This Gun for Hire (1942)DVDRip | Language: English | Subtitles: Spanish (.srt) | XviD 512×384 (4:3) | 81 min | 23.976 fps | 119 kbps | 700 Mb Genre: Crime | RS.com
Outstanding film noir, based on Graham Greene’s novel A Gun For Sale, which presents one of the most disturbed (and disturbing) killers ever to cross the screen. Ladd is scary because he doesn’t care; he is simply a killing machine hired out by whoever will pay. Only when Lake takes the time to break through the emotional fortress that he has built around himself does Ladd show any signs of humanity. This is the film that made Alan Ladd a star.
This Gun For Hire has been described as ‘one of the most important early films noir’, and one that ‘helps to establish a number of conventions of the genre’. The film’s enduring significance lies in its influence on a particular subset of classic and post-classic noir films featuring the figure of the lone assassin.(…) Scriptwriters Albert Matz and W.R.Burnett adapted Graham Greene’s A Gun For Sale (1936) to the American screen, transposing the original story of a London hitman to the emblematic noir territory of San Francisco and Los Angeles. Greene’s Phillip Raven is ‘dark and thin and made for destruction…a screwed-up figure’ with a ‘repulsive’ hare-lip, who is contracted by a wealthy industrialist to kill a socialist minister. In the Paramount scenario, Alan Ladd plays the considerably less disfigured Raven, hired to dispense with a blackmailing industrial chemist in the employ of chemical tycoon, Alvin Brewster (Tully Marshall). (…) While Ladd’s Raven is memorable in many respects, his performance will principally be recalled as the source of inspiration for another, justifiably more famous lone assassin: Jef Costello. In Le Samourai, Melville’s paean to the solitary hitman, the influence of Tuttle’s film is manifest. Ritualistically dressed in trenchcoat and fedora, first made emblematic as the hitman’s attire of choice in Gun, Alain Delon’s frigid charisma owes much to Ladd’s earlier incarnation. From Costello’s methodical modus operandi as hitman, to the centrality of the nightclub singer, a veritable angel of death, Melville makes clear his unabashed debt to this early ’40s noir film. In this way, This Gun For Hire ultimately makes an important contribution to what Foster Hirsch has described as ‘the long and ongoing dialogue between French and American strains of noir’.
This is the film that made Alan Ladd a star. Although director Tuttle had originally intended to cast Preston in the lead role, he later decided to hunt for an unknown. When Tuttle was introduced to Ladd, the director was convinced that the 28-year-old blond could make the cold-blooded killer Phillip Raven a sympathetic character. Contracted at $300 per week, Ladd underwent screen tests, and even had his hair dyed black in keeping with his character’s name. Though the film was conceived as a Lake-Preston vehicle, it soon became quite apparent that the studio had something in Ladd, and the script was reworked during production to favor the actor. The film became, in more ways than one, the Alan Ladd story–with all the attention being paid to him and his role. As a result, the film’s romantic angle was soon tossed away and Preston reduced to a plot device. But even though Ladd and Lake did not so much as exchange a kiss, they still became one of Hollywood’s hottest and most bankable love teams, with three more pictures following–THE GLASS KEY; THE BLUE DAHLIA; and SAIGON.
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