Alan Ladd made his debut as a leading man in this silly pastiche of pulp-fiction clichés, adapted from a popular novel by Graham Greene. The diminutive actor plays a tough-as-cardboard killer with a fashionable scar on his soul, opposite Veronica Lake as the sympathetic fiancé of the cop assigned to track him down. The wildly improbable, coincidence-filled plot involves espionage, blackmail, wartime patriotism, and Freudian psychology, with a few musical numbers (believe it or not) added for good measure. Viewers today would have little choice but to enjoy it as a laughably dated early noir potboiler, not exactly what the filmmakers originally had in mind.
Review of This Gun for Hire
