Die Narbenhand

Both Alan Ladd and Tyrone Power made their film debuts in 1932's Tom Brown of Culver; by 1936, Power was a star.

It took Alan Ladd a long 10 years and something like 40 films to make it, but make it he did as a cat-loving contract killer in "This Gun for Hire," also starring Veronica Lake, Laird Cregar and Robert Preston.

Ladd plays Phillip Raven, a contract killer in San Francisco who is hired to "off" a blackmailer and retrieve a formula from him. What he doesn't know is that his employers paid him in marked bills and then reported him to the police as the killer of the man, hoping to get him out of the way.

Their plan is to sell the formula to the Germans. A Senate committee is suspicious of one of the traitors, a night-club owner named Willard Gates (Cregar) and send in a performer, Ellen Graham (Lake) to work undercover for them, unbeknownst to her LA policeman boyfriend (Preston). Graham and Raven are mistakenly connected by Gates, and soon both are on the run from him.

"This Gun for Hire" is thickly plotted but nevertheless somehow holds the viewer's interest, most likely because of the characterizations. The diminutive, beautiful Lake is an absolute delight as a singer with a magician routine.

As one of the villains, Laird Cregar creates an excellent character - a hugely built fraidy-cat who abhors violence. And Ladd's Phillip Raven, vicious though he is, is a man who learned in childhood not to trust anyone and not to get too close to anyone.

He's a sad character - and this is as close to acting from Ladd as you'll get. In future films, he says his lines in a monotone, though his tough guy persona is very effective.

Here, he plays a ruthless man given to outbursts as well as depression. His pairing with Lake, which perhaps was continued because she was a good height for him, is heaven-sent - these are two noir actors who fit the genre perfectly, if for different reasons.

"This Gun for Hire" makes for compelling drama, but it's sad to watch as well. Cregar died two years after the film's release, at the age of 28, with what would have been a great career lost; after a failed suicide attempt (his mother was a suicide), Ladd would die of an alcohol and drug overdose at the age of 51; and the rage with her peek-a-boo hairdo, Lake, by the '50s, would be an alcoholic working as a bartender in a hotel before dying at age 54.

You could say this is a "curse" film, but one can say that about so many - the lives of the people who made these classics just weren't fun. A shame, because they left us with such great work.

THIS GUN FOR HIRE (TGFH, for short) is, without question, one of Hollywood's truly classic thrillers from the glorious 40's. It's a top-rate suspense flick, no doubt about that, and, personally, one of my all-time favourite flicks from that particular era. TGFH is jam-packed with plenty of hard-boiled action and death-defying drama. It's a 'Must See' for any Film Noir fan, like myself.

This would be Alan Ladd's first starring role as an actor. He'd been struggling to make it in Hollywood for nearly a decade. Ladd's widespread appeal as the hard-edged tough guy, Raven, in TGFH would, literally, catapult him into immediate stardom. Ladd's position as one of Hollywood's top male actors would endure for the next 10 years. Sadly enough, he would eventually die by his own hand from a deliberate overdose of alcohol and barbiturates in the early 1960's. Alan Ladd - Gone, but not forgotten.

Adapted from the Graham Greene novel of the same name, TGFH is a tough-edged story about love, power, and betrayal set in the seamy underworld of the 1940's.

Alan Ladd, as Philip Raven, plays a cold-blooded, professional killer who's been double-crossed and set-up for termination by his most recent client. It's only a matter of time before he's put out of action for good. But Raven ain't going down alone. No way. To avenge himself and the wrong done him, Raven must track down and eliminate, with extreme prejudice, those who want him out of the picture, permanently.

The tension mounts and before the night is over someone will be paying dearly with their life.

This Gun For Hire is a sure-fire hit!

Philip Raven (Alan Ladd) is a gun for hire. He lives alone in a small room and gives milk to a lonely cat every morning. But he doesn't seem to appreciate the company of humans. He never smiles and he won't trust anybody. He is asked by Willard Gates to kill a man and steal documents from him. After Gates paid Raven with hot money, Raven decided to find Gates to settle a score with him. In the meanwhile, a cabaret performer Ellen Graham (Veronica Lake), the girl friend of a Police lieutenant, is secretly charged by a senator to infiltrate a company – Nitro – that is suspected to sell army secrets to the Japanese. For this, she goes to an audition to be hired by Willard Gates, owner of a cabaret, but also an employee of Nitro. In the train on her way to Los Angeles, Ellen Graham meets Philip Raven, both unaware that they are involved in the same case. When they arrive in Los Angeles, the Police is after him and he has to kidnap Ellen to get away from it. Realizing they have the same enemy Ellen convinces Raven to forget his own interest and start to fight the people of Nitro in the interest of the country.

