Thursday, August 26, 2010
There are two kinds of great old movies: those into which a great deal of care and detail and passion were invested by filmmakers, cast and crew — think Citizen Kane or Notorious or The Philadelphia Story — and those which somehow rise to greatness despite being made under the old studio-system directive “They don’t want it good; they want it Wednesday.” If the latter kind of film succeeds, it is carried to success on the shoulders of star power, pure and simple, because if we truly judge it on its merits, if we pause long enough to contemplate the mechanics of its plot, we might find ourselves astounded that the picture ever made it into the can.
Frank Tuttle’s This Gun for Hire, adapted by Albert Maltz and W.R. Burnett from a 1936 novel by Graham Greene, is just such a picture.
Released May 13, 1942, This Gun for Hire is a legendary and important film noir chiefly because it made a star out of Alan Ladd, who holds our attention from the moment we first see him: cool, confident, laconic, magnetic. One would like to believe that he was an amazing discovery, an overnight sensation who appeared out of nowhere, but Ladd had already appeared in 43 films in 10 years before being billed here as “and introducing Alan Ladd.”
The class of this operation, however, is the terrific Veronica Lake, who received top billing and would have carried the entire picture on her slight shoulders had Ladd not made such an impression.
Lake is an anomaly among leading ladies: a confounder of expectations, the girl next door in the packaging of a femme fatale, daintier than Barbara Stanwyck but every bit as tough. And while her trademark peek-a-boo hairstyle makes her appear a bit high-maintenance, the girl behind it is anything but. She’s a gamer, a player, one of the boys. Wherever you’re headed, she’s going too, in heels and without bellyaching. (Witness her also alongside Joel McCrea in Sullivan’s Travels.)
This Gun for Hire marks the first pairing of Ladd and Lake, who would make another six films together over the next six years, most notably the crime dramas The Glass Key and The Blue Dahlia. Symbiotically, Ladd and Lake would each validate the other’s screen cred: Lake enabled Ladd to appear taller and more formidable onscreen than his real-life 5 feet 4 inches, and consequently the 4-foot-11-inch Lake was seen holding her own alongside not just Ladd but every other man in the picture. Not that she had to exert herself much or often.
Because these two are so good, together and apart, one finds oneself forgiving the faults of a film that bears every evidence of having been rushed through production.
To wit, at the scene of the murder that sets the story in motion, the hit man Philip Raven (Ladd) encounters a polio-stricken girl on the apartment steps. He’s taken aback and oddly drawn to her; he wasn’t counting on any witnesses, let alone a little girl. He lingers too long in the foyer and the stairwell, both coming and going, and even interacts with the little girl, letting her get a really good look at him. Here the filmmakers have established the most perfectly reliable eyewitness in the history of contract killings, and yet Raven’s departure marks the last we see of her. All that tension and foreshadowing wasted because someone didn’t cover all their bases during rewrites.
Next we meet Willard Gates (Laird Cregar), the effete, doughy, violence-averse middleman, who on behalf of his mysterious boss has hired Raven to execute the aforementioned murder of a chemist in order to obtain a secret formula. Gates is big on others doing the dirty work but blanches at the mere mention of the sordid details. He pays off Raven with traceable stolen bills that effectively make Raven a marked man, in turn setting Raven on a course for revenge. But I’m getting ahead of myself.
Here the writers post their first entry in the suspension-of-disbelief sweepstakes, as we learn that Gates is a chemical-company executive by day and — wait for it — a nightclub impresario by night. Take a moment to let that sink in.
Hard on the heels of that reveal, we follow Gates to open auditions at a theatrical agency. He’s brought there by a talent scout named Baker so we can all have our first look at Ellen Graham (Lake), who performs a pretty nifty song–and–sleight of hand routine that makes one wonder how much of the magic was performed with a camera and a moviola. In any event, Lake is the best kind of misdirection — and frankly, I can’t imagine any of her contemporaries, except perhaps Stanwyck, not making an embarrassing hash of the singing-magician routine. Naturally she gets the job.
Next, Baker drives Ellen out to the freeway, escorts her to a car parked on the shoulder, and introduces her to Sen. Burnett, presumably of the great state of California and ranking member of some or other intelligence subcommittee, who enlists the newly booked showgirl to spy on Gates for the government.
You can’t make this shit up. And yet Maltz and Burnett did.
Remember that, though, because we’ll circle back to it shortly.
Ellen’s boyfriend, Lt. Michael Crane of the L.A.P.D., is portrayed by Robert Preston in the only pre-Music Man thing I’ve ever seen him in. If I concentrate real hard to suspend my disbelief, I can maybe buy Preston as a uniformed cop but not a detective — and there are no circumstances under which I can accept him as Lake’s boyfriend. He’s a little too starry-eyed and gee-whiz and aww-shucks, and with his soft features and cheesy mustache, he reminds me more of Bud Abbott than of the murder police I’m accustomed to. In the real world — my world — Veronica Lake would break him like a matchstick.
