Noir-a-Thon: Phantom Lady (1944)

This weeks entry for our Noir-a-Thon is Phantom Lady. The first movie adapted from a novel by Cornell Woolrich (using the pseudonym William Irish) and the first major American movie directed by another European emigre, Robert Siodmak, this is the kind of adaptation you would have expected from a more experienced pairing.


Director: Robert Siodmak
Starring: Franchot Tone, Ella Raines, Elisha Cook Jr., Alan Curtis
Year:1944
Country of origin: USA
Language: English

Synopsis: An innocent man is accused of murder but his anonymous alibi cannot be found, sending him to death row. His trusty secretary must discover the truth and save his bacon.


What Indie Nights? review

Hello BBBG readers. This is your captain speaking. Your random fact for this week is that Sarawak, a Malaysian state in Borneo, was ruled for over 100 years by a British family, who were given the Rajah-ship as a thankyou gift by a Sultan and known as the White Rajahs. Honestly, I couldn't make this stuff up.

This week we were treated to the finest noir we've seen in a long time. Even my mum liked it. She was shouting at the screen, telling characters Don't go in there! and Look out! It takes a lot for my mum to stay awake throughout a whole movie, friends, so I wouldn't take this praise lightly.



This film was excellent. I don't even think it was the contrast with the limp and confusing Ministry of Fear from last week, or the subtle and somewhat romantic Laura from the week before. It was genuinely tense, suspenseful and absolutely gorgeous - the cinematography was spellbinding!

Our hero this week is an architect known as Scott Henderson, whose hair is so full of pomade you could see your reflection in it, should you feel so inclined. Seriously, even being in prison has no effect on the shininess of his hair. Dude was dedicated. His wife is strangled while he's out one night, and his only alibi is a woman whom he met in a bar, who insisted on 'no names' and who can't be found for love nor money by the police, Mr Henderson, or his spunky secretary Kansas (not her real name, but it's what he calls her and I can't remember the actual character's name. What do you think I am, superman?)



It is this mystery woman who drives the plot - it is her absence that causes Mr Henderson's alibi to be doubted, her presence as we saw it that convinces us of his innocence. When witnesses whom we know saw them together start telling the police he was alone that night, we start to suspect her - why is she having them paid off to stay silent, we wonder? What kind of a monstrous lady-criminal would sit by and watch an innocent man go down for the murder of his wife when a word from her would save him? This is certainly the most ingenious use of the femme fatale motif we've seen so far: the femme in question is absent the entire way through, allowing us all the time in the world to attribute shady and terrible motives to her actions.

The truth is rather different, of course, and I won't lie, even I saw it coming a mile off, and I'm not known, shall we say, for astuteness when it comes to signposts in filmmaking. The murderer and the motive are as clear as day - in fact we know who it is for the final third of the film - and yet this does nothing at all to detract from the suspense and tightly-wound nature of the plot. Knowing who it is just gives us more chances to say 'Don't go in there!!' to the innocent characters (thanks Mum).



While the film was visually stunning, I'd like to dedicate my final paragraph to Kansas the secretary. She's resourceful, dedicated and chipper, never giving up on her quest to exonerate her boss. I've noticed lately that there seem to be as many of these positive female characters in our noirs as there are the femmes fatale. I'd go so far as to say they were, thus far, as big a part of the noir canon as the fatales, quite often playing opposite them in the 'dowdy' or 'clever' girl roles, never getting to sparkle, but quite often getting to stay alive. I don't know about you, but I'd rather be dowdy and alive than glamorous and dead. Unless I got to be Marlene Dietrich in Shanghai Express, in which case I'd happily die any awful femme fatale death you dreamt up for me. They tend to get shot in the stomach from extremely close range, I find.
I almost think this anti-fatale character deserves its own name - femme vitale? If there are any French-speakers out there who could give me a legitimate opposite to fatale, I'm open to ideas. Cherchez la femme, so to speak...



Blahblahblahtoby review

If last weeks movie was as convoluted in its plot as the noir mode of film making gets then Phantom Lady is, so far at least, the height of the noir style.

