This Gun for Hire

I mentioned a few days ago that I had watched This Gun for Hire because of an upcoming TCM appearance but was going to hold off on doing a post about it because it's already on DVD and there was something else on that I wanted to blog about. So now that I don't have much else to blog about, it's a good time to do that post on This Gun for Hire.

Alan Ladd plays Philip Raven, who lives in a rooming house and seems to have no friends save for a cat who lives on the fire escape and whom he feeds. Raven gets a letter, giving the address of where he's supposed to go for his next job. That job is... shooting a blackmailer! Worse, the blackmailer was supposed to be alone but there's a woman there, so Raven has to kill two people!

Raven gets paid off by Willard Gates (Laird Cregar), who makes it a point to give Raven bills that are known to have been stolen, from Gates' boss Brewster (Tully Marshall), a noted industrialist. Apparently the blackmailer knew somthing about either Gates or Brewster, but damned if Raven can figure it out. Looks like a chemical formula or something.

Meanwhile, I mentioned that there was money stolen from Brewster, although that's probably more of a set-up to get marked bills in Raven's hands. The police don't realize this yet, and have a police detective Michael Robert Preston) on the case. He's got a girlfriend in Ellen (Veronica Lake), and she's about to get involved in the whole case too.

World War II has recently started, and folks in Washington think there might be something hinky going on with somebody in Brewster's enterprise. So a US Senator get Ellen, a nightclub entertainer, to audition for a job at a club owned by Gates. Ellen heads out to Los Angeles to get to that club, while Raven heads there because the murder he committed was in San Francisco. Not only does he want to get away, he realizes he's been set up by Gates, and wants revenge.

Ellen and Raven meet on the train to Los Angeles, and the sparks fly, even though she's got a boyfriend, and even though they're ostensibly on opposite sides of the law, Raven being a hired killer after all. But sometimes the enemy of your enemy is indeed your friend, and once Ellen falls afoul of Gates, they're both going to be on the run, with both Gates and the police looking for them.

This Gun for Hire has a pretty complicated plot for a fairly short movie, so you're going to have to pay pretty close attention. If the movie has one problem, it's not the plot's complexity, but the fact that with the existence of the Production Code, a hired killer like Raven is going to have to face justice at the end, even though he is in many ways as much a hero here as the cops.

The acting is uniformly good, with it being really nice to see Laird Cregar away from his home studio of Fox. He died way too young, and it always makes me wonder how his career would have gone had he lived. This movie is the one that made Ladd a star, and deservedly so. Robert Preston is nominally top-billed alongside Lake, but he has the least to do.

If you haven't seen This Gun for Hire yet, it's one I can definitely recommend.

The Glass Key (1942)

TCM ran the 1942 version of Dashiell Hammett's The Glass Key not too long ago. I had seen the movie quite a few years back but never did a blog post on it, so with the recent airing, I DVRed it to watch again and do a post here.

Paul Madvig (Brian Donlevy) is a "boss" in one of those medium-sized cities that has an underworld problem, and a political establishment that's looking the other way because they're getting paid off by the underworld folks. And in fact, Madvig has been allied with the folks getting paid off. That's about to change, because Paul has met Janet Henry (Veronica Lake). She's lovely to look at, so it's no surprise that Paul has fallen in love with her. She's also the daughter of Ralph Henry (Moroni Olsen), who is the mayoral candidate of the reform coalition. So to get in Janet's good graces, Paul decides that his organization is going to support the reformers.

The family situation for both of them is complicated, however. Ralph has a son Taylor (Richard Denning) who is an inveterate gambler and heavily in debt to underworld boss Nick Varna (Joseph Calleia) as a result. Worse for Paul, Taylor is in love with Paul's much younger sister Opal (Bonita Granville). So there are quite a few people who have good reason to have issue with Taylor. Eventually, he winds up murdered with a lot of people being potential suspects.

