After he is betrayed by his current employers, hired killer Raven (Alan Ladd) ignores the police manhunt after him and goes after his former paymasters.
A spiritual forebear of Jean-Pierre Melville’s Le Samourai, John Woo’s The Killer and the John Wick franchise, This Gun For Hire made a star out of unknown Alan Ladd as the cold-blooded hitman Raven.
Ladd’s performance - emotionally contained, terse and cynical - laid down the template for all the tightlipped hard men of Hollywood, like Marvin, Bronson and Eastwood.
In its basic outline and chase structure, This Gun For Hire lays out a basic plot that would be taken up by every rote action movie into this century.
Despite taking place in the middle of World War Two, Raven is not interested in who he works for. And despite his profession, Raven is the only one who follows a code.
As the movie illustrates, patriotism is meaningless, justice bends toward the money, and supposedly upstanding citizens are solely obsessed with their own enrichment: it is revealed that the film’s villain has been selling his products to the Japanese.
Since it is the height of the Hays Code, the unrepentant Raven has to meet his maker, but not before he has sent the people who betrayed him to meet theirs.
What gives the movie - and its central character - heart is the rapport that builds between the fugitive killer and a young club performer, Ellen (Veronica Lake), who is able to get some humanity out of him.
One could perhaps read some kind of romantic tension to their dynamic, but that feels a step too far. It takes up enough of Raven’s bandwidth that he can acknowledge her humanity.
Lake gives the character a world-weariness and toughness that complements Ladd’s minimalism.
With little backstory, the two characters come together because of their hard won wisdom about the way the world works.
Outside of the central duo, the rest of the cast are serviceable.
Despite top billing, Robert Preston is completely overshadowed as the cop (and Ellen’s boyfriend) on Raven’s tail.
Laird Cregar would play many villains in his short career - his role as Raven’s slippery employer Willard Gates is fine if familiar - a mastermind too cowardly to face his enemy, he is willing to backstab anyone who gets in his way.
Based on the novel by Graham Greene, This Gun for Hire would be the first of four collaborations between Ladd and Lake. Its influence on the noir and action genres would continue for decades afterwards.
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