Tueur à gages

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 is a great, compelling crime thriller that stands the test of time quite well. This would be one of the first movies I'd choose to show to a fan of recent movies who wants to explore classic thrillers but doesn't know where to start (along with "The Maltese Falcon" and one or two others). While many period pieces are "appreciated", this one still provides a jolt of adrenaline right from the opening scene, when Alan Ladd rips the maid's dress and slaps her. He's a bad man, no doubt about it, and his portrayal throughout most of the movie is surprisingly dark, even by today's standards. His character, Raven, is a man whose sole act of human compassion is not to murder a crippled orphan in cold blood, and Ladd's performance is underplayed just enough to make him chillingly believable.

This is a relatively early feature in the cycle that would later be called "film noir". A few films had begun to establish the new look and feel for the new generation of gangster movies, but the archetypal noirs were still a couple of years off. This movie is an interesting example of the early style because it visits the typical noir territory (culturally and emotionally) but avoids the stereotypical noir cast of characters. Rather than a flawed, weak man and a femme fatale, "This Gun For Hire" gives us a coldly amoral killer as the male lead and a tough, streetwise woman as the main "good guy" (her cop boyfriend spends most of the film running around frantically and accomplishing nothing).

Visually, this film is pure noir. It's directed by Frank Tuttle, who made the first version of "The Glass Key" in 1935, combining a hard-boiled gangster story and expressionist-influenced lighting. "This Gun For Hire" fits firmly into that mode, and shows that many of the stylistic trademarks of the supposedly "post-war" Noir style were firmly in place before the US had even been in WW2 for a full year. More importantly, it provides thrills, and a great dose of "the good stuff" in a neat, 81-minute-long package.

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 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!

The film that launched Alan Ladd's career, This Gun For Hire is a very short film like the earlier Public Enemy which gave James Cagney his stardom. This would be the normal length of a B film, but it definitely gets all it wants to say in its brief running time.

Essentially we have three stories where all the principal players get brought together in the end. The first involves Robert Preston investigating a reported payroll robbery of the firm that Tully Marshall is the president of. Note that I said 'reported robbery.' The second involves his girl friend, entertainer Veronica Lake being recruited by no one less than a United States Senator to get the goods on one of Marshall's top aides, Laird Cregar who they think is doing some fifth column work at the behest of Marshall. Finally we have contract killer Alan Ladd who's hired by Cregar to bump off Frank Ferguson who is blackmailing Marshall as to his treasonous activities. Preston, Ladd, and Lake don't know they are all on the same case, but by the end of the film they do.

Alan Ladd became Paramount's answer to Humphrey Bogart as a star of action/adventure films and noir films. This Gun for Hire launched his career. He was enormously popular through the Forties, Paramount's biggest star after Crosby and Hope. He played cynical tough guys in modern films, but then branched into westerns where for the most part he was the gallant hero. In fact the ultimate gallant white knight hero in Shane.

His part as Raven is a difficult one, yet he pulls it off. He's a cold blooded contract killer, one of the earliest ever portrayed as a film protagonist. Yet he's human and you see flashes of it, his concern for cats. As a cat lover, I can sure identify with that. Raven is also one of the earliest characters in cinema who talks about child abuse making him what he is. Groundbreaking when you think about it.

Next to Ladd, the biggest kudos have to go to Laird Cregar, borrowed from 20th Century Fox to play Willard Gates. Gates is a top company executive with Marshall's firm which is a defense contractor which is why the Senate is interested in him. He's basically a jerk who thinks he's so clever. Veronica Lake gets to him real easy because of his weakness for the nightclub scene. And he really doesn't take the full measure of Raven, even though the audience is very aware of how deadly he is.

When you think about it what Cregar and Marshall do is unbelievably stupid. They hire Ladd to kill Ferguson and then pay him with hot money, from the alleged robbery. Why would you do that? Chances are in the rackets they're involved in, they might have need of his services in the future. Not a guy to get mad at you. In fact their double cross is what sets the whole film plot in motion.

Moral is never double cross a guy who says and means that "I'm my own police."

This Gun for Hire was Director Frank Tuttle's finest film. He was a contract director for Paramount who did a whole bunch of films with their various stars in the Thirties and Forties. When he hadn't worked in a while, Alan Ladd got him a job directing him in Hell On Frisco Bay while he was at Warner Brothers and Tuttle also directed A Cry In the Night which Ladd produced. Ladd remembered and was grateful to Tuttle for helping break through into top star ranks. Ladd was like John Wayne that way, ever ready to help a colleague down on his luck.

Veronica Lake is recruited by a U.S. Senator with a fictitious name, but in fact there was a committee looking into all kinds of things like this in the Senate in regard to the conduct of the war. It was headed by a Senator from Missouri named Harry Truman who went on to higher office. I wonder if Truman liked This Gun for Hire? Veronica Lake got a big boost in her career. She and Ladd became a classic screen team as a result of this film.

This film is one great cinematic classic, so important to so many careers and still keeps you on the edge of your seat today.