed and seems ready to kill her before construction workers barge in. Then she runs for her life.

It takes some heavy lifting to bring them back together. Ellen shows up at the Neptune, shaken, but does her nightclub number; then she gets invited to Gates’ place and actually goes. She knows Gates is a traitor, and (via the “fat man/peppermints” line) she knows a hired killer is looking to kill him—a hired killer who might kill her, too. But she goes. Patriotism, I guess.

For Raven it’s different, since his whole raison d’etre has become getting Gates. In LA, he tracks Gates in a way that James Cameron would steal for “The Terminator”: He tears out the phonebook listing for half a dozen “W. Gates,” and starts going through them one by one. Nope. Nope. Yep. By then, Gates, the traitor to both Raven and the United States of America, has accused Ellen of treachery—not for teaming with the feds (which is true) but for teaming with Raven (which isn’t). So Gates’ right-hand man, Tommy (Marc Lawrence), knocks her out and trusses her up, Gates returns to his nightclub, and then his place becomes Grand Central Station. First, it’s Det. Crane, searching for Ellen. Then it's Raven, searching for Gates. Nobody finds what they’re looking for, but after knocking out Tommy, Raven finds Ellen.

I don’t quite get why he goes from trying to kill her to saving her, but sure, keep the story moving. Also, up to this point, I’d kinda wondered about Veronica Lake. She almost seemed to be sleepwalking through the part; but interacting with Ladd she comes to life. Bells go off. She basically becomes Bacall before Bacall: throaty, sardonic, sexy.

The rest is chase through factories and railroad yards. The cops chase Raven (and Ellen, who becomes a suspect, too), while Raven stays alive to chase Gates. In the fog of the railroad yards, we get two good scenes. A stray cat bonds with Raven but he has to quiet its meows and accidentally smothers it—a bit “M*A*S*H” would use, in another form, for its final episode. The other scene involves a dream. He says he doesn’t want to sleep because he doesn’t want to dream; at the same time, he’s read that if you tell someone your dream it might go away forever. So he tells Ellen.

It’s less dream than backstory:

I dream about a woman. She used to beat me. “Whip the bad blood out of me,” she said. My old man was hanged. My mother died right after that and I went to live with that woman. My aunt. Beat me from the time I was 3 til I was 14. One day she caught me reaching for a piece of chocolate. She was saving it for a cake. A crummy piece of chocolate. She hit me with a red-hot flatiron. Smashed my wrist with it. I grabbed the knife. I let her have it in the throat. They stuck a label on me—killer. Shoved me in a reform school and they beat me there, too. But I’m glad I killed her.

[Pause]

What’s the use? Nothing I can do.

Ladd nails this monologue. I imagine he got men with “I’m my own police” and women here.

Don’t get the gas masks at Nitro Chemicals. Tommy is wearing one while guarding Gates, which allows Raven to take his place without notice. Apparently Nitro Chemical is conducting a gas-attack drill (for themselves or WWII?), but it doesn’t explain why Tommy wears one and Gates doesn’t. But in the end, Raven kills the traitors and saves the day.

A few notes
It's amazing that all of this got through the Production Code Authority. I’ve been wondering about them lately. A hired killer is made central and sympathetic, and, despite the interference of the police, he winds up taking out two of America’s enemies. Hell, by their lights, the PCA made it worse. One of the few notes they had involved a line from Det. Crane as he and Ellen watch Raven expire. Crane is supposed to say, “He did all right by all of us,” but the PCA said no, the cop can’t say that. So they gave the line to Raven, who poses it as a dying question to Ellen: “Did I do all right for you?” The hell? That's actually better. They make it touching. They make us like him even more.

Seriously, for an org that had the power to stunt movies and culture for 30 years, the PCA was amazingly bad at what they did.

The director is Frank Tuttle, not a well-known name, so I assume the movie pops because of others: Graham Greene, screenwriters Albert Maltz and W.R. Burnett (who wrote “Little Caesar” and kept remaking the gangster genre), cinematographer John F. Seitz, and all the great actors in it, including Cregar and Marshall—both of whom would die shortly afterwards, Marshall 78, Cregar only 30. But it's mostly the leads. There’s such a frisson with Ladd and Lake that they made three more movies together in the next five years. I wonder if those are any good?

Fifteen years later, James Cagney was asked to direct a remake of this one. It was retitled “Short Cut to Hell,” but there was no Alan Ladd to save the day.

Publicity shot: This close to being a super ... hero?