Siodmak and his director of photography, Elwood Bredell, led the way in expressionist lighting and powerful use of shadows, laying down a template for future directors who dreamed of making it big in the film noir cycle. To date in the noir-a-thon we have seen some incredibly powerful visuals, even in last weeks Ministry of Fear we saw Fritz Lang and his darkened room/brightly lit hallway, but they were sporadic at best. Phantom Lady is almost a non-stop barrage of breath taking images. I was constantly making mental notes of which shots should be screen captured and in the end gave up trying to remember because there were so many.



The story of a wrongly accused man could be called Kafkaesque, the nightmare scenario of entrapment, wrongful imprisonment and knowing that nobody believes your story is one that we've all seen rehashed many times over the years but that does not detract from the power of rooting for the entrapped, even if he is a rich architect living in a similar milieu to Laura and not the grimy, poverty stricken streets that are usually associated with noir.

This is middle class crime once more and our male protagonist is just another man, passively accepting his fate like one of those once proud jungle cats seen in third rate zoos. In comparison the performance of Ella Raines as the secretary of the accused architect is superb. She is everything a man might expect to be in a Hollywood movie; strong, determined, resourceful etc and puts her cowering paramour to shame as he awaits execution.



Franchot Tone as the bad guy is merely OK, I know they had a different way of telling and showing in movies back in the 40's but I really don't think the way they accentuated the "my hands are itching to kill" aspect of his character stands the test of time. In a polished, highly professional piece of modern cinema this throwback to the silent expressionism of something like Fritz Lang's M just feels out of place.

The stand out scene is the slightly surreal jazz club sequence in which Ella Raines, dressed to look as trashy as possible is on a date with Elisha Cook Jr. in an attempt to find out some information from him. They go to a jazz club where Cook plays drums. The entire sequence stands out for its tight framing, dutch angles, expressionist lighting and Elisha Cook Jr.'s frenetic banging on his drums; his face echoing the main character from the Dali/Bunuel piece Un Chien Andalou as he approaches climax, all alluding to sexual behaviour that was unable to be shown in a more straight forward way. It certainly beats a train going through a tunnel.

Of all the lesser known films so far on this journey through noir this is the one I would insist on you watching, it's superb. The more time that passes since I screened it the better it gets in my mind. The visuals alone are worth drooling over time and time again, even the shots without Ms Raines.

Feel free to discuss these incredible images or our fabulous words in the blahs below

And now for some coming attractions

Noir-a-Thon: Ministry of Fear (1944)

Moving our Noir-a-Thon on to the second of the Graham Greene adaptations, Ministry of Fear is directed by the man behind classics such as Metropolis and M, Fritz Lang. You can find the Noir-a-Thon vault here.


Director: Fritz Lang
Starring: Ray Milland, Marjorie Reynolds, Dan Duryea
Year: 1944
Country of origin: USA
Language: English

Synopsis: Ray Milland inadvertantly gets drawn in to a Nazi spy ring at an English County Fair and doesn't know who to trust as he tries to clear his name for murder and reveal the spy ring to the police.


What Indie Nights? review

Greetings BBBG readers, it's Leah 'I'm-running-out-of-ways-to-introduce-myself' from What Indie Nights?. I suppose 'from What Indie Nights' is a good enough way. Maybe I should just start introducing myself with a random fact - did you know that in England that if someone doesn't die within a year and a day of another person intentionally harming them, it can't be called murder?

Of course you didn't.



And as I sit here, drinking cold chocolate (it's like hot chocolate, only when the person making it was too lazy to heat up the milk) and thinking about Ministry of Fear, I wish it weren't true, because Fritz Lang intentionally harmed me with his adaptation of Graham Greene's wartime novel and I think I died a little inside.

Ok, ok, I may be being a little hyperbolic, but truly, that movie was no noir, and it was a pretty poor example of any genre. As Toby will tell you, there are some lovely scenes, but they're lost in the drab, uninspiring story and confusing characters - including one bumbling private detective (there's your first clue, folks, that one's a big noir no-no) who lets his client come with him on a stakeout and then doesn't appear again for the whole film. I like to call him Mr. Plot B. Device, P.I.



Firstly, and I know we (or especially, I) harp on about this a lot, but there's no femme fatale. At all. There's one American actress pretending to be an Austrian refugee with a 'brother' who looks a lot like Joel Cairo from The Maltese Falcon (another clue!) and behaves like butter wouldn't melt in his mouth.

