Short Cut to Hell

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.

As B movies go, SHORT CUT TO HELL makes it pretty far. This is a tawdrier remake of Graham Greene's source novel for THIS GUN FOR HIRE with lower-rent sets, and lead actors less charismatic, but still very effective. In fact, it's the acting that most impresses about this odd little film. Robert Ivers embodies the diminutive, tightly wound hit-man pretty convincingly; his body language and hard-edged line deliveries are spot-on. Opposite him is Georgann Johnson, who has a disarming, natural acting style. The oil and water combination of these two sustains an interesting tension for the whole movie. Their first meeting aboard a train is a case in point: a very effectively played scene. Talented Johnson never made much of a mark until television later in the 50s and 60s. In the role of Bahrwell, Jacques Aubuchon is very well cast, as are Murvyn Vye and assorted other smaller roles, including Yvette Vickers and Douglas Spencer. Scarce prints of SHORT CUT TO HELL don't always include director James Cagney's spoken introduction and sometimes a jump cut suggests editorial trimming. A restored version of this film would do justice to Cagney's gift for directing actors and a couple of fine action sequences.

Robert Ivers and Georgeann Johnson never quite had the careers that were predicted for them in the introduction to this film by their director. But both give a reasonably competent road show adaption of the Paramount classic This Gun For Hire. Short Cut To Hell also stars William Bishop in the role of the San Francisco cop played originally by Robert Preston who is on the trail to Los Angeles looking for a killer.

The whole wartime angle in This Gun For Hire is dropped for this 1957 film. Instead it's a contract killing of civil servant Peter Baldwin who is about to expose some shady dealings in building contracting. But as in the original he's paid off in hot money from a faked robbery with serial numbers duly recorded and reported to the police.

For the most part the film follows the plot of This Gun For Hire even using a lot of the same lines. Jacques Aubuchon plays the Laird Cregar part of the fixer and he has the same aversion against seeing any of the violence he pays for.

A.C. Lyles who later became famous for producing all those B westerns with past their prime players produced this film and got none other than James Cagney to direct it in his only credit in that department. Cagney never went behind the camera again.

But I doubt even with the original cast of This Gun For Hire that he could have improved on what Frank Tuttle did in 1942.

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.

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.