This Gun for Hire (Paramount, 1942)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night’s (Monday, January 20) “feature” for my husband Charles and I was This Gun for Hire, a 1942 early film noir from Paramount directed by Frank Tuttle and starring Veronica Lake, Robert Preston, Laird Cregar and Alan Ladd, billed in that order on the closing credits. The script was by future Hollywood 10 member Albert Maltz and Little Caesar creator W. R. Burnett based on a 1936 novel called A Gun for Sale by Graham Greene. Greene’s novel was a pretty straightforward tale of intrigue dealing with a hired killer named Raven who’s engaged to assassinate the Minister of War for Czechoslovakia by two men high up in a munitions company, CEO Sir Marcus and his assistant, Willie Davis a.k.a. Cholmondeley, who’s described in the Wikipedia page for the novel as “a grossly sensual man.” Sir Marcus’s hope is that the assassination will trigger a second world war and his company will make tons of money supplying both sides. Also involved in the case are a police officer, Jimmy Mather, who joined the force after his brother committed suicide; and his fiancée, Anne Crowder, a chorus girl. Maltz and Burnett moved this plot to present-day San Francisco and Los Angeles and set it in the 1942 present, incorporating the actual World War II into the story. Here the CEO is wheelchair-bound Alvin Brewster (Tully Marshall) of a L.A.-based explosives company called Nitro, and the “grossly sensual” assistant is Willard Gates (Laird Cregar), who in addition to his duties at Nitro runs an L.A. nightclub, the Club Neptune, that specializes in “girlie shows.” He confesses a weakness for the female flesh – a surprise coming from Cregar, who not only was Gay in real life but is playing the part as a screaming queen – and he’s in San Francisco as the film begins both to supervise the killing of a former Nitro executive, Albert Baker (Frank Ferguson), who made off with the formula for a super-explosive that could prove decisive to whichever side gets it, and to audition talent for his nightclub in L.A.

His hired killer is Raven (Alan Ladd, who’d been kicking around the minor studios for years – his first known film was Tom Brown of Culver in 1932 and his initial screen credit was for the first PRC release, Hitler: Beast of Berlin in 1939 – and by 1941 had worked his way up to fourth billing in a quite good vest-pocket gangster film called Paper Bullets, also for PRC, but Paramount still gave him an “Introducing” credit). The imdb.com cast list and other sources for the film give Raven the first name “Philip,” but he has no first name in the film and apparently he didn’t in Graham Greene’s novel, either. Raven shows up at the San Francisco address he’s been given and dispatches both Baker and his “secretary” (Bernadene Hayes) – really a dark-haired bimbo floozy he’d picked up for the night – but there’s a heart-stopping moment when he and we see a crippled girl (Virita Campbell) on the staircase and he briefly reaches into the leather case in which he carries his gun before he finally thinks better of it and lets her live. Unfortunately for Raven, he’s paid off in bills stolen from a bank, and the San Francisco police have been given a list of their serial numbers and sent bulletins out to store personnel telling them to watch for bills with those numbers. Raven of course has no idea of this, but he passes one of the marked bills to a dressmaker for whom he’s buying a dress for his landlady – he tore her previous dress when he caught her trying to shoo away his pet cat. The store clerk reports it to the police and the call is taken by detective Michael Crane (Robert Preston), whose girlfriend Ellen Graham (Veronica Lake, top-billed) is auditioning for Gates’s floor show with a quite good magic act performed while she sings a song called “Now You See It, Now You Don’t.” The song was composed by Jacques Press with lyrics by Frank Loesser (who would write “dummy” tunes to indicate what sorts of settings his composers should give his words; when he wrote the words and a tune to “Praise the Lord and Pass the Ammunition,” his wife said, “Don’t send that out to a composer. Get it published yourself, with your melody,” and so Frank Loesser became a full-fledged songwriter and not just a lyricist), and it’s O.K. but I can’t help thinking it would have been better if we’d got to hear Loesser’s melody as well. Veronica Lake had one of Hollywood’s all-purpose female voice doubles, Martha Mears, whose contralto matches Lake’s low-pitched singing voice quite well.

Needing to flee San Francisco before the police catch him for the murders, and anxious for revenge against Brewster and Gates for having paid him off in useless money, Raven takes the train to L.A. and runs into Ellen, who befriends him and helps him sneak through the police barricades. The cops running them have been told to look for a man with a big scar on his left forearm (though there’s a glitch: when we finally see Raven’s arms the scar is on his right forearm), but Ellen aids him by draping her coat over him. Then Ellen is waylaid by a mysterious figure who turns out to be Senator Burnett (Roger Imhof), who actually recruits her as a spy for our side in the war to root out the Fifth Columnists at Nitro. One problem with This Gun for Hire is how often it changes tone: it’s a film noir, an old-dark-house horror movie (especially in one scene in which Raven and Ellen are trapped inside, you guessed it, an old dark house, which cinematographer John F. Seitz lights – or doesn’t – with the full armamentarium of both horror and noir tricks), and a musical with bits of screwball comedy. Whenever Robert Preston appears on screen we expect him, based on his two most famous roles (in The Music Man and Victor/Victoria), either to start singing about seventy-six trombones or donning drag. Also writers Maltz and Burnett never give us a clear motive for Brewster and Gates to be stealing military secrets from their own company and selling them to the enemy (in Graham Greene’s novel at least the motives made sense!), especially since making the stuff for our side would seem to be at least as profitable financially for them. This Gun for Hire ends with a shoot-out at an oil refinery in which Raven finally dies and Ellen and Detective Crane get together at the end. It’s a frustrating film because it certainly qualifies as a noir visually, and thematically it’s at least on the cusp, but Veronica Lake is a “nice” girl and therefore much less interesting than she’d be as a femme fatale, and Alan Ladd moves through the film with a kind of stoic blankness that works to establish him as a hard-hearted villain but doesn’t give the actor much to do. He’s been described in the literature on This Gun for Hire as a sadist who gets pleasure out of killing people, but I saw him as a figure similar to the one Humphrey Bogart played in his late-1930’s gangster films: a man who doesn’t either enjoy murdering people or have guilt feelings about it, but simply accepts it as a grim necessity for his own survival. Ladd would get better parts later, though he still never became a truly great actor and Raymond Chandler once compared him to Humphrey Bogart thusly: “Ladd is a teenage boy’s idea of a tough guy. Bogart is the real thing.”