Our hero is an ex-mental patient who's about as tough as a kitten rolling in sparkly pink sugar and with much less charisma - the poor soul won't look at another cake for the rest of his life after the dreadful events following his release from hospital! Just imagine - you're mistaken for another man and given a secret code that wins you a cake at a country fair - terrifying so far - and are then pursued in a gentlemanly manner by a faux-blind old codger who crumbles your cake before your eyes to find - what? The real eggs with which said cake was made? The audience's engagement with the story? Nope, it's the MacGuffin, of course. To top off this really traumatising experience, a man is apparently shot during a relatively unrelated seance and you're framed for the crime! Now you have to go on the run, trying to avoid capture as well as discover just what made that cake so delicious- er, I mean, dangerous. Wouldn't you be afraid of cake forever, too?



Sure there were a lot of characters with shady motives, but none of them were really characters, more like occasional pieces of dialogue spoken by pieces of furniture. Someone got double crossed, I think, but I'd struggle to tell you who. There was no real sense of threat to our hero, the crimes committed take second place to watching Marjorie Reynolds flutter her eyelashes, and we're left with a sense of general confusion and malaise. I guess what I'm trying to say here is that the movie was out-and-out silly, pretty boring and totally devoid of suspense or atmosphere.



Now the most disappointing thing for me: I've gone on record as a Graham Greene devotee, so I suppose you can take or leave my opinion on this one depending on your view of things, but the man could write atmosphere and subtle nuances even if he had to write a microwave manual (the microwave would have a shameful past and end up reconsidering its faith in Microwave-God whilst making astute and poignant observations about its own mechanisms) and it's a crying shame to have his work butchered like this.



Until next time, fellow travellers on the path of noir, and let us hope it's a better next time...

Blahblahblahtoby review

I've been struggling to find thoughts for this review. It's a film that is possibly as convoluted as the genre gets with very few redeeming features. Fritz Lang, the master film maker himself directed this and it was seemingly, loosely, based on Graham Greene's novel of the same name. Aside from those names I'm pretty much stumped. If you thought I didn't like Laura last week (which I did by the way) then you will probably think I hated this one.

The adaptation is quite a drawn out proposition, with apparent crosses and double crosses, misunderstandings and lies littering the course as obstacles for our hero to overcome within the 88 minute run time. Which is fine in a film noir if you care about the characters or the storyline but in this instance you don't learn enough about any of the characters beyond what's required for the plot to continue and the story is told in nothing more than plot points, moving gracelessly from one scene to another.



I haven't read the original novel so I cannot compare the two but this has all the hallmarks of a bad adaptation, not least because there are none of the usual qualities of a Graham Greene story such as the study of humanity or human behaviour.

This is probably the worst of the Fritz Lang movies I've seen, his direction isn't bad, in fact there are some great visual moments such as shooting somebody through a door from a dark room but they're lost on a movie as unentertaining as this and watered down by the fact that at no point do you believe that this is happening in Central London, during The Blitz. It is not grey or oppressive, people are not concerned with the bombings or even the war at all, it's a terrible Hollywood recreation all the more offensive as the film was made during WWII.



If you've seen the end of the theatrical version of Blade Runner then you've seen the end of Ministry of Fear, it's hard to say which one is worse. In Blade Runner it's an awful addition to a good movie but in Ministry of Fear it's an awful addition tacked on to an already poor movie.

On to categorising it within the noir motifs so I can concentrate on, hopefully, a better noir next week. This was a simple On The Run story with not so much gangsters in place of Nazis/Commies but actual Nazis. And worst of all, there's a happy ending. A very happy ending. Complete with the kind of dialogue and gurning more at home in a slapstick comedy.



This film doesn't actually appear in the Film Noir Encyclopedia, which leads me to believe that it may not even be a film noir. I admit my judgement may have been clouded during my research by the fact that this was an adaptation of Graham Greene by Fritz Lang, a combination I couldn't resist. I think I deserved better!

Seen it? Disagree? Were you also disappointed by the adaptation? Graham Greene fans this is a call to arms! Leave me your blah below.

And now for some coming attractions

Noir-a-Thon: Laura (1944)

After the double feature of This Gun For Hire and Double Indemnity last week got us back in to the swing of things we moved on to the first of three Otto Preminger movies that made the 125 film cut, Laura.


Director: Otto Preminger
Starring: Dana Andrews, Gene Tierney, Clifton Webb, Vincent Price
Year: 1944
Country of origin: USA
Language: English

Synopsis: Laura (Gene Tierney) is found murdered in an apartment, Detective Mark McPherson (Dana Andrews) investigates a trio of middle/high class suspects who all have reasons to want her dead.


