THE NEEDLE’S EYE AND THE DAMAGE DONE: In 2008, Walter Olson of Overlawyered recommended This Gun for Hire. So now you know how long it takes something to reach the top of my Netflix queue! Here are a few thoughts on this terrific movie.

First, Veronica Lake is extraordinary. Her sad, forgiving eyes and husky, hopeful, low-rent voice might be even more startling here than they were in Sullivan’s Travels. She’s a noir woman who is neither brassy nor slinky, with more future than past and more wisdom than sense.

Alan Ladd is also really good here. He gets all the sentiment of the show (based on a Graham Greene novel, which I suppose explains the brief suicidal-tendencies scene) but he makes a difficult part work about as well as it could.

The direction is classic noir, opening with Ladd, as killer-for-hire Raven, sweaty and off-kilter in his flophouse bed. We get venetian blinds, centered framing when the major villain is finally cornered, candles in a thunderstorm and searchlights raking a railyard, menacing opulence and magic tricks. This is a hugely engaging and entertaining movie.

Its characterizations also reminded me, unexpectedly, of Jamaica Inn, which I recently rewatched as part of AFI’s Hitchcock retrospective. Both movies feature a smart, basically “lawful good,” resourceful young woman whose sympathies are torn between a lawman and an underclass killer. In both movies compassion, guilt, and repentance are the provinces of those without much money; the rich are irredeemably cruel. I think This Gun for Hire glosses over its killer’s opening violence toward a housemaid, whereas Jamaica Inn doesn’t prettify the head wrecker’s cruelty to his wife, but overall their characters and situations are surprisingly similar. In both movies, power corrupts–the power of the gun, but even more deeply, the power of money.