Alan Ladd is so stunningly good as a hired killer in this thriller its remarkable he played so few baddies in his subsequent career - and a great shame. While he's only given the "and introducing" credit and the top line billing goes to Robert Preston and Veronica Lake, this is Ladd's movie through and through.
He is helped by beautiful photography and carefully constructed scenes and one of the all time great introductions - Ladd wakes up tousled haired from a nightmare, then goes out to work in his trenchcoat, is nice to his cat, is mean to a nasty land lady who is cruel to the cat goes a visits a man who he shoots dead, then he shoots dead the man's girlfriend because she just happens to be there, passes a little girl sitting on the steps who identifies him who he should shoot... but he can't go through with it. Then he meets up with his boss Laird Cregar who is alternatively fascinated and/or repulsed by what Ladd has done.
Then the movie gets a bit odder and war conscious, with it turning out that Cregar invests in nightclub shows on the side, and he goes to see Veronica Lake perform a number... and she's asked to go undercover by a kindly senator who thinks Cregar is a fifth columnist and needs evidence. It just so happens that Lake is the boyfriend of cop Robert Preston, who is investigating the murders committed by Ladd.
The Lake-as-undercover-agent plot sits uneasily alongside the Ladd-getting-revenge-on-Cregar-for-betraying him story. Its as though it was shoved in to build up Lake's part (she sings two songs), or else to placate the censor.
The movie slows down in between the half way and two thirds mark with Lake and Ladd on the lamb. I couldn't put my finger on it - it needed another complication or something, maybe some double dealing - or maybe it would've worked if Lake and Ladd had been able to enjoy more of a romance or they'd given Robert Preston more to do.
But then it perks up and becomes more like a Hitchcock action film a la The 39 Steps, with Lake pretending to be a guy to help Ladd from the police and Ladd leaping on to trains and then breaking into the baddy's mansion. This is effective and Ladd gets to redeem himself before perishing.
So the result is a mixture of film noir, WW2 propaganda and Hitchcock thriller, with a brilliant Ladd star performance, excellent support from Cregar, Tully Marshall and Preston, top notch female star work from Veronica Lake. Frank Tuttle isn't known as a top director and no doubt benefited considerably from the in house team at Paramount (eg John Seitz the DOP) but I thought he did a very good job.
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