What Indie Nights? review

Happy Tuesday Bbbg-ers. Hope your respective weeks were fabulous. Welcome to another noir extravaganza, a somewhat subtle example of the genre, to say the least.



I have to say that Laura is definitely the least obvious noir we've watched so far (discounting The Glass Key, which was so far off the mark that we took it off the list). It has none of the genre's indicators that we've come to look out for: the lighting is notably lacking in starkness and there are only a minimum number of venetian blinds, and even those aren't used to the full effect. There are some great shadows cast by hats on faces, some trenchcoats are worn in the rain like there's no tomorrow, and cigarettes are smoked like they're going out of style, but truthfully, these elements are probably present in every film made in the era and taken separately they do not constitute a film noir.

Another point of contention is that there is really no femme fatale, no actual criminals in the conventional sense at all; there is, in fact, no seedy underbelly of society on which the viewer can place all the blame and feel justified.



Indeed, Laura is unflinching in the method in which the criminal is brought to light - we suspect all the usual players (the slimy gold-digging boyfriend, the jealous older woman, the maid, the cop himself) but in the end we are forced to face the fact that the murderer had no underlying criminal tendencies, and that his motives were extremely personal, a fact that is much more unsettling than the ease of blaming it all on the criminal underworld.

It is here, of course, that the film deviates from traditional noir - another novel adaptation, it displays many more of the characteristics of a classic Agatha Christie-like detective story than of a hardboiled crime novel. And there is more than a little of the Queen of Crime's touch to Laura - it is above all a story of relationships, of the intricacies of human beings' complex and twisted feelings towards one another.



This is made far knottier by the sexual confusion running rife beneath the film's outer layer - the Lydecker character, written in the novel as a homosexual, has to be played straight to satisfy the morality code, and the cop's clear sexual ambiguity makes for relationships completely lacking in tension and chemistry, including one of the most wimpy first (and only) kisses ever to be set down on celluloid. Unfortunately, the adherence to traditional class values combined with the casting of obviously gay actors means the characters are not really played properly, and serves only to give the entire story a gleam of unreality and untruth.

Ultimately, because of all this, the film doesn't linger with the viewer, and we are left with the vague feeling that there was something we didn't quite get, or that something terribly important was left out, and if we could only scratch that itch, everything would fall into place. It is an itch, however, that will not get scratched.



Blahblahblahtoby review

It would be very easy to give away spoilers for this film, the major one revolves around a key plot element after all, but I will try my best to avoid them for those of you who haven't seen this and are yet to hear what actually happens.

There is a lot less of the traditional noir use of high contrast light and shadow, being replaced by a lot more of the warmth and soft lighting of society apartments and whilst the ghost of Laura has a strong hold over these men she is far from a femme fatale; her role is largely passive despite times when (as is standard for women in noir) she is painted as untrustworthy.



On face value this isn't really a noir, it's closer to a Hitchcockian melodrama, but I think this is our first encounter with Dugnant's Middle Class Murder theme. We have a not-quite-hard-boiled detective investigating a society murder who finds himself followed around by three overly helpful yet not too concerned suspects whilst becoming ensnared by an obsession with the victim, Laura.

There's no doubting the fact that Gene Tierney is a beautiful woman, but also smart and determined, her character, in flashback, blazing the trail later followed by Peggy in Mad Men as she climbs the ladder in a male dominated advertising agency. However at no point do you get the impression that she would lie, cheat or persuade men to kill for her. This leaves her as nothing more than a bauble for men to crave.



The extroverted, idiosyncratic performance of Clifton Webb as Waldo Lydecker is almost a show stealer; witty, erudite, pompous and a self-applauding manner is a whole lot of fun to watch; "in my case, self-absorption is completely justified. I have never discovered any other subject quite so worthy of my attention." He baits the other characters and always has a reproach waiting for them in response. His complete contrast with Dana Andrews adds an extra layer to proceedings; calling him, with obvious contempt, "muscular and handsome in a cheap sort of way" whilst constantly trying to undermine his actions.



Andrews for his part seems to be channeling the Alan Ladd school of film noir hero and gives a subtly great performance as the pragmatic, unromantic, typically masculine cop adding meaning to scenes with a simple facial gesture that could easily get missed by the unobservant viewer.

