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Ron Miller's DARK CORRIDORS VOL. 10, No. 32 |
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GRAHAM GREENE'S "A GUN FOR SALE"
ABOVE LEFT: Graham Greene's original 1936 novel with its original title. ABOVE RIGHT: Alan Ladd achieved stardom in the first movie version of the novel, Paramount's 1942 "This Gun For Hire." |
Filmed three times, but never like the original book
of TheColumnists.com
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If you intend to either read the book or see one of the movie versions, be warned that this column gives away certain key plot elements and may spoil your enjoyment of them. |
English novelist Graham Greene began in the 1930s to designate certain new works as "entertainments" to separate them from his more "serious" works of fiction. His 1936 novel "A Gun For Sale" was listed by Greene as an "entertainment" and, perhaps as a consequence, isn’t regarded quite so highly by critics as his more serious novels.
And yet it was a tremendously popular book
and so far has been filmed three times. None of the films has
very closely resembled the original novel.
The first version, called "This Gun For Hire," was
released by Paramount in 1942 just months after America went
into World War II and today is taken quite seriously by critics
as one of the great films noir of the 1940s. It’s
the film that made actor Alan Ladd a star, along with his equally
unknown leading lady, Veronica Lake. After that film together,
they became one of the most potent romantic star pairings of
the period.
Greene's novel was adapted for the screen by American crime novelist
W.R. Burnett, whose own novels "Little Caesar" and
"High Sierra" had both become classic crime films.
Working with Burnett on the script was screenwriter Albert Maltz,
who later was blacklisted after being smeared by the commie-hunting
House Un-American Activities Committee of the McCarthy era.
"This Gun For Hire" took extravagant
liberties with the original Greene story, which was a cynical
thriller about a soul-dead mercenary killer named Raven who only
briefly knows the touch of human kindness before he meets his
grim end in the final reel.
Naturally, the first big change was shifting the setting of the
film from pre-war England to America, trading London for San
Francisco and, eventually, Los Angeles as settings. With England’s
film industry severely curtailed by the war and many of its actors
and directors working in America at the time, it made sense to
switch the locale, which surely made it more appetizing to American
moviegoers.
Greene’s main character, the hit man called "Raven,"
also got an overhaul in the American screenplay. In the novel,
he’s a grotesque-looking man with a harelip, which makes
it much harder for him to hide from the police when they start
looking for him. His deformity and the hints Greene gives us
of Raven’s terrible childhood--his father was a criminal
who was hanged--make it easier for readers to understand why
he might have turned into a hate-filled adult who trusts nobody.
But the movie’s Raven is, of course, quite handsome because
he looks just like Alan Ladd. To make up for tossing out the
harelip, the screenwriters gave Raven a badly-scarred wrist,
which is spotted regularly by witnesses who report his whereabouts
to the police.
Greene gave Raven one humanizing quality: He loves the stray cat he's been feeding in his shabby tenement apartment. When the slovenly maid kicks the cat one day, Raven whacks her upside the head. He worries what's going to happen to his kitty while he's the object of a manhunt.
The screenwriters weren't content to leave it there. They also have a little crippled girl with leg braces spot him as he leaves the scene of his murder assignment. Rather than shoot the kid--his normal reaction when a witness spots him--he actually says a few nice words to her, then reluctantly lets her live. As mean as he gets later in the movie, that gives him a good heart that Greene never quite gave him.
In the novel, Raven was hired to kill England's Minister of War, which he does rather coldbloodedly for money, killing the old man's secretary, too, because she would be a witness if allowed to live. Though Greene doesn't come right out and tell us so, I think we're supposed to believe the people behind the killing are Nazi sympathizers and the assassination nearly plunges England into war with Germany.
But the 1942 "This Gun For Hire" was conceived and filmed before America had experienced the Dec. 7, 1941, attack on Pearl Harbor by the Japanese and finally was drawn into World War II, lining up with England against the Germans, Italians and Japanese. Once the locale of the story was switched to America, that made it difficult to maintain exactly the same sort of "brink of war" climate of the 1936 novel.
So, the American version of Raven is instead hired to kill a chemist who has some evidence that would incriminate the arch villain of the American movie, a wheelchair-bound corporation kingpin who is apparently supplying America's foreign enemies with secret formulas. The chemist is apparently blackmailing the kingpin. Raven kills the blackmailer's girl friend, too, when she winds up in the man's apartment when Raven comes to kill him.
