 |
 This is one of the "classic hard-boiled" thrillers that is a "favorite of
suspense film lovers." It marked the first time Alan Ladd and Veronica Lake
teamed up. It supposedly made him an "instant star" and Lake was called a
"sultry blonde bombshell." This is a story adapted from a Graham Greene novel
and is "the hard-edged story of love, power, and betrayal set in the seamy
underworld of the 1940s." Ladd plays Raven who is a hitman that's
double-crossed by the person who hired him. Lake plays a woman who is a
nightclub
singer that is spying on her boss. Robert Preston plays a cop who "wants
Ellen's love and Raven's capture." When it's all done, "someone will pay with
his life." 1942, 81 minutes, VHS
This was the first of several pairings teaming Alan Ladd and Veronica Lake.
Ladd plays the nutso hitman Raven while Lake plays a nightclub
singer/government agent/cop's girlfriend named Ellen. This is one of those
flicks where the five or so main characters have impossibly interwoven lives to
the point that you might believe these people are the only five on the entire
planet. That said, this is one of the great film noirs of the early forties
and most of that can be laid on the shoulders of a performance of blazing
intensity by Alan Ladd. Ladd's Raven is one of the great characters of noir,
simultaneously made of iron and completely crushed by his own pointless
existence. Maintaining a steely exterior, Ladd manages to infuse Raven with a
vulnerability in much of his actions throughout the movie, some obvious, some
not. From his love of cats, to the way he rests his head on Ellen's shoulder
on a train, if ever so briefly, to the way he reacts when she kisses him near
the end of his life. The man has been ground up by life, but he is, in spite of
his attempts to mask the fact, still a man. And it is his search for something
that will still the beast that rages inside of him that draws us into
this film.  The movie opens with Raven's alarm clock braying like a jackass to let him know
that he better get up or he'll be late for hitman school. He gets up and it's
obvious that he's crashed at some skanky flophouse, complete with cute little
stray kitty on the window sill. He plays with the cat and gives it something
to eat and then the maid shows up and starts complaining about how she needs to
get in there and clean. She does and for some reason decides that it would be a
wise career move to abuse a psychotic hitman's kitty. Well, you can dang sure
bet that once Raven gets a load at what room service in that joint entails,
he's on her like Vincent Price on a payday from a cheesy horror movie. She
gets herself backhanded and her dress torn and tossed on her can back into the
hallway and then kitty gets petted by that nice hitman. The movie's not even
five minutes old and we're already establishing that Mr. Raven is a protagonist
of a different stripe. He's got some envelope with an address on it so he
heads over there to transacts the day's business. Once there he encounters a
chemist and a woman. The chemist has apparently been blackmailing the Nitro
Chemical Company with something or other so Raven's been dispatched to retrieve
the documents for a price. Of course the chemist thinks the price is cash, but
heck, Raven's a hitman, not a banker so he gets some hot lead for brunch.
Raven notices the woman and says that the chemist was supposed to be alone
(obviously he doesn't like to kill for free) and he goes after her. She locks
herself in the kitchen so Raven just plugs her through the door. Then he
checks to make sure she's dead. As he leaves he helps a girl with braces on
her legs get her ball back. We would learn later that Raven himself was
injured as a child. Raven meets up with the dude who hired him. This guy is a very large man who
likes sweets and has a great distaste for violence. Everything about this
character, Gates, is designed so that the audience will absolutely loathe him.
They don't really come out and say it, but they try to position this guy as a
fat degenerate of some strange persuasion. Raven suspects that he's going to
double-cross him, because he doesn't trust anyone and eventually he does
double-cross him by giving him marked bills for the payoff on the hit and then
reporting the money stolen to the police. Robert Preston, the star of The Music Man, plays the copper that's hot on the trail of the "stolen" loot and he
looks a lot younger in this movie and has one of those fancy little penciled on
mustaches that people of that time inexplicably thought made them look dashing.