I noticed nothing special in Preminger's direction, it is solid if not spectacular and includes some long takes in which the camera follows the characters around the sets, lingering on some of the homoerotic moments between the two male leads - Andrews initial interview with Webb starts with Webb in the bath and continues as he dries himself in front of Andrews! - and at times giving you a sense that you are another of the suspects tagging along with the detective.



In terms of theme, aside from being populated by morally corrupt people who treat murder lightly (Middle Class Murder) there's more than a hint of Sexual Pathology and Portraits & Doubles throughout. I believe the three motifs will turn out to be intrinsically linked as the Noir-a-Thon rolls onwards.

Laura is a highly enjoyable film but also quite forgettable. I had seen this one a few years ago and had completely forgotten that I'd already seen it by the time I pressed play this time round. It is however definitely worth watching.



I know Brian saw this recently but has anyone else seen it? What did you think? Anyone adding it to their watchlist? Leave me some blah below.

And now for some coming attractions

Noir-a-Thon Double Feature Part 2: Double Indemnity (1944)

Sadly the DVD of Alfred Hitchcock's Shadow of a Doubt we bought from eBay would not play so we had to scratch it off of the list, this means we jump straight through to 1944 and Billy Wilders classic, Double Indemnity. If you missed the first part of this weeks double feature you'll find it here and all the Noir-a-thon reviews here.


Director: Billy Wilder
Starring: Fred MacMurray, Barbara Stanwyck, Edward G. Robinson
Year: 1944
Country of origin: USA
Language: English

Synopsis: Star insurance salesman Walter Neff (Fred MacMurray) narrates his fall from grace as he encounters a dame he can't resist (Barbara Stanwyck) with an offer he can't refuse.


What Indie Nights? review

Greetings once more, BBBG readers, long time no see.
Following on from yesterday's This Gun For Hire post we're bowing at the pedestal of the noir classic Double Indemnity.



As a total film neophyte before I met Toby, I had to admit that I had never heard of the film, or of Billy Wilder (Sacrilege! Disgust! Fainting and general astonishment ensue!), but in much the same way that one watches Casablanca or Gone With The Wind for the first time having had them built up within popular culture all one's life, the inevitable starting point will be 'It can't be as good as all that - it's so old!'. The amount of sour grapes I've had to eat with that sentiment in mind, faithful readers, I don't even want to talk about...

This is an intensely dark film, perhaps the first that truly earns the title of noir in every sense. Many of the scenes are so visually dark that screenshots are infeasible - night-for-night outside shots, night-time inside shots where the curtains get closed and the lights turned off; sometimes the only reference points are the glitter of an actor's eye or the streetlights outside the windows. And the story is certainly the darkest we have seen thus far on our noir travels - where cold-blooded murder can be committed for nothing more than money and the hallmarks of love can be manufactured and thrown aside as easily as a ten-cent tin of beans.



Barbara Stanwyck is a femme fatale formidable, the coldest and most focused yet. Her plans as exposed by Neff in the penultimate scene (in a room with all lights off and all curtains drawn) are the image of Brigid O'Shaugnessy's litany of murders and crimes done in the name of the Maltese Falcon as exposed by Sam Spade. But Phyllis Dietrichson's cold, calculating actions are infinitely more chilling than O'Shaugnessy's wildly opposing, emotional reactions to obstacle and accusation - Spade laughs at Brigid and never lets himself get taken in by her act, whereas Neff has been caught from the first in Phyllis's subtle web of desire and temptation. Where Brigid weeps and throws herself on the mercy of the men around her, Phyllis coolly manipulates them into positions that will be of most benefit to her. As femmes fatale go, Phyllis Dietrichson leaves all the others eating her dust.



Much has been said about the supermarket setting, and I dare say much of it might be true - the brightly-lit can-stacked aisles provide about as much contrast to the pitch-black Old-Hollywood mansions and insurance offices as is possible on celluloid. Placing his noir characters in a public, family space, in broad daylight, Wilder highlights their absurdity compared to the everyday world - do things like this really happen? he seems to be asking the viewer, almost reassuring them.

Not in our comfortable world of baby food and tinned beans, no sir. This American dream is enough for all of us… or is it?