This is the first Alan Ladd Veronica Lake movie but it is also probably the best. The plot, the acting, the dialogue and the direction are so great that these make ‘This gun for hire' a classic film noir. At the beginning, the credits mention: introducing Alan Ladd. For his first leading role, the least we can say is that Ladd gives a great performance. It is obvious that his character inspired the character of Jeff in ‘Le samourai' by Jean-Pierre Melville with Alain Delon. Both characters have the same attitude and the same clothes. They live alone a small room. They never get involve in any relationship and both are very professional. They are only kind to animals and children (in `Le samourai', Delon had a bird in his room). Also, the sequence on the pedestrian bridge of the railroad has clearly its equivalent in ‘Le Samourai'. I was really impressed by the first sequence, when Ladd execute his contract and also by the sequence where Ladd and Lake are running across the city to escape from the Police (which is much of the movie). How breath-taking! This is truly great cinema, quiet a good surprise for a director (Frank Tuttle) who is not that well known. I've seen ‘The Blue Dahlia', `the Glass key' and `this gun for hire' these last three days (film noir retrospective in Oak Street Cinema, Minneapolis) in this order (reverse of the chronological one) but I must say that the quality increase in this order. ‘This gun for hire' is much darker and less funny than the movie they made together after that but it is a better film noir. Definitely a masterpiece. High recommended 9/10.

This is a straight-forward, linear, quick-moving story based on a much more interesting book. But it's still an entertaining movie, and probably close to required viewing if you enjoy noir and/or Forties movies.

Raven (Alan Ladd) is a hired killer, evidently without remorse or nerves, who is paid to knock off a blackmailer. The blackmailer was trying to take to the cleaners a corrupt industrialist who was coincidentally helping the enemy. (This is during WWII.) However, Raven is paid in counterfeit bills on the assumption the police will catch him when he spends the money. He discovers the plot and decides to take out the guy who hired him and the fellow, the industrialist, who was behind it all.

The movie bills Veronica Lake and Robert Preston above the title, Laird Cregar just below the title, and Alan Ladd last in big type as "Introducing Alan Ladd." Some introduction; according to IMDb, Ladd had already appeared in more than 40 films in unbilled and minor parts.

This was Ladd's breakthrough movie and he's very good in it. I don't think he was much of an actor, but he had a lot of star presence, especially in the movies he made in the Forties. There was always something passive but potentially dangerous about him. His looks could have kept him in the pretty boy category, but for whatever reason didn't. Veronica Lake, for me, is something of an acquired taste, but for whatever reason she and Ladd made an effective pairing that was repeated several times. Laird Cregar played the heavy, and he was an interesting actor. Big and fleshy, he was something of a Raymond Burr type but more versatile. Robert Preston is seldom mentioned in regard to this movie and this must have ticked him off. Here's a guy who usually played best friend of the lead, gets a good part as the lead in a solid movie -- and winds up being over-shadowed by Ladd.

The first five minutes or so of the movie are among the most efficient I've come across in establishing a major player's character and complexities. We first see Raven waking up in his rented rooms and checking the clock. Nothing out of the ordinary there. In very short order, however, he's taken a gun out, helped a stray kitten get into his room and given it some food, slapped hard and full in the face a maid who tried to kick out the cat, showed up at the blackmailer's place where he meets the blackmailer (who was supposed to be alone); the blackmailer has his "secretary" with him so he just kills them both; on the way out a little girl on the stairs asks him to get her ball which has rolled away; she sees his face, he obviously thinks about shooting her, too -- but gets the ball for her and leaves. In just a few minutes Raven's cold ruthlessness and his conflicts are established, and so is a sort of sympathy for him. These first few minutes, in my view, are what make the movie work.

Phillip Raven is a hit man of no obvious moral fibre, he literally will kill anyone for the right price. After fulfilling a contract for the chocolate munching Willard Gates, he finds himself pursued by the law on account that he was paid by Gates with stolen money. Raven sets out for the ultimate revenge and dovetailing towards the explosive finale with him is sultry conjurer Ellen Graham and honest cop Michael Crane.

Based on the Graham Greene novel A Gun For Sale, this is not a straight out adaptation, the plot has been re-jigged with very impressive results. The most enlightening thing I found when reading up on the film was that the studio were so blown away by the efforts of Alan Ladd as Raven, they turned the script around to make him the films chief axis, and boy what a smart move that was for this is Alan Ladd's show all the way.

Ladd plays Raven with brilliant icy veneer, he's cold and devoid of emotion, his only trip to anything resembling caring is an affinity to cats because in his own words, "cats don't need anyone, they are on their own, just like me", the result is one of the most unnerving killers put on to the 40s cinema screens. Veronica Lake is the stunning female of the piece, she glides through the picture with ease as Ellen, a character with her own issues, but thankfully she's integral outside of any sort of romantic plot, even though she is the only one who gets close enough to Raven to learn anything about what makes him tick.

Robert Preston as Michael Crane was to be the pics focus but he becomes a mere side part thanks to Ladd's barnstorming show, and unsurprisingly Laird Cregar is suitably shifty as Gates. It's a fine film in its own right, it's tightly filmed, wonderfully scripted and contains a great noir ending, but ultimately it's all about the cold as death hit-man Raven, and the great performance by the man who played him. 8.5/10