filmalamosa Story about an antisocial hired killer who goes after an employer who double crosses him. While tracking down the men who hired him he gets involved with the female lead a night club singer on her way to Los Angeles. In the end revenge is extracted.It is fast paced and keeps your interest especially the first hour. When the action moves to LA it starts to bog down a bit and get a little squirrelly. There is a long scene in an air raid shelter of some huge giant factory that is completely implausible...dozens of police scour the plant for hours but overlook an obvious staircase to the airraid shelter??Still it is worth a watch I give it a 6.The other reviews are by people much more knowledgeable about the actors and period than I...am reviewing it as a naive uninformed viewer.RECOMMEND

bajorhosting Not TOO many spoilers but better safe than sorry!I love James Cagney the actor and was looking forward to seeing something from James Cagney the director. Unfortunately, Mr. Cagney was no Charles Laughton. Since most people interested in this film are probably Cagney fans, I will cover the direction first. Cagney had one strike against him going into this: he was remaking a popular classic, This Gun for Hire. That film launched Alan Ladd as a star, solidified Veronica Lake's popularity and created a powerful (albeit diminutive) screen team. (Plot for both films: A hit-man does a job but is double-crossed by his employers by being paid off in hot, marked bills. On the run from the police for a robbery he didn't commit, the hit-man plans revenge. His only lead; a fat man who loves pretty women and peppermints. Meanwhile, a nightclub singer gets caught in the middle, first as one of the hit-man's intended murder victims, then as his hostage and finally as his friend/girlfriend/mother/sister figure.) Remaking a popular and successful film meant that Cagney had to work twice as hard to meet or surpass the original material. There is not a single scene that works more effectively in this remake than in the original. However, the movie has flaws that are evident even if you have never seen This Gun for Hire. One of the main problems of this film is the pacing. Suspenseful scenes are rushed along while dull ones are allowed to linger.A few scenes do have interesting camera work but the novice director seems enamored of this and pushes is a bit too far and long. Then there is the woeful hamminess and just plain bad acting. The leads aren't terrible, just not that good. Robert Ivers is OK as the hit-man but he doesn't come off as dangerous as he should. Alan Ladd had this frostiness that served him well in tough guy roles. Ivers is less glacial and more petulant. Further, the script waters down his character. You see, in the original novel, the hit-man had a cleft lip. In This Gun for Hire, it was turned into a disfiguring arm injury, the result of child abuse at the hands of his aunt. This bid to preserve Ladd's handsome face actually turned into a powerful character trait. In Short Cut to Hell, the hit-man's important physical trait is that he is a bit small. That's it. By giving the hit-man a very distinguishing feature, the novel and the original film made his plight more desperate. This was a man who could not just disappear. You can issue a general call for men with cleft palates and mangled arms. Being a small-ish just doesn't cut it. You can hardly have a police dragnet looking for all small-ish men. Robert Ivers was 5'8" according to IMDb. Hardly lilliputian. As for the heroine, Georgann Johnson acts well enough but her demeanor is too "gosh-gee-whiz" for the dark material. Veronica Lake (Sorry to keep harping on the original but I just can't help it) gave a street- smart performance. Maybe she was never Oscar-worthy but she was certainly believable. Lake always gave the impression of being a pretty girl who grew up on the wrong side of the tracks and never lost her toughness (which is what she, in fact, was). This element makes her eventual friendship with the hit-man much more believable. She understands him because she probably had a rotten childhood too. Georgann Johnson's take on the character is more maternal and some of the complexity of the relationship is lost.Finally, the villain played by Jacques Aubuchon seems rather out of place as well. The original film had the delightfully squeamish Laird Cregar in this role. Aubuchon does a pale impression of Cregar but simply doesn't match him. Cregar's character was fussy, eccentric and way too fond of peppermints but he was also paranoid and it was this paranoia that endangered Veronica Lake's character. Aubuchon, on the other hand, simply follows paint-by-numbers villain motivation.So, this film is mainly for film buff and Cagney completists. From me, it won a resounding "meh" Would I have liked it better if I had never seen This Gun for Hire? Maybe a little. But not enough for me to give this film any kind of recommendation to general film enthusiasts. Stick with the original.

