Tueur à gages

one of the things that can make a film noir great is the ability to, at each turn, make the audience think that things are going to turn out okay, and then slam the door in its face. this film is able to do just that. alan ladd doesn't get the lead billing (that honor goes to lake and preston), but make not mistake - he is the star of the film. he plays a loner hit-man and we pick up the action just before he's set to do a job. he holds up his end of the bargain, but the man who hired him pays him in marked bills in an attempt to pin a robbery on him. ladd goes on the lam, but runs into the girlfriend (lake) of a cop (preston) who is after him for having passed one of the marked bills. little does ladd, or even preston, know, but lake has been enlisted by the government to do some investigative work on the man who paid ladd for the hit with the marked dough. it's quite a criss-crossed story, but it's all very easy to follow and very fun to watch while it unfolds. lake is sworn to secrecy because of the sensitive nature of her investigation, and she has no idea that the man she meets on the train (ladd) is the same man her boyfriend is pursuing. it's not as dark a noir as detour, but the ending is surprisingly affecting and certainly dark enough to qualify as a noir. the lighting is more subtle than it is in some noir and i made a note of looking into the cinematographer on this film. my hunch was right - john seitz did the cinematography for this and such films as invaders from mars, sunset blvd., double indemnity, sullivan's travels, and big clock. it's a crime that i've never heard of the guy. but i redeemed myself by finally looking into his work after watching this film. with sunset blvd and double indemnity i probably attributed the good lighting and camera work to billy wilder and the same is true for sullivan's travels and preston sturges. at any rate, this is a good film - ladd and lake do a good job, preston is capable; the cinematography is good even though it doesn't knock you over the head with its brilliance; and the story is well-constructed despite being a little far-fetched in places. B+.

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.

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.

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 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.