Average Reviews:
(More customer reviews)Wonderful character actor Laird Cregar plays the oily and overfed Broadway angel and hulking Lothario to singing magician Veronica Lake. By day he's a squeamish schemer, eager to contract out crime most foul just so long as he isn't subjected to recitals of any disturbing details. That he'd double cross Alan Ladd's Raven was as inevitable as his bedtime box of mints and book of racy French stories. That Raven would resent it was unfortunate, indeed.
Cregar died at the tender age of 30, two years after THIS GUN FOR HIRE was released. For old movie fans unfamiliar with him, he was a combination of a bulked up Vincent Price and Sydney Greenstreet with a little more bounce in his step.
As delightful as Cregar is, discussion of THIS GUN FOR HIRE starts and stops with Alan Ladd, who catapulted to stardom with his portrayal of the cold-blooded killer Raven. The emblematic scene occurs early on, when the hired Ladd enters an apartment building to fulfill his end of the contract. He meets a young girl wearing leg braces as he walks up the stairs. What occurs next, and continues on until he leaves the building, is simply a brilliant bit of minimalist screen acting. Raven's face is an expressionless, cold-blooded, inscrutable mask. Ladd plays the sequence almost solely with his eyes. They dart menacingly from the crippled girl to the apartment door, assessing the risks, flashing for a split second before smoldering to a colder temperature. It's a justifiably famous scene, one of the best tough guy sequences ever, a star maker.
The plot bends and twists just enough to throw Ladd and Lake together for most of the last half of the movie. She a hostage with a secret or two, he obsessed with getting back at Cregar. The camera liked what it saw when they shared a frame. Ladd and Lake oozed chemistry, enough for a handful of future teamings. Their characters dance an uneasy minuet in this one - Ladd never lets Lake's considerable charms breach his tough guy shell, she's reminded more than once why he's named for a ruthless carrion killer. The only time this movie stumbles, I believe, is when Ladd talks about the "psych-something doctor" who can make his bad dreams go away. By then the movie was in a hurry to get to the final scene, and it needed to humanize Ladd some before getting there. Still, it feels awkward and stilted.
THIS GUN FOR HIRE is an exceptional movie, one of the best tough-guy crime thrillers ever made.
Click Here to see more reviews about: This Gun For Hire (Universal Noir Collection) (1942)
Get 17% OFF
Click here for more information about This Gun For Hire (Universal Noir Collection) (1942)
0 comments:
Post a Comment