This Gun for Hire (1942)

"Thoroughly Enjoyable Briskly Paced Noir"

A couple of years ago I reviewed Arrow's Blu-ray release of THE GLASS KEY starring Veronica Lake and Alan Ladd. Now Eureka are giving us the chance to see the Lake/Ladd starrer that preceded that and made Ladd into a star.

Ladd plays Raven, an assassin for hire who bumps off a blackmailing chemist at the behest of villainous Laird Cregar (probably best known to readers here for starring in John Brahm's duet of mid 1940s classics THE LODGER and HANGOVER SQUARE). Out for revenge Raven meets nightclub singer-cum-magician Ellen (Lake) on a train. Her boyfriend Michael (Robert Preston) is a detective on the hunt for the assassin. The poison gas the dead chemist was working on is due to be sold to the Japanese and Raven suffers a crisis of conscience as those looking for him close in, leading to a splendid confrontation in the wheelchair-bound master villain's skyscraper lair.

Adapted from a Graham Greene novel, the teaming of Ladd and Lake worked so well that Paramount had already put them together for THE GLASS KEY before THIS GUN FOR HIRE had been released. As well as those two stars the film benefits immensely from the presences of both Preston and Cregar, likeable and slimy respectively. But it's Ladd's show all the way and it's not surprising reviews of the period recognised this was a star in the making. 

Director Frank Tuttle never made anything approaching a horror film but that doesn't stop him staging a splendid bit at Cregar's isolated gothic country residence at night. With a power outage during a storm, Lake having revealed herself as someone who has to be done away with, and Ladd coming to the rescue it's all splendid stuff.

  Eureka's transfer is a 4K scan. Extras on the Blu-ray include a commentary track from film scholar Adrian Martin, two radio adaptations with the voice of Alan Ladd in both and Joan Blondell in the Lux Radio Theatre version and Veronica Lake in the Screen Guild Theater one. You also get a trailer and a booklet with new writing on the film from Barry Forshaw and Craig Ian Mann.

THIS GUN FOR HIRE is out on Blu-ray from Eureka on Monday 14th September 2020