This Gun for Hire (1942), from a Graham Greene novel (This Gun for Sale), is an excellent film. A hired killer, Raven (Alan Ladd) murders a blackmailing employee of a chemical plant but receives his payment from his contact at the company, William Gates (Laird Cregan), in marked bills. Simultaneously, Gates, who backs a night club in the evenings, hires a new show girl, Ellen Graham (Veronica Lake). Ellen is asked by a Senator to watch Gates surreptitiously for traitorous behaviour. Ellen and Raven coincidentally meet on the train to L. A., and soon discover that they are after the same thing—Gates’ boss. After the two are chased through a factory and a train yard by a police detective (Robert Preston) who is Ellen’s fiancé, there is a showdown in the executive office of the chemical company. Raven gets the CEO and Gates to admit they sold deadly chemicals to the enemy (Japan), but then a gun fight erupts. He is about to shoot the detective when he sees Ellen rescuing him, so he pauses and is shot by a policeman. As he dies, he asks Ellen if he did good. She affirms, and she hugs her fiancé.
As one of the earliest film noirs, This Gun for Hire has some of the classic noir characteristics but also some features of conventional film. Unlike classic noir, Gun lacks a dream-like quality except somewhat in the second half. The first part is replete with quotidian detail—feeding the cat, using the telephone, riding on the train in economy class, and so on. The last part of the film is more oneiric. Raven and Ellen are chased through a huge industrial plant at night. While it is clearly a plant, it is also surrealistic because shapes and shadows loom, and there is no indication of what the plant produces, or how. It is deserted, a nightmarish symbol. Then Raven and Ellen are cornered in a railway yard and the fog moves in. At this time, Raven says he’d like to tell her his recurring dream in the hopes that this will rid him of the nightmare, but he relates his painful life of lost parents, a brutal aunt, and societal misunderstanding. The office building of the evil chemical manufacturer is dream-like and symbolic: the huge fluted column, the grossly oversized doors, and so on, represent the inflated wealth and greed of the industrial baron much more than they do a place where work gets done.
The strangeness so common in film noir resides in the protagonist, an “angelic killer,” as Borde and Chaumeton said in the first book on film noir. He looks slim and delicate, yet performs monstrous acts. He cares for kittens and has a tendency to, as he fears, “go soft,” yet he blithely kills people.
The eroticism in This Gun for Hire is highly unusual for a film noir. Ellen is devoted to her fiancé, the police detective chasing Raven. While she wants to settle down in a house in the suburbs and raise children, her romantic relationship with Michael Crane is tepid. The film contrasts Crane and Raven—note the last names. Although Raven at first holds Ellen at gun point and drags her through trouble, a relationship slowly develops where he is not afraid to talk to her nor she to listen, and she seems to genuinely care for the killer. The sexual tension is so subtle that I find it difficult to state the evidence for it. It starts when they first meet on the train: She says, entirely unnecessarily, “Well, I guess I’ll turn in now,” which suggests going to bed but in fact she merely closes her eyes sitting up-right in the passenger car. In the morning he is sleeping with his head on her shoulder, although he sits upright as if he has not noticed and before she notices anything. And so it goes, until there is more frisson between them than between Ellen and her future husband. When Ellen is set to leave Raven in the train yard and act as a decoy for his escape, she steps back and gives him a kiss on the cheek. Powerful. He belatedly breaks into a smile, and she has signalled that where her most powerful attraction may be is not where she is going to settle.
Much of the noir feel comes from the ambiguity of three of the four main characters. Raven is a killer with a kind streak. Ellen is a show girl, who wants to settle down to be a middle-class mother, but who takes a job spying for a US Senator, and develops a peculiar affection for a hired killer. Obviously, Ellen is not the femme fatale that we expect to find in film noir. Even her night club act is good family magic fun centred on her all-American girl charm. The other character that is ambiguous is William Gates (Laird Cregan). He is the middle-man between the evil industrial traitor and the front line guys like Raven, but he lacks all the traditional street smarts. He is decadent, chasing chorus girls and eating too many peppermints. He is a dandy and angst-ridden yet the fellow who double crosses Raven and sets in motion Raven’s revenge.
Although Gun has cruelty, it is not a cruel film as later noir could be. The greatest cruelty comes right at the first of the film to establish Raven’s character: He shoots the man he was hired to kill, but the man’s secretary happens to be there. Raven says calmly, “They said he’d be alone,” and then shoots her. In stark contrast, the ending is upbeat. Usually the death of a protagonist signals a negative ending, but Raven has said he’d like to die, he dies smiling in Ellen’s praise, and he is, after all, a killer who could not stop killing. Meanwhile, the war-time traitors are dead, and the nation has been saved from a Japanese attack with chemical weapons. To put the icing on the cake, in the last shot of the movie, Ellen and Michael hug—the wedding, the house in the suburbs, the happy children, the fine family.
As this suggests, the salient noir theme of fatalism does not apply to This Gun for Hire. Quite the opposite, people, including the deadly protagonist, take action to save the day. The other common noir theme, the burden of the past, has no role in Gun, except when it is presented psychologically as Raven tells Ellen a capsule version of his horrendous upbringing (excellent acting by Ladd to pull of that scene). So, in everything from theme to cinematography, This Gun for Hire is actually not a classic film noir, but rather a hybrid bridging the gulf between conventional fare and film noir. The two main characters manifest this. Raven is a merciless killer with a hidden streak of kindness, and his presence helps create the noirish atmosphere where violence is possible at any moment. But into this criminal world comes an all-American girl. The director, one of the studio’s most experienced and reliable, thought it best to include a couple of song and dance numbers (a la popular entertainment from the 1930s) with lyrics by the well-known Frank Loesser. But it is a hybrid that works wonderfully.