What did you watch? The 1942 hardboiled crime drama This Gun For Hire.

Ooh? Gunmen? Tough cops? Hot dames torn between men on both sides of the law? That’s what the copy promises.

I picked this one at Amoeba records in July 2022 and it has been sitting here waiting for a single watch since then. You can’t assume that all old movies are public domain, there’s many that are regarded as classics and held tightly by their studios. And CEOs of various merged entertainment media entities don’t consider anything produced to be art their companies have marketed as products anymore: it’s just disposable content that has a financial cost that doesn’t justify its existence anymore. And this includes recent productions, such as the recently revealed “Coyote Vs ACME” which might not even be good, but what kind of world do we live in where a studio completed a full movie about a cartoon coyote suing a manufacturer of various elaborate bird traps that keep backfiring on him, and then shoves that completed movie in a vault to never be seen by anyone?

What I was getting at was: some of these movies don’t have the widest physical media release, only so many DVD copies are out there of an older movie because there may not be a huge market for it, and electronics and big box stores only have so much space for physical media these days and don’t keep large libraries. A streaming service might have room for a studio’s deep library, but if no one is searching and watching for that movie, then someone behind the scenes or a computer decides that it’s not worth having it on their server and removes it from the public view.

You’ve lost me. So, you bought a DVD? I don’t think I’ve seen This Gun For Hire to be streamed anywhere, at least through streaming services I have, so yes, I found this DVD and bought it. And am now getting around to watching it.

The back of the DVD includes this copy: “It’s the hard-edged story of love, power and betrayal set in the seamy underworld of the 1940’s. Raven is a cold-blooded professional killer who’s been double crossed by his client. Ellen is a beautiful nightclub singer who’s spying on her corrupt boss. Lt. Michael Crane is a dedicated cop who wants Ellen’s love and Raven’s capture. The tension mounts and before the case is wrapped up, someone will pay with his life.”

Wow, sounds lurid and dangerous! Is Ellen a sultry femme fatale that Lt. Crane can’t save from herself? No, the copy is a little deceptive. Or at least it’s easy to infer a hard-boiled dark tone.

The movie starts with a bang: In San Francisco, hit man Raven kills a chemist and his assistant, and takes the chemist’s notes to a businessman, Willard Gates, who pays Raven in what turns out to be money reported as stolen from Gates’ company. Raven finds this out the hard way when he tries to spend it, and now the cops are on the lookout for him all across the state. At the same time, Gates falls for a singer and magician, Ellen and hires her for his club in Los Angeles. Shortly afterward, she is accosted by a U.S. Senator – Gates and his company may be selling secrets to Axis enemies, and the government would like her to spy on Gates and get proof.

Ellen can’t tell her boyfriend, Lt. Crane, who was visiting her in San Francisco as this murder and stolen money issue happened, and was asked to help out. So now the lovers are separated, and she can’t tell him why she just can’t abandon her new job to be with him in SF. She gets on a train and in an amazing coincidence, she’s sitting next to Raven. Gates is also on the train and sees them together, and has the train staff call ahead to Los Angeles to report that Raven is on the train. When the train reaches LA, Raven escapes and takes Ellen hostage, and is about to kill her in an abandoned building when he’s interrupted by some construction workers.

With Raven spotted in LA, Lt. Crane heads there. Meanwhile, Gates invites Ellen to his mansion, and his chauffeur knocks her out and intends to dump her body somewhere. Lt. Crane shows up at the mansion having been told by the nightclub that Ellen was meeting the boss there, and vengeful Raven is also lurking outside, with the latter fully aware that Ellen is in danger. Raven rescues Ellen from the chauffeur, but eventually he has to take her hostage again as Lt. Crane and the police confront him, and Raven and Ellen hide out in a railyard waiting for the right moment to escape.

Ellen convinces Raven that Gates is up to something beyond just having Raven murder people, that America needs to root out traitors, and helps cover Raven’s escape from the cops so that Raven could confront Gates and get a confession. Unfortunately, Raven kills a cop doing so, which looks kinda bad for Ellen, frankly. Raven reaches Gates’ business and has a showdown with Gates, the chauffer, and persons Gates answers to their espionage plans.

Wow…this doesn’t seem like noir. It seems like a WW2 era spy adventure. Seriously, I thought this was something where characters are temped to engage in crime for love or something, but it’s kind of the opposite. Perhaps Raven thinks Ellen sees good in him, after his lifetime of remorseless criminal activities, and instead of just plugging Gates at the first chance he gets, he seeks out a confession from him and his handlers (despite, you know, something like that being “under duress”), knowing there’s no reward for him regardless if he pulls it off.

Otherwise, it was very good. Like a lot of movies, we have to get a little backstory from Raven why he’s such a bad guy, having a hard childhood and life, when he opens up to Ellen, but it might be the first time he’s done so. He’s otherwise verbally and physically abusive to most people we see him interact with, though he discovers he’s got “stolen” money when he tries to buy a dress for an employee at the hotel he’s staying at. Ellen and Lt. Crane are already a couple, he’s trying to get her to marry her right then and there while he’s looking into the murder of the chemist. It’s not a love triangle, just a bad man seeing what good people have and willing to end it all for himself if it means not looking like a total piece of crap in the eyes of one person. Recommended!

Anything about the cast? Alan Ladd is Raven, Veronica Lake is Ellen. The two were received well as a duo in this film and were cast together in an adaptation of The Glass Key and a couple other movies as well. There’s plenty about them out there, but another cast member to look up is Laird Cregar, who played Willard Gates. Laird was a gay man whose lover, David Bacon, was murdered in 1943 (and is still unsolved). When it was revealed that Laird and David were “good friends,” a studio exec quickly tried to set Laird into a public “relationship” with a female actress. I don’t know how long that lasted but in trying to lose weight (he was very tall and over 300 lbs) Laird would suffer a heart attack and died in 1944 at the age of 31.