Blahblahblahtoby review

The first time I saw Double Indemnity I was stunned by the sheer weight of its ending, a thoroughly downbeat way to finish a film despite knowing right from the start that what we are watching is one man's dying confession.



Directed by Billy Wilder, this is one of the master's early efforts, six years before Sunset Boulevard opened an incredible decade of films from him and with a screenplay written by pulp fiction great Raymond Chandler based on fellow legendary pulp writer James M. Cain's novel this film has so much going for it on paper that it's no surprise that it has become known as one of THE great films of Hollywoods golden era. Currenty ranked #54 on imdb's Top 250 its reputation precedes it and as such some are disappointed when viewing for the first time.

But in so many ways this is a perfect example of the films noir cycle. The perfect murder for money and a woman that inevitably goes wrong, the cunning and conniving Barbara Stanwyck who leads MacMurray astray, location shooting at night, a knowing narration from the hard boiled protagonist, subtle homoeroticism, the inevitable betrayal and death of the protagonist, a fatalistic tone throughout and snappy dialogue all contributing to this film being rightly lauded as such.



Aside from the atmospheric lighting and camera positioning that Wilder and his Director of Photography John F. Seitz worked hard to produce, providing the fatalistic tone of the piece; my favourite part of the film is the performance of Edward G. Robinson. His character of chief claims investigator Barton Keyes is a wonderful creation, filled with personality that only someone as talented as Robinson could do justice to. His “little man” inside him could quite easily have become something silly and campy in the wrong hands but this great actor steals the film from third billing as Neff describes the actions of his boss to us in flashback. The fact that the flashback scenes are from the point of view of Neff highlights the homoerotic nature of his relationship with the romanticised figure of Keyes and makes the explicit “I Love You” ending acceptable to the viewer in the Hays Code era of Hollywood production, they’re very close friends after all.

As far as motifs go there is a clear use of the Middle Class Murder and Sexual Pathology signifiers with Stanwyck as arch black widow chasing the money and not caring how many men she ruins along the way and MacMurray opening the film with “Yeah I killed him, I killed him for money and for a woman. I didn’t get the money and I didn’t get the woman. Pretty isn’t it?”



There’s some interesting sub-plots including a relationship with the young daughter of his victim, Lola Dietrichson (obviously an homage to The Blue Angel’s Lola Lola played by Marlene Dietrich) and some extremely tense moments that if this were any other film I might feel the need to way lyrical about but Double Indemnity should need no further praise; it’s a classic, enjoy it for what it is and take great pleasure in the Chandler dialogue and double entendres in the first part of the film.

How do you feel about this movie? Are you in agreement with the classic tag? Has it been wrongly praised and sat on too high a pedestal? Leave some blah below, let us know how you feel and don't forget to come back next week for more from the Noir-a-Thon.

And now for some coming attractions

Noir-a-Thon Double Feature Part 1: This Gun For Hire (1942)

After last weeks washout with The Glass Key we move on to another great adaptation of the eras crime literature, this time English master of literature Graham Greene sees his 1936 novel A Gun For Sale adapted for an American audience as the 1941 film This Gun For Hire. Don't forget you can find all the Noir-a-Thon entries in our vault.

Director: Frank Tuttle
Starring: Alan Ladd, Veronica Lake, Laird Cregar, Robert Preston
Year: 1942
Country of origin: USA
Language: English

Synopsis: Hitman, The Raven (Alan Ladd) is hired to kill a blackmailer and then set up to take the fall. Pursued by the police he sets out to escape capture and get even with the pair of bad guys who intended for him to get busted. Along the way he encounters a cabaret singer, Ellen (Veronica Lake,) employed as an undercover agent by federal authorities.


What Indie Nights? review

Hi there BBBG faithfuls! It's nice to see you again!
Thanks for sticking with us over the unplanned hiatus of the last week or so, sometimes all one's self-imposed pressures and deadlines can just pile up too high to see over.

We're back in action again this week, looking at This Gun For Hire, another adaptation from a novel of the same period - this time it's Graham Greene. I will now go on record as being a complete Graham Greene fangirl: there's something about the world-weary poignancy of his characters, the sigh-and-get-on-with-itness of their outlook, that really appeals to my narrative sensibilities. I always like to say that his novels are just long, bittersweet endings to stories that began long before we as readers (or viewers) pick up the thread.



