The Killer as a Cold Angel
Alan Ladd was the tough-talking film noir anti-hero — and he looked cool every step of the way. But underneath his trenchcoat and fedora, Ladd spent his life battling a formidable foe — himself.
Of all those indelible menswear moments in movies — Cary Grant’s grey flannel remaining resolutely unruffled amid the mayhem of North by Northwest; Steve McQueen’s three-piece Prince of Wales check encapsulating the brio of his gentleman-thief in The Thomas Crown Affair — perhaps the most underrated might be the opening scene of the 1942 thriller This Gun for Hire. Alan Ladd’s conflicted hit man, Philip Raven, wakes from a nap in a San Francisco flophouse — a piano tinkles desultorily downstairs — and gets dressed for his latest job; he’s slept in his spearpoint collar shirt and knit-tie, andafter loading his pistol (a Colt Pocket Hammerless), he pulls on a subtly pinstriped suit jacket to match his flat-front trousers, followed by a double-breasted, generously lapelled raincoat, and a wide-brimmed fedora.
The look, at once spare and starkly elegant — and equally appropriate for the rigours of getting entangled with femme fatale Veronica Lake or blowing away his nemesis, in this instance a blackmailing chemist — would set the template for the tough- talking film noir anti-hero. Humphrey Bogart would subsequently show up, trench-coated and hard-bitten, in Casablanca; likewise Dana Andrews in Laura, Robert Mitchum in Out of the Past; and, later still, Alain Delon in Le Samouraï. Ladd not only rebooted the archetype — “That the old-fashioned motion picture gangster, with his ugly face, gaudy cars and flashy clothes, was replaced by a smoother, better-looking and better-dressed bad man was largely the work of Mr. Ladd,” wrote The New York Times — but also invested him with a bruised ambivalence that left audiences rooting for him in both kiss-kiss and bang-bang modes (winningly, he pauses before embarking on his hit to furnish a thirsty cat with a saucer of milk).
That the old-fashioned movie gangster was replaced by a smoother bad man was largely due to the work of Mr. Ladd.
“Once Ladd had acquired an unsmiling hardