THIS GUN FOR HIRE

New Zealand Listener, Volume 7, Issue 176, 6 November 1942, Page 13

THIS GUN FOR HIRE

(Paramount)

IRECTOR Frank Tuttle deserves credit for pro‘viding, in This Gun for Hire, sustained melodrama that never slips over the edge into

bathos. There are occasions when it wobbles on the brink, but a fall is prevented on all. these occasions by the splendid acting of Alan Ladd, a newcomer to the screen, who plays the difficult role of Raven, Raven is a killer. He doesn’t mind killing. The explanation lies in the fact that he was neglected as a child, and that at the age of 10, he had a red-hot flat-iron thrown at him by his fostermother. Now it’s difficult to tell the flat-iron story without becoming bathetic, and it’s difficult to act the villain when you’re as innocently handsome as Alan Ladd. Yet he manages both convincingly. Veronica Lake is as fluid as ever, as a night club hostess with. a good line of magic, who is, incidentally, briefed by the U.S. Senate to discover just who at Nitro-Chemicals is peddling poison-gas formule to the Japs. She acts with commendable restraint, if by restraint is meant refusal to register any facial contortion whatever when faced with immediate death, seduction by a fat fifth columnist, or misinterpretation on the part of her police-officer fiancé, Preston Foster. And when she is dragged by the Raven in a crouching position through several miles of grease-dripping tunnel, thrown over a precipice and stowed away in a deserted railwayshack, her inner and outer calm is undisturbed enough to allow her to lend a sympathetic Madonna-like countenance to the recital of the Killer’s life-story, and then acknowledge the rejection of her well-meant consolation merely by a quizzical lift of the left eyebrow. It was not till the very end of the 7,000-odd feet that we confessed to a slight feeling of disappointment. The Arch Fifth Columnist, thanks to the Lake-Ladd combination, is completely dead. And while the Raven croaks his last on the couch in the corner, Veronica sinks into the sugary embrace of her noble policeman, Preston Foster. Has she got the wrong man, we wonder? But remembering our uncompromising. attitude in regard to High Sierra, we repress this thought as unworthy, and merely hope that next time we see him, Alan Ladd, who’s got the goods, will get the woman, too.