Having a strong background in Graham Greene 101, many of his trademarks are easily spotted in This Gun For Hire - a young girl out to meet the world, an old man reflecting on his part in it, young hopefuls pitted against its cruelty, young cynics battling on through it; the general bent of characters is towards introspection, creating deeper characterisations and relationships than many other films of the era. Greene's overall tone is unmistakeable, no matter how much the setting and characters have been shifted - it's not surprising that this is only the first of his stories appearing on our noir list.

Interestingly, this is the first noir to feature any mention of the War that had been going on for nearly three years, although The Maltese Falcon was filmed only a year previously, and Pepe le Moko was filmed in Europe only two years before war broke out. It's here we see the beginning of the true American noir cycle, where the war can no longer be brushed off as a distant European problem - it begins to feel 'close to home' in a way that must have been extremely unsettling to Americans still feeling the effects of the Depression. The excellent denouement in the wide marble hallways of a Los Angeles chemical firm features mistaken identities due to the company-wide gas-mask drill, a scene that probably had a lot more meaning for the English readers of Greene than the American viewers of the film.



However the moralistic ending feels rushed, Alan Ladd's sudden change of heart after being persuaded by Veronica Lake to do the right thing for his country seems almost incongruous, or perhaps even beside the point - not for a noir anti-hero the nationalistic sentiments, the with-us-or-against-us attitude. He's been wronged his whole life, and he craves revenge.
That he gets it whilst still doing a good deed may have satisfied the morality censors of the time, but it doesn't quite fit with the self-serving attitude we expect from our anti-heroes. We might be able to see Raven's final deed as a mixture of Pepe le Moko's desperate caged-animal finalé and Sam Spade's sense of right and fair.
But one can't help thinking that Spade would never have played the sap, not even for his country…



Blahblahblahtoby review

As with most of the great classic period films noir This Gun For Hire is based on the thrilling fiction of the era; this time famed English literary master Graham Greene saw his 1936 novel adapted for American audiences in 1941.

Alan Ladd as The Raven is one of the great early noir protagonists, a man who would beat a woman because she kicked his cat and then apologise by buying her a designer dress, a man who shows so little emotion and compassion for others but is hiding a dark and disturbing past which when relayed allows us an insight in to his character and makes his behaviour almost understandable.



Foreshadowing later noirs such as Melville’s excellent Le Samourai, as a man he exists in solitude, his trenchcoat and fedora a uniform worn with pride, not hesitating to remove any obstacle between himself and freedom.

Laird Cregar as the effeminate Willard Gates, responsible for the set up of our antihero, is a much more palatable version of the Sydney Greenstreet character from The Maltese Falcon, relying less on caricature and a bit more on the subtlety of character and performance to establish his role in proceedings.



Whilst Veronica Lake is the femme fatale without intending to be, she isn’t evil, she is working for the good of her country but still leads The Raven to his inevitable demise with a flutter of her eyelashes and an appeal to his hidden better nature as only a beautiful woman with her own agenda in a noir film could achieve.

Blending location shooting with studio back lots you are treated to a some of the noir staples; late nights and expressionistic lighting in dirty looking locations such as a gasworks and sewer during a particularly enjoyable late night chase scene, together with some simple Hollywood musical numbers including one rather racy fetishistic fisherman/mermaid scene.



From the point of view of the noir motifs this is a film that is obvious with its wartime propaganda (Mr Big is in bed with the Japanese, selling chemical secrets.) But it also makes use of the Cops vs Robbers angle and the On The Run motif as The Raven looks to escape the police by fleeing the state but inevitably submits to his fate.





In much the same way I saw Shanghai Express as entertaining but Pepe Le Moko as a more rewarding viewing experience the comparison can be made of the two early noirs chosen for the Noir-a-Thon. This Gun For Hire is an entertaining early noir, it doesn’t have the shine or gloss or fast talking exposition of The Maltese Falcon. In the pairing of Alan Ladd and Veronica Lake (in roles that made them Hollywood stars) you get a highly charged affair which leaves you expecting one thing but delivered another, this coupled with the powerful sense of doom that surrounds The Raven, despite his best efforts to continue living, make for a highly rewarding viewing experience.


Seen this one? Got any other favourite Alan Ladd performances? Disagree with us skipping The Glass Key? Leave some blah below and tune in later for the second part of this weeks double feature, Double Indemnity.


And now for some coming attractions