This Gun for Hire (1942)

 ☆ ☆ ☆ ½

This Gun for Hire (1942) – F. Tuttle

First teaming of Alan Ladd and Veronica Lake who went on to star together in a few further films. I’ve read that they did not like each other very much.  It doesn’t really show here, perhaps because Ladd plays a cool hitman (Raven; very likely the forerunner of Delon’s Jef Costello in Melville’s Le Samourai).  Raven doesn’t show much emotion (except briefly when helping a small child) but you do sense his fondness toward Lake, at least later in the picture, after he is thwarted from rubbing her out as a witness. The plot (from Graham Greene) is a little convoluted – Ladd is hired by Laird Cregar, a chemical company exec who pays to wipe out a blackmailer who is about to expose him as selling formulas for weapons to the enemy (this is WWII). He pays Ladd in marked bills and tells the cops that Ladd stole them.  Soon enough, Ladd spends some money and the dragnet is after him. Lake, the girlfriend of the cop after Ladd, accidentally meets Ladd on a train (after being recruited by a Senator seeking to uncover Cregar’s nefarious actions to get dirt on him) but he takes her hostage when Cregar tips them off that he’s on the train.  Of course, crime doesn’t pay (with the Hays Code still in existence), so it doesn’t end well for Ladd (or Cregar). This early film noir captures the look of the genre and, although we don’t ever identify with Ladd, there’s a fatalistic sense that he’s the victim of a terrible childhood that he could never escape. Not yet the noir theme of the fatal mistake that dooms a protagonist but we’re on the way there.