MartinHafer This is a very unusual film for two reasons. First, it's directed by James Cagney--the actor. It's his only film as a director. Second, when the film begins, it opens with Cagney himself addressing the audience about the film. And, to prove that he IS the director, he stands next to a chair with "James Cagney. Director" written on it! The movie is a remake of "This Gun for Hire". To me, this is an odd choice, as the Alan Ladd film was very good and very famous. Cagney already had an uphill job as director putting across his own version of a film that is already a familiar classic.Like "This Gun for Hire", this film is about an assassin that does some killings for a horrible man. When he is paid off, the stupid guy sets up the assassin to get arrested--a very, very bad idea. That's because the killer escapes. Now, he knows he's been set up and is out to exact revenge. And, along the way, he kidnaps a woman and forces her to go along for the ride.The film isn't bad, but you can't help but think that the originals, Alan Ladd and Veronica Lake were simply better. Instead, Cagney uses complete unknowns--and his introductory remarks come off like he's almost apologizing for using them and insists they are exceptional actors. Well, considering that unlike Ladd and Lake, they did NOT go one to great careers in films, we must assume Cagney was mistaken. Overall, a decent film (since the plot is very good) but a relatively uninspired film and one you could easily skip. Of interest mostly because of its Cagney angle.This film, I give a 5. The original is strong and earns an 8.

bmacv Towards the end of Short Cut to Hell, with the two principal characters holed up in an abandoned underground storage bunker and the police cars massed outside, there's a long quotation from the doom-freighted score Miklos Rosza wrote for Double Indemnity. It's one of several arresting details the movie provides (another is a newspaper from the previous decade, with the headline 'Allies Cross Siegfried Line'), details that pique interest but go nowhere in attempting to satisfy curiosity.Short Cut to Hell is an all but forgotten movie but a noteworthy one nonetheless, if only as the only title James Cagney ever directed. Night of the Hunter it's not (the sole directorial effort of Charles Laughton), but another point of engagement is in its being a remake of the 1942 Alan Ladd/Veronica Lake vehicle This Gun for Hire, drawn from the Graham Greene 'entertainment' of that name.The Ladd/Lake allure didn't last into a new millennium (who knew?), but in 1957 both of them were still reasonably active, their less than glamorous (all right, alcoholic) endgames still a few years, or decades, off. Cagney chose to update them using actors without much in the way of either past or future.In the Ladd role of the icy, isolated killer-for-hire, Robert Ivers is little more than a trenchcoat and a topper, skin and bones, who brings to mind an unlikely amalgam of Elisha Cook Jr. and James Dean. Finding himself set up through marked bills, after carrying out the two brutal murders contracted by pompous 'fatso' (Jacques Aubuchon, whose indulgences are pretty young things and peppermint patties), he eludes police, taking as hostage Georgann Johnson, a lounge singer engaged to police detective William Bishop. Johnson proves a game gal, but in the wrong way. She has a way with a wisecrack, but it's not in the flirtatious Veronica Lake way (nor that of Lauren Bacall or Gloria Grahame); the spin she gives is more in the Eve Arden-ish, vinegar-virgin mode, less seductive than matey, even matronly. So the chemistry between captor and captive (our old friend The Stockholm Syndrome) rarely reaches reactive force. (Nor, for that matter, do the reactions between Johnson and Bishop.)Notwithstanding its unknown cast, Short Cut to Hell doesn't have the look or feel of a B-movie, and Cagney keeps a good pace and an acceptable amount of tension (a few quite brutal scenes help to quicken the pulse as well). It's not quite clear why Cagney chose this material to direct, and he makes (or had to accept) some less than ideal choices, but he'd worked in movies long enough to insure that the movie he directed was brisk and absorbing, a better little movie than its obscurity might suggest.