This Gun for Hire

Frank Tuttle's This Gun for Hire (1942) has had a mixed history in high-end video. In its first laserdisc incarnation in the mid-1980's from Image Entertainment, the movie looked pale and out-of-focus, while the accompanying trailer looked sharp and bright. A later laserdisc from seven or eight years later was better produced, but not nearly as visible, appearing just as modern titles were starting to overwhelm the release schedule. This DVD makes up for all of it, apart from the absence of a trailer. The movie, transferred full-frame (1.33:1), looks about as good as it ever has, and the sound is mastered at a fairly high volume. There is no annotation or any other indication of the movie's importance in the history of film noir, which is sort of a pity, as it is one movie that could have justified a commentary track based on its origins in a Graham Greene novel and its importance in the careers of Alan Ladd and Veronica Lake (and, for that matter, Laird Cregar). It's not as though Universal doesn't do that sort of thing on movies which are no more important than this one. The 18 chapters are more than adequate to outline the movie and highlight the key scenes. The disc opens to the simple menu automatically on startup.