Sorry, this movie sucks

Overrated and overhyped

Excellent but underrated film

Blistering performances.

This movie is about a hired killer named Raven, and it uses a variety of means to make us like him. First, Raven is played by Alan Ladd, who is good looking, and we have a natural inclination to like good-looking people. Second, he has a cat for a pet, of which he is very protective, causing him to slap a maid when she runs the cat out of the room after it knocks over a can of milk. We tend to like people who like animals. True, we tend to not like men who slap women, but that is the sort of thing we would expect from a man who kills people for money. It is the positive qualities that he is given to make us like him, in spite of the negative ones that would ordinarily make us not like him, that are interesting.When he goes to an apartment where there is a man he is supposed to kill, he sees a little girl sitting on the stairs with her legs in braces, probably a victim of polio. He doesn't like the fact that she is a witness, but he continues on up the stairs. Once inside the room, he is dismayed by the presence of a woman. After he kills the man, he sort of apologizes to the woman, saying he was told the man would be alone, and then he shoots her too. The man he killed was a blackmailer, so we had no sympathy for him, but in killing the woman, who presumably was nothing more than a girlfriend of the blackmailer, Raven shows that he is not averse to killing someone who is innocent, if she happens to be a witness. As a result, we wonder if he will shoot the little girl too on his way back down the stairs. He is tempted, but takes pity on her and simply leaves after handing her the ball she dropped. That is another way the movie gets us to like him.Furthermore, the movie gives us another villain, Willard Gates, whom we are encouraged to despise. Gates is played by Laird Cregar, who just has the look and manner of someone creepy. He is the one who hired Raven to do the job. He pays Raven off in ten dollar bills, and then double-crosses him by giving the serial numbers to the police so that Raven will go to prison where he cannot talk. At least, that is the idea, but it really doesn't make sense, because the best way to keep a hit-man from talking to the police is by not double-crossing him. In any event, it turns out that Gates works for a chemical company that is selling a formula for poison gas to the Japanese during World War II. Compared to Gates, Raven seems to be a pretty good guy, for a hit-man.Ellen Graham, a showgirl, is enlisted by a senator to go undercover and investigate Gates and his company. This naturally results in her and Raven crossing paths. He almost kills her to keep her from talking, but she gets away. Eventually, they come to like each other, especially after he rescues her from Gates, who was planning to have her killed. Raven confides in her about dreams he keeps having of the woman who raised him as a child, who beat him regularly, and even hit him with a flatiron, deforming his wrist. This movie was made when psychoanalysis was familiar to audiences, who were therefore primed to accept childhood trauma as an explanation for mental problems later in life. Even today, we tend to accept this explanation for why Raven is the way he is, somewhat excusing his evil nature.Raven wants to get even with Gates and with Brewster, the man Gates works for, while Ellen wants to find out if those two men are traitors. This leads them to cooperate with each other, with Ellen telling Raven where he can find the two men. Brewster is an old man in a wheel chair, which makes him the third person in this movie with some kind of physical disability, but there does not appear to be any special significance about that. In any event, when Raven forces Brewster to sign a confession, the latter dies of a heart attack, after which Raven kills Gates. This is a common ploy of the movies, having the protagonist act from personal motives, which just happen to be of great help for the war effort. So this is another way the movie gets us to like Raven.Finally, Raven starts to shoot a police detective, but when he sees that he is Ellen's fiancé, he holds his fire. This consideration for her makes us like him some more. Then he is shot by a policeman and dies. Because his death is the proper punishment for the crimes he has committed, it balances the books, allowing us to like him without feeling guilty about it.

"This Gun for Hire" is interesting from an historical perspective, but it isn't film noir by any stretch of anyone's imagination. Film noir usually involves an innocent or naive hero who is seduced by a femme fatale, brought into a seedy world, betrayed (at least once), and then left to an unhappy ending. There's usually lots of night scenes, rain, dark shadows, and an urban environment to boot. Alan Ladd is neither innocent nor naive and there is no femme fatale. Veronica Lake and Ladd develop a relationship and she doesn't betray him. Thus, if you're looking for film noir, look elsewhere. Also, you may find the acting a little heavy handed, at least by 21st century standards.While this film helped make Ladd a star, it's probably one of his weaker films. I liked him far more in "Shane": (1953), "The Blue Dahlia" (1946), and "Boy on a Dolphin" (1957).

While the 'film noir' genre was still in its earlier stages (back then they were generally referred to simply as melodramas), This Gun For Hire, an exciting, violent thriller from Frank Tuttle, probably shares more thematically with the Pre-Code gangster thrillers. There is no femme fatale to manipulate the film's anti-hero, nor is the lead a hard- bitten private dick or a dead-beat trying to make some cash. In fact, there isn't really a lead at all. It's arguably three inter-linking stories that intertwine and finally come to a head at the climax. Such is the curiosity of This Gun For Hire, one of the finest examples of the B-movie noirs.Stoic hit-man Philip Raven (Alan Ladd) guns down chemist Albert Baker (Frank Ferguson) and his innocent secretary, and takes what he came for - a chemical formula. His employer, the effeminate and cowardly Willard Gates (Laird Cregar), pays Raven in marked bills and then reports the bills stolen from his company. Nightclub entertainer Ellen Graham (Veronica Lake) is in town to audition for a nightclub spot owned by Gates, but is pulled aside by a senator hoping to gain information on Gates, who is under investigation for treason. Graham's boyfriend, LAPD detective Michael Crane (Robert Preston) is assigned to the case of Raven and the stolen money, but Raven has plans for revenge.Although only fourth-billed, this made a star of Alan Ladd. His dead- eyed, cold-blooded gun for hire is what you take away from the film. Like Richard Widmark as Tommy Udo in Kiss of Death (1947), his character displays such a shocking lack of ethics, quite alarming for its day. His brief moment of humanity comes when he chooses to spare an child who sees his face after a murder. Yet Ladd makes him undeniably compelling, even when he's smacking his girlfriend around for messing with his cat. Veronica Lake, an actress who has yet to completely win me over, does a decent job with a rather unexciting character, performing a couple of nice musical numbers (even though she is lip-synching) while performing magic.Made during WWII, the overseas menace plays a definite part in the film. While by no means a political thriller, the chemical formula that Raven unwittingly steals is for poison gas, intended to be sold overseas to the highest bidder by Gates' mysterious, wheelchair-bound boss Alvin Brewster (Tully Marshall). America's need for corny patriotism damages the film in the end, used as a tool to allow its mean anti-hero some one-dimensional sympathy. It's my only real problem with the film, which without the ending, come have been up there with the greats of film noir. It's still a damn fine film, as hard-edged as you would want your noirs to be, with a truly enigmatic character (and actor) at its centre.www.the-wrath-of-blog.blogspot.com

By coincidence, the cop's girl gets involved with the mad-dog killer that he is pursuing. Alan Ladd is the killer, and by film's end you're given the liberal line about his poor upbringing and brutality that led to his life like this. Let's not forget that he gunned down a man and the woman who witnessed the murder in cold, ruthless blood. Stop the sympathy angle already.The fact that espionage is part of the story could have been made more interesting, but the writers chose that merely as a by-line. Too bad. Ladd is appealing, but the script basically isn't. How come Lake didn't have her hair covering her one-eye? She was known for that?