Paul has a fixer of his own in the form of right-hand man Ed Beaumont (Alan Ladd). Ed didn't particularly care for the idea of Paul throwing in with the reformers, but he's the boss. And now Paul has Ed investigate to try to figure out who really killed Taylor (and of course it may actually have been Paul after all). As Ed investigates, Janet begins to fall in love with him. She's never really been in love with Paul, only being polite to him for the sake of her father's political fortunes. Ed rebuffs Janet, if only because he doesn't want to hurt his boss.

Ed faces a lot of other danger, in the form of Nick and his henchman Jeff (William Bendix). Nick would be more than happy to see Paul be the guilty one, since that would doom Henry's candidacy, leaving the city wide open for the underworld bosses like Nick.

The Glass Key is a movie that has a pretty convoluted plot, one which requires a lot of careful attention to watching it. But it's not a bad movie at all. Ladd and Lake were rushed into making this after the success of their first pairing This Gun for Hire, and they have similar chemistry here. Bendix doesn't have the looks or the range to be anything but a supporting character, but given a role that fit, he's able to run away with it as he does here with the brutal enforcer for Nick.

While The Glass Key may be a bit too complicated to be truly great (although that doesn't stop people from overrating the Bogart/Bacall The Big Sleep), it's still a pretty darn entertaining movie. It's available on DVD both in a Universal noir box set, and a standalone.

Sullivan's Travels

I don't think I've ever blogged about Sullivan's Travels before. It's airing on Sunday, October 28 at 2:15 PM on TCM, and now is a good time to recommend it.

Joel McCrea stars as John L. Sullivan, a Hollywood director who's become prominent -- and wealthy -- by making light fluffy comedies and musicals with titles such as Ants in Your Pants of 1938. Despite the good pay, Sullivan wants to make "serious" pictures; especially something with a social message what with there still being a depression on. Specifically, in order to make the movie he wants to find out what it's like to live on the "other side", as a hobo with only a dime to his name. Needless to say, the studio execs don't like the idea. But they come up with an agreement. They come up with a good idea, however: treat it as publicity. So they follow Sullivan, with Sullivan trying to escape and learn more "authentic" poverty.

Stuck with only ten cents in his pocket at a roadside diner, Sullivan meets The Girl (Veronica Lake), a failed starlet who is going to be leaving Hollywood since she can't succeed there. Oh, Sullivan could have given her the success, but he can't really portray himself as Sullivan now, so he passes himself off as somebody who knew Sullivan, which at least gets him the run of the Sullivan place. The two really wind up living the hobo life, spending a night in a homeless shelter among other things, where Sullivan has his shoes stolen.

This is a problem because part of the agreement Sullivan had with the studio execs involved putting ID in the sole of his shoe while he was going to be on the road. The bosses would be able to prove that this was really Sullivan, but nobody else would, which was just the way Sullivan wanted it. As part of a plan to help the hobos out by distributing cash to them, he winds up at the same railyard as the guy who stole his shoes; the guy gets hit by a train after knocking Sullivan out and giving Sullivan a case of amnesia. Sullivan gets sent to a prison labor camp, and is about to learn what the other side is really like, if he didn't already know it from being a hobo.

Sullivan's Travels sounds like serious stuff, and it certainly does have a serious message, although what that message is could be debated. (I won't say anything more about that, because it would give away the ending of the movie.) The movie was directed by Preston Sturges, however, which means a lot of things. First, whatever message was intended is definitely somewhat anti-establishment. Second, you know there's going to be a lot of comedy here. There's slapstick with the people who would be Sullivan's entourage, and somewhat more intelligent humor for McCrea and Lake. Last but by no means least, you know you're going to get a great movie. McCrea is just right for the Sullivan part: not too glamorous, but not too rough either. I can't imagine somebody like Cary Grant being a believable wannabe hobo, or somebody like John Garfield playing the wealthy director. Veronica Lake is gorgeous as the failed actress, and Sturges was able to get several of his usuals to play the supporting roles, which they do to comedic perfection.