In any event, there were several times when I thought Preston was going to
bust out into a verse of "There's trouble here in River City," or "Marion the
Librarian," but all he did was chase after Raven and bother Ellen. Now try to
follow this part. The copper (Preston) has a fiancee named Ellen (Lake) who is
some type of nightclub singer and she manages to get a job with Gates at this
nightclub in L.A. (The Neptune Club) which he runs at night when he isn't
working for Nitro Chemical during the day. Senator Burnett shows up and gives
Ellen a ride at which point he asks her to work undercover on Gates because
they believe he's selling secrets to the enemy. She says okay and she gets on
a train to L.A. as does Gates. Raven has figured out that the fat bastard has
double-crossed him so he gets on the same train to L.A. Meanwhile the copper
is hot on the trail of Raven for having the stolen money, he haven been given
up by the maid that beat up his cat. Got that?  There's a little bit of hijinks on the train with Raven happening to take the
seat next to Ellen and Fatty Arbuckle happening to see the two of them sleeping
next to one another and thus thinking they're in cahoots. He's a ratfink and
sends a telegram alerting the coppers that Raven is on the train. Somehow
everyone knows that his left wrist is screwed up so everybody is checked as
they get off the train, but Raven manages to slip by unnoticed as he's holding
Ellen captive. He takes her to an out of the way warehouse and apparently
plans on erasing her with extreme prejudice (that's what hitman buddies of mine
call it), but before he can do the job they're discovered and she gets away and
then he has to make his getaway. Lardbutt decides that since Ellen knows
Raven, he needs to have her killed, so he has her come to his place for a
little meet and greet whereupon the chauffeur knocks her out, ties her up and
dumps her in a closet. He then lays out in loving detail how he's going to
dump her in the river and make it look like a suicide. All the while, Pigface
is squirming and pissing in his frilly pink panties about how he just abhors
violence and doesn't want to know anything about it. Well, before they can
kill her, her copper boyfriend shows up and gets the runaround, then leaves.
Then Raven shows up. You don't give this guy the runaround. He sticks a gun
in the chauffeur's back and then kicks his ass down the basement stairs! You
have to love the strong violent type. Then he finds Ellen in the closet and
rescues her. They go back to the Neptune Club to confront Porky, but the copper
is there so Raven takes Ellen and runs off to hide out until he can get his
revenge on Tubby and his boss.  Ellen leaves a trail and the cops follow it and Raven has to end up holed up
in the railroad yards. It's during these quiet moments that we learn the fires
that forged Raven into the creature he has become. There's a cat that shows up
and Raven is glad to see it, thinking that it will bring him luck. He
inadvertently kills it trying to keep it quiet. "Now I've killed my luck," he
says and you can see whatever bit of hope that had remained in him drain from
his face. Ellen suggest that he get some sleep, but he doesn't want to because
then he'll dream. Then he asks Ellen if she'll listen to his dream, and
probably for the first time in his life someone actually cares enough to give
him the time of day (unless she just says yes so he doesn't shoot her). He
says that he dreams of a woman. The woman who beat him as a child. His father
was hanged and his mother died soon afterwards and he was sent to live with his
aunt and she abused him all the time. Once when he was reaching for a piece of
chocolate she hit his left wrist with a hot iron. Then he killed her and he
was sent to reform school where he was beaten all over again. Ellen makes him
promise he won't kill again because all he's doing is killing his aunt over and
over. He promises and you hope like hell that he keeps his promise, because
somebody that's endured all that as a child and carries the scars both
psychologically and physically deserves a break, deserves some kind of
redemption, especially now that somebody tells him that he does matter in some
small way, because he's important enough to listen to. You hope like hell he
keeps that promise, but you know in your heart that he's too far gone, that at
this stage it's too little too late. There's a showdown and he kills again and
the bad guys die and Raven himself is shot by Ellen's boyfriend. Raven still
has a chance to kill the copper, but he doesn't. He sees that the cop means
something to the only person who ever gave a damn about him and decides that
maybe with his final act, he can keep his promise to her, to stop killing and
he does. As he dies, he looks up at her and asks if he did good, and like an
angel of mercy she looks down on him and gives him the absolution in death that
he could never have in life and she tells him that he did good. A powerful
performance by Ladd is complemented nicely by Lake who simultaneously was his
doom and salvation. The plot is somewhat tortured and convoluted, but you just
don't care, because it's only a framework for Raven to search for something
worthwhile in a life that never gave him a chance or any options. It's
breathtaking and heartbreaking. After he kills the cat, he looks down at it
and says "I'd like to crawl down there with you and sleep." How many out there
have no one listening and wish the same thing?
Reviews © 2004
MonsterHunter
|
|
