I’ve long understood that French filmmakers of the 1960s drew on the Hollywood gangster films of the ’30s and ’40s for inspiration, but it wasn’t until finally catching up with the 1942 Paramount picture This Gun for Hire that I realized those homages occasionally veered toward outright theft. A sparse, harsh noir about a taciturn hitman (Alan Ladd) caught between double-crossing clients and the police, This Gun for Hire was essentially remade in 1967 by Jean-Pierre Melville as Le Samourai, with Alain Delon as the reincarnation of Ladd—right down to the smoldering stare, trench coat, and fedora.
Director Frank Tuttle, loosely adapting a Graham Greene novel, doesn’t have Melville’s facility for staging and control, but he does have Ladd. Ridiculously handsome—and still as a statue, the easier for you to admire him—his Philip Raven dominates the movie while hardly batting an eye. He’s a quintessential noir figure—damaged and damaging, but just possibly redeemable—who says things like, “I’m my own police.” There’s a moment where he hides in a phone booth, a gun pointed at the woman (Pamela Blake) making a call, and Ladd and Blake somehow makes it tense but not terrifying, their closeness in the small space even hinting at the erotic.
It’s a good thing Ladd has charisma to spare, because Veronica Lake—as Ellen, a nightclub singer who gets caught up in the search for Raven—is bereft of it. Her famously cascading hair, matched by the long lines of Edith Head’s gowns, make a visual impression, but the minute she begins moving and singing (or, rather, lip syncing) during her introductory dance number it’s obvious there isn’t much else there. That stiffness carries over into her dialogue scenes—except when she’s with Ladd. Then, her eyes come alive and her words gain an edge; there are no phone booths for them, but they do get an extended, intimate exchange while surrounded by police in a box car.
It’s during that chase sequence that Tuttle and cinematographer John Seitz do some borrowing of their own. As Raven and Ellen race through a dark factory and out into the foggy rail yard, This Gun for Hire takes on the atmospheric intensity of a German expressionist masterpiece like Metropolis. The movie has other surprising flourishes, including the conniving owner of a chemical company (Tully Marshall) who rolls around in a futuristic wheelchair like some sort of supervillain. Come to think of it, at one point Lake dons a vinyl outfit in another dance number that looks like something from Catwoman’s closet. Catwoman, it should be noted, first appeared in a Batman comic in 1940 as “the Cat.” What’s that phrase about great artists and stealing, again?
