“You talkin’ to me?”
This Gun For Hire is a strange tonal mix of a movie, but a classic nonetheless. How else can you explain a movie that opens with a hitman coldly murdering a man and a woman in their apartment, and goes on to feature musical numbers, odd humorous bits and traitorous spies wearing gas-masks? Based on the novel A Gun For Sale by Graham Greene, it’s a bizarre mix to be certain. But thanks to a sharp script and excellent chemistry between the leads, it has become a classic amongst the film noir cannon.
Jean-Pierre Melville’s biggest inspiration for his seminal Le Samourai is clearly This Gun For Hire, right down to main character Jef Costello’s raincoat and hat being virtually the same as Alan Ladd’s here. But the master French director took inspiration from far more than just the surface details. Just like Frank Tuttle’s 1942 film, Melville opens his movie with his killer sitting alone in his sparse room, just before embarking on a hit. In Tuttle’s film, this is Philip Raven, played by Alan Ladd in his first major role. Already the character is an enigma - we see him caring for a small kitten, yet he beats the cleaning lady almost as soon as she shows up. We then follow Raven as he conducts his business, killing a chemist who’s stolen a special formula. Only something’s not right - the chemist has a woman with him. “You’re not supposed to be here,” he says without even the slightest hint of remorse, before coldly shooting her through a closed door. There’s another who sees him leave the building, a little crippled girl who asks Raven to fetch her ball. For a moment it seems as if Raven will kill the girl too, but at the last moment relents. This teetering balance of morality and doing whatever it takes to get the job done hangs over the character and film for the entire runtime, to the point where we’re never sure which way Raven will turn next. After carrying out his contract, Raven is soon drawn into an international conspiracy involving a corrupt chemical company selling gas to the Japanese, which also brings him into contact with Veronica Lake’s Ellen Graham, a nightclub singer who threatens to soften Raven’s stone-cold heart.
Ladd received fourth billing, but there’s no question who the star of the movie is. He owns every scene he’s in with a quiet, burning intensity - a prototype of the antihero who would soon replace the white hat types played by the likes of John Wayne and Gary Cooper. And although Melville and Delon would later fine tune the psychological depths of such a character with Jef Costello, Ladd here also manages to craft a compelling and disturbed portrait of a man who makes a living killing other human beings. For all his tough guy trappings, he’s very child-like (consider the scene where he falls asleep on Veronica Lake’s shoulder), and there’s a basic piece of humanity missing from his character. He doesn’t understand other people - he in fact seems to loathe other people - and therefore isolates himself and makes a living doing away with those same people. That’s an important distinction to make; while many later anti-heroe may be bad men, they keep to their own personal code of honor. Raven has no such code, and seems okay with killing anyone who gets in his way, no matter how innocent they are. He shoots cops at point-blank range, has no compunction hitting women for the flimsiest of reasons, and even nearly kills the woman who softens his heart in the end. In other words, he’s the nicest bad guy in the movie.
Veronica Lake starts her very well-earned career in film noir here, and is luminous throughout; like an angel in an Edith Head dress. This was the first pairing of Ladd and Lake, and the two had such chemistry they would later go on to costar in three more noir films. Lake’s character Ellen Graham already has a copper boyfriend in Michael Crane (played by the second-billed Robert Preston), but her scenes with Ladd suggest her true desires lie elsewhere. Graham is a fancy nightclub singer/magician who is hired by Laird Cregar’s Willard Gates, who is also conveniently the same man that Raven is looking to settle the score with for betraying him earlier. It turns out that Gates is also involved with the turncoat company Nitro Chemical, so she’s soon enlisted by a U.S. senator to spy on Gates and gather as much information on his scheme as possible. She encounters Raven on a train and, discovering they have a common enemy in Gates, the two of them hit it off… At least, as much as a pretty lady and a child-like, cat-loving sociopath can. And being a child-like, cat-loving sociopath, Raven immediately decides he has to kill her, being that she’s seen his face and knows what he’s in town to do. She escapes, and when they next meet Raven winds up inadvertently saving her life (just go with it). It’s then he starts to realize that maybe not everyone is as terrible as he thinks they are, and Graham manages to convince him not to kill Gates but rather force a confession out of him.
It’s there the film becomes a sort of proto-James Bond movie, as Raven sneaks into Nitro Chemical and encounters a physically-challenged villain with trapdoors and the like (there’s even a bullet-shooting pen!). Raven manages to get confessions out of Gates and his conspirators, but at the cost of his own life. As is the classic noir trope, falling for the girl is his downfall. His heart softens just enough to break through his careful demeanor, and by breaking his normal routine he goes and gets himself killed. It’s interesting how in all these films that “softness” winds up being the protagonist’s demise - there’s no room for love in their strict codes and Spartan lifestyles. It plays into the whole male emasculation undercurrents in all noir: opening oneself up to any compassion of any kind only leads to untold suffering and heartache. The only option for the antihero to survive is to cut himself off from the world; sever all his emotional ties and keep a distance from anyone and everyone he comes in contact with. The ending is always inevitable, because it doesn’t really change anything - the antihero has been dead long before the bullets fly and the credits roll.
That obsession and drive towards death was something that heavily influenced Melville for his film, and it hangs like a specter over all its progenitors. The killer-for-hire has one foot in the grave, constantly seeking out death for reasons all his own - his past and how he came to be the way he is a well-guarded mystery. But whereas Melville left us in the dark as to how Jef Costello became the man he was, Tuttle stumbles slightly by explaining Raven’s demeanor due to an abusive childhood. It’s a perfectly reasonable explanation, but entirely unnecessary - one look at Ladd in his room with his gun, and we know what that character is all about. He is both a dead man walking, and Death itself... for the two cannot be mutually exclusive.
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