"They said he'd be alone!" Raven grumbles as the girl runs into an adjacent room to hide from him. He shoots her through the door and doesn't seem much bothered by it either.
In the book, Raven's contact man is "Chumley," who's also known as "Davis." He's a grossly fat corporate lackey who invests in local theater productions for his amusement--and as a way of connecting with good-looking young women looking for some way to get ahead in show business. This "hobby" puts him in the right place to meet the book's heroine, Anne, who is a young actress who just happens to be engaged to marry the Scotland Yard detective who's assigned to investigate the murder of the Minister of War.
In "This Gun For Hire," Anne becomes "Ellen" (Veronica Lake), a night club performer who does a song and magic act and the contact man is now Willard Gates (Laird Cregar), who owns a Los Angeles night club where she's hired to work. The movie still has her engaged to the chief investigator (Robert Preston), whose character name is also changed from "Mather" to "Michael Crane," but the screenplay also has her working undercover for Senator "Burnett" (perhaps an in-joke referring to screenwriter W.R. Burnett), who's head of a Senate committee that's trying to gather evidence against the treasonous corporate kingpin.
Greene's novel has Raven betrayed by the men who hired him when they pay him off in marked bills from a robbery. The numbers of the bills have been widely circulated just before the murder, so Raven suddenly finds himself hunted by the police, but unable to use any of the money he's been paid for the job. Angry, he vows to kill not only "Chumley," but whoever Mr. Big turns out to be.
The movie makes the betrayal even more personal because the corporation puts lots of pressure on the cops to catch the man who robbed their company and killed the paymaster, adding yet another layer of motivation to not only catch Raven, but to perhaps kill him on sight.
The book makes it clear that Raven is a hardened villain who deserves the unhappy end that comes for him. But by giving us a glimpse into his prior life and showing us how he begins to see things differently while in the company of Anne, who becomes his hostage at one point, we do eventually understand him and care about what happens to him.
But "This Gun For Hire" goes further, turning Raven into a movie anti-hero. We go along with him because most of the people he's killing are worse villains than he is and we sense he might have had a completely different kind of life if he'd been treated better as a youngster. We don't even root for him to have cosmetic surgery to eliminate his deformity because the screenwriters remove his deformity (without need for anesthetic) before we even meet him.
Directed briskly by Frank Tuttle, "This Gun For Hire" still holds up quite well and is worthy of its towering reputation as a noir classic.
The first remake of "This Gun For Hire" came in 1957 and it's best-remembered today as being the only film that actor James Cagney ever directed. Called "Short Cut To Hell," it kept the story in America, but changed all the names of the characters. Raven becomes "Kyle Niles" (played by Robert Ivers), "Anne" becomes "Glory Hamilton" (Georgann Johnson) and Detective Mathers becomes "Sgt. Stan Lowery" (William Bishop) It has even less connection to the original Greene novel than did "This Gun For Hire."
In 1991, another remake was made for cable television under the title "This Gun For Hire," this time starring Robert Wagner as Raven, Nancy Everhard as Anne and Fredric Lehne as Detective Mather. Though the main character names were unchanged and Raven now bears a facial scar, the locale was again switched, this time to New Orleans. It was basically a remake of the first movie and not a new adaptation of the book.
In retrospect, some of the changes made for the 1942 "This Gun For Hire" don't seem so high-handed. Giving Raven a harelip, as Greene does in the book, would have made it all the more difficult to build sympathy for him in a movie audience. Giving a leading character visual deformities can be more unsettling in a movie than in a book, where the imagination can be toned down by the reader. You need to imagine that something romantic might occur between Alan Ladd and Veronica Lake to retain your interest in what happens to them. If he looked like Quasimodo, it would be harder to go along with him as he hunts down the men who betrayed him and his country.
But Graham Greene was a masterful storyteller and "A Gun For Sale" retains its potency all these years later because you at least understand why Raven has been turned into a coldblooded killer and accept the fact that he's a doomed man from the moment we meet him.
©2009 by Ron Miller. The photo of Alan Ladd is courtesy of Paramount Pictures. The book cover illustration is courtesy of Penguin Books. This column first posted Sept. 7, 2009.
Ron
Miller is a former nationally syndicated television columnist
and the author of "Mystery! A Celebration," the official
companion book to PBS' "Mystery!" series. He currently
writes about television mysteries for MYSTERY SCENE magazine.
You can comment on this column online. Please address your message to either "The Editors" or Ron Miller. To send an email, click here and don't forget to mention Ron's name: talkback@thecolumnists.com
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