Stream On: Going Greene—‘This Gun for Hire’
Raven the hitman, in the Graham Greene story ‘This Gun for Hire,’ was the part that earned Alan Ladd a place at the table in Hollywood.
A Gun for Sale (1936) was Graham Greene’s second in a string of novels that he termed “entertainments,” works similar to thrillers in their spare, tough language and their suspenseful, swiftly-moving plots, but possessing greater moral complexity and depth. Its 1942 movie adaptation was fairly faithful and dark, a worthy film noir, and introduced Alan Ladd to audiences.
/Amazon /Streaming /🍅94%🍿82% /Trailer /1942 /NR
—In 1942 wartime San Francisco, chemist and blackmailer Albert Baker (Frank Ferguson) is killed by hitman Philip Raven (Alan Ladd, The Great Gatsby), who recovers a stolen chemical formula. Raven is double-crossed by his employer, Willard Gates (Laird Cregar), who pays him with marked bills and reports them to the Los Angeles Police Department as stolen from his company, Nitro Chemical Corporation of Los Angeles. Raven learns of the setup and decides to get revenge. Police Detective Lieutenant Michael Crane (Robert Preston), who is vacationing in San Francisco to visit his girlfriend, nightclub singer and stage magician Ellen Graham (Veronica Lake), is immediately assigned the case. He goes after Raven, but the assassin eludes him.
The “gun for hire,” Alan Ladd, grabs our attention from the jump. We see him, as Raven, on a bed in a rooming-house. He sits up when his alarm clock rings and looks at an addressed envelope on which is clipped a note: “At home alone – between three and four p.m.” He removes the note and puts the envelope and an automatic pistol in a briefcase, straightens his tie and gets his hat and coat.
A cat meows outside on his window sill, so he opens the window and gives it milk, getting some on his hand. He goes into his washroom, and a maid comes to the open door: “It’s after two, can I come in now?” She sees the cat and scats it away: “Get out! Get out!” as Raven re-enters the room. He roughly jerks her away from the cat, tearing her dress.
“Keep your dirty hands off me,” she says. Raven slaps her, and she spits, “You—you and your cat!”
“Go on; beat it!” He pets the cat tenderly and follows her out of the room. When he gets to his destination, a little girl in leg braces is on the stair. “Hello, mister.”
Raven stares at her for a moment and climbs to the second storey. He knocks on Albert Baker’s door and hands him the envelope. “Come in, friend,” says Baker. “Don’t worry: my secretary,” indicating a dame lounging on the couch.
She goes into the kitchen to retrieve a whistling teakettle; Raven receives some papers from Baker in exchange for the envelope—and shoots him dead. When the dame reappears at the kitchen door, surprised, Raven says, “They said he’d be alone.” She’s about to scream when he pulls the trigger again, but the gun misfires.
She disappears into the kitchen pulling the door behind her, and he shoots through it, hearing a body fall. He pushes it open, looks down, and backs out, wiping his prints from the doorknob and examining the papers Baker gave him in return for the envelope.
On the way downstairs, the girl in braces asks him to pick up her ball from the bottom of the stairs. Raven starts to reach into the briefcase again, but then retrieves the ball for her. “Thanks,” she says … and he leaves.
Greene sold A Gun for Sale to Paramount for £2,500 in 1934. In 1958, He was furious when Joseph L. Mankiewicz completely reversed his political standpoint in The Quiet American. But in 1941 he didn’t seem to mind when screenwriters Albert Matz and W.R. Burnett massaged his sociopathic protagonist, giving him a sympathetic backstory: Greene needed the money. Matz and Burnett changed the location, too, from London to San Francisco—a great location for films noir.
Matz and Burnett also changed Raven's target into a blackmailing scientist instead of a socialist politician, as in Greene’s novel. The effect is still that of a bleak noir, as Ladd plays Raven without any affect at all, except in moments like with the cat and the girl in braces, signaling a “deep” character; that is, a modern antihero.
94% critics’ score on Rotten Tomatoes, Ian Coster of the London Evening Standard calling This Gun for Hire simply “an excellent thriller.”
Sources include Britannica, The Editors of Encyclopaedia. “Graham Greene.” Encyclopedia Britannica; Empire, “This Gun for Hire Review”; and Wikipedia: This Gun for Hire (CC BY-SA 4.0 DEED)
Pete Hummers is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to earn fees by linking Amazon.com and affiliate sites. This adds nothing to Amazon's prices. This column originally appeared on The Outer Banks Voice.