Mit dem Satan auf Du

Peppermint-loving Jacques Aubuchon hires Robert Ivers to kill a couple of people, then pays him off with hot money. So Ivers boards the train to track down the guy who stiffed him. Seated next to Georgann Johnson, a singer who's heading to LA to work ina night club, he lifts a five-dollar bill from her. She catches it and demands her money back, then notices how hungry he is and splits a sandwich with him. Aubuchon is on the train, sees Iver, and calls the cops. Ivers forces Miss Johnson off the train with him, but they part company.... although their paths will soon cross again.

How did Jimmy Cagney come to make his sole movie as director with this remake of 1942's THIS GUN FOR HIRE? Good friend A. C. Lyles was producing it as his first picture and asked him to. It's not particularly distinguished, but then, neither was the first screen version. It's much more open in its sexuality, with a long moving shot focused on Yvette Vickers' rear as she sashays around Ivers' flop. Everyone is good, but no one is great, and lightning didn't strike the way it did with the first movie.

Towards the end of Short Cut to Hell, with the two principal characters holed up in an abandoned underground storage bunker and the police cars massed outside, there's a long quotation from the doom-freighted score Miklos Rosza wrote for Double Indemnity. It's one of several arresting details the movie provides (another is a newspaper from the previous decade, with the headline 'Allies Cross Siegfried Line'), details that pique interest but go nowhere in attempting to satisfy curiosity.

Short Cut to Hell is an all but forgotten movie but a noteworthy one nonetheless, if only as the only title James Cagney ever directed. Night of the Hunter it's not (the sole directorial effort of Charles Laughton), but another point of engagement is in its being a remake of the 1942 Alan Ladd/Veronica Lake vehicle This Gun for Hire, drawn from the Graham Greene 'entertainment' of that name.

The Ladd/Lake allure didn't last into a new millennium (who knew?), but in 1957 both of them were still reasonably active, their less than glamorous (all right, alcoholic) endgames still a few years, or decades, off. Cagney chose to update them using actors without much in the way of either past or future.

In the Ladd role of the icy, isolated killer-for-hire, Robert Ivers is little more than a trenchcoat and a topper, skin and bones, who brings to mind an unlikely amalgam of Elisha Cook Jr. and James Dean. Finding himself set up through marked bills, after carrying out the two brutal murders contracted by pompous 'fatso' (Jacques Aubuchon, whose indulgences are pretty young things and peppermint patties), he eludes police, taking as hostage Georgann Johnson, a lounge singer engaged to police detective William Bishop.

Johnson proves a game gal, but in the wrong way. She has a way with a wisecrack, but it's not in the flirtatious Veronica Lake way (nor that of Lauren Bacall or Gloria Grahame); the spin she gives is more in the Eve Arden-ish, vinegar-virgin mode, less seductive than matey, even matronly. So the chemistry between captor and captive (our old friend The Stockholm Syndrome) rarely reaches reactive force. (Nor, for that matter, do the reactions between Johnson and Bishop.)

Notwithstanding its unknown cast, Short Cut to Hell doesn't have the look or feel of a B-movie, and Cagney keeps a good pace and an acceptable amount of tension (a few quite brutal scenes help to quicken the pulse as well). It's not quite clear why Cagney chose this material to direct, and he makes (or had to accept) some less than ideal choices, but he'd worked in movies long enough to insure that the movie he directed was brisk and absorbing, a better little movie than its obscurity might suggest.

Story about an antisocial hired killer who goes after an employer who double crosses him. While tracking down the men who hired him he gets involved with the female lead a night club singer on her way to Los Angeles. In the end revenge is extracted.

It is fast paced and keeps your interest especially the first hour. When the action moves to LA it starts to bog down a bit and get a little squirrelly. There is a long scene in an air raid shelter of some huge giant factory that is completely implausible...dozens of police scour the plant for hours but overlook an obvious staircase to the airraid shelter??

Still it is worth a watch I give it a 6.

The other reviews are by people much more knowledgeable about the actors and period than I...am reviewing it as a naive uninformed viewer.

RECOMMEND

This is the only film directed by James Cagney.

In Short Cut to Hell, Robert Ivers plays a hit man paid off with counterfeit money, bringing police to his door. He hops a train to Los Angeles and winds up kidnapping a young woman (Georgian Johnson) who is the girlfriend of a detective (William Bishop).

Very routine and I struggled to stay involved.

Growing up I loved the TV series It's a Great Life which starred Bishop. I suppose if I saw it now I would find it silly, who knows. Sadly he died young.

I had never seen Georgann Johnson as a young and pretty actress. She was a wonderfully talented character actress.

This is the only film James Cagney directed, and for a first-time effort, this remake of THIS GUN FOR HIRE is not too shabby. Cagney supposedly made the film as a favor to producer A.C. Lyles, and he did not really intend to pursue a career as a director. While it may not be up to the original, the film still has a good deal of Cagney-esque energy, and enough suspense to sustain viewer interest.

Actress Georgann Johnson is cast in the Veronica Lake role, and she applies a serious amount of realism. At one point, she has to walk down the aisle of a train, and she does it very subtly as if her equilibrium is off-balance, which if you think about it, it should be. How come other actors do not walk realistically on trains, planes and other fast-moving transportation in movies? Maybe they should consult Miss Johnson for pointers.