The story opens in San Francisco, where Ellen auditions for Gates and where Crane just happens to be cooperating with the S.F.P.D. on a case. This is established only because it allows Gates to put Ellen on a train bound for L.A., where his nightclub is. And it allows the vengeful Raven to board the same train, where he takes the last available seat … next to Ellen. Gates, who knows Raven is out to get him, comes out of his private sleeper just long enough to spy Raven and Ellen together and suspect that the two of them are co-conspirators.
Never mind that they soon enough will be. This little twist all but renders Sen. Burnett moot. Because according to the Law of Economy of Characters, we don’t need the senator to create a relationship that Raven and Ellen will stumble into on their own. It’s enough that Gates sees them together; now he must eliminate both of them, and he wires ahead to the authorities that Raven — the ruthless killer everyone already knows about because of the widely publicized stolen bills Gates paid him off with — is on the train coming into L.A.
Raven also has a badly deformed wrist that has been duly noted up to this point, so that’s presumably how the police will identify him coming off the train, but he manages to elude the dragnet with an assist from Ellen.
A lot of stuff happens after this, including another fantastic nightclub number by Lake, wearing what her act would dictate is black patent leather fishing gear (no, really), but which for all the world makes her look like a dominatrix. Not that I’m complaining.
In short order, Ellen is abducted by Gates, setting up an excellent bit of work by veteran screen heavy Marc Lawrence as Gates’ bodyguard and driver, Tommy. When Tommy explains in efficient, businesslike detail how he’d go about dispatching Ellen and arranging the whole thing to look like a suicide, Gates is as horrified as though he’s being told about his own imminent demise. Lawrence clearly is having as much fun in the role as Tommy is having at Gates’ expense.
Eventually, Raven rescues Ellen and the two set out together to get Gates. Ellen has warmed to Raven and is trying to persuade him to help bring Gates and his boss to justice instead of merely killing them in cold-blooded revenge. And here the film comes off the rails in the writers’ ongoing mission to cram too many ideas into a story that Graham Greene had probably pretty well nailed in the first place.
Remember: It was released in May 1942 — just six months after Pearl Harbor. It bears repeating that Lake is nothing if not a trouper of the first order, so good in fact that she sells the film’s ham-handed war propaganda (and rescues Sen. Burnett from irrelevance) about as well as anyone could hope to:
“You know, I’ve been figuring something,” she tells Raven. “That chemical formula — I bet I know what it is. … Gas. Poison gas. They’re selling it to our enemy. … Tomorrow they’ll ship it back in bombs. Japanese breakfast food for America. … Did you hear what I said? It’s important. This war is everybody’s business. Yours too.”
She may as well be speaking directly to the camera, ordering us all to run out and buy bonds.
Right after Lake knocks that impossible speech out of the park, Ladd fares much worse with some completely unnecessary business with a stray cat and a soul-purging monologue of his own in which he explains his entire back story (including how he got that deformed wrist) in a paranoid flourish of mounting hysteria totally out of sync with the stoic, calculating, remorseless killer we met in Act I. It’s another misfire by the filmmakers, following a moment in Act II when Raven all but admits to Ellen, at that point a complete stranger on a train (!), that he’s a hit man.
Letting Raven unburden himself to the one person who sympathizes with him is an obvious ploy to enlist the audience’s sympathy as well. Two problems with that: 1) Like the stray cat before it, it’s totally unnecessary, because we’re already on board with Raven’s vendetta against Gates and his boss for double-crossing him; and 2) because the cool, calculating character we’ve spent two acts getting to know has suddenly, if momentarily, morphed into a crazed, wild-eyed maniac.
After they’ve reached an understanding, united against a common enemy, there’s a neat exchange between Raven and Ellen regarding her intentions toward Crane:
“You gonna marry that cop?” he asks. She nods.
“He the right guy for you?” She nods again. Raven smiles at her. “OK.”
Because Raven trusts Ellen and is charmed by her — and because he already knows, as do we, how this is going to end for him — he’s more or less giving her his blessing to go be with the pasty, goofy flatfoot Crane. It doesn’t help matters, though, that Ellen, about to make a decoy of herself, is wearing Raven’s trench coat and fedora — and looking like 12 different kinds of adorable.
Clearly we are meant to want them to be together, even if it’s only for this moment. And while 1940s Hollywood was, for all intents and purposes, contractually obligated to crank out happy endings, even in crime stories, one imagines how much better This Gun for Hire would have been if they had made Crane a more flawed, compromised character whose true colors might be revealed in Act III, leveling the playing field a bit between killer and cop.
In any event, someone other than Preston would have to play Crane. Someone like Joseph Cotten or Glenn Ford or Dick Powell or Dana Andrews — whomever Paramount had under contract who fit that bill. After all, if we have to watch tough, brave, heroic Veronica Lake turn all sappy and vulnerable for some cop in the end, he should at least be someone we can believe in as much as we believe in her.
