This Gun for Hire

Raven is a contract killer. He does the job and is paid in marked bills, and sets out to find the man who used him. On the same train is Ellen Graham, a nightclub singer who also does magic tricks and is quietly working for the government. Neither knows it, but they are after the same man. Frank Tuttle directs. Alan Ladd plays Raven, Veronica Lake plays Ellen, Robert Preston plays the policeman Michael Crane. The source is Graham Greene's 1936 novel A Gun for Sale. The adaptation moved the story from England to America and changed the address of the evil: instead of the novel's arms dealer there is a traitor selling a poison gas formula to Japan. It was made in 1942, in the middle of the war. Ladd was fourth billed and had not been noticed before. After this he was a star, and the Ladd and Lake pairing became one of Paramount's reliable assets across several more pictures. Raven's fondness for cats and his childhood damage count as an early instance of noir humanising its cold killer. Who it is for: anyone interested in forties noir and in Alan Ladd's first star turn. Who it is not for: the espionage plot is very simple from here, and the wartime propaganda register is the film's weakest element.