Click on the headline to link to a Wikipedia entry for This Gun For Hire.
DVD Review
This Gun For Hire, Alan Ladd, Veronica Lake, based on a novel by Graham Greene, Paramount Pictures, 1942
No question I am a film noir, especially a crime film noir, aficionado. Recently I have been on a tear reviewing various crime noir efforts and drawing comparisons between the ones that “speak” to me and those that, perhaps, should have been better left on the cutting room floor. The classics are easy and need no additional comment from me as their plot lines stand on their own merits. Others, because they have a fetching, or wicked, for that matter, femme fatale to muddy the waters also get a pass. Some, such as the film under review from 1942, This Gun For Hire, offers parts of both. The plot line maybe less so, although because it is set in World War II America and indirectly part of the fight to defeat the nefarious (in this case Japanese) enemy it has a certain intrigue factor. As for femme fatale energy, or rather quasi-femme fatale energy, although I have always considered Veronica Lake (and her classic air over her eye look) fetching here she is cross between that type and the girl next door.
As for the plot. Alan Ladd, a gun for hire to the highest bidder does his job as expected and is paid off for doing so. Unfortunately those that hired Ladd to silence an employee of a chemical company whose president was ready to sell poison gas to the highest bidder (Japan)were not on the level. They tried, might and main, to set Brother Ladd up as the fall guy. But one does not get to be, or rather one does not survive in the hired gun business, by being a chump for some nefarious scheme. Needless to say the plot is partially driven by his well-earned revenge.
However, a second plot line is brought in by Ms. Lake. America was at war and selling poison gas to the bidder, Japan, was, well, not right so she is “hired” to get the goods on the chemical operation through a weak-link, one of the company executives. Naturally in the course of these two plots unwinding the Ladd-Lake combination is brought to a boil, well, almost a boil. Through twists and turns the pair get the bad guys, although Ladd as a bad guy himself, or maybe just misunderstood, has to take a bullet for the cause because as we all know- “crime, especially murder, does not pay.” Not as good a pairing of Ladd and Lake as in The Glass Key but okay. But you can see what I mean about this one being sort of a semi-classic noir, right?
No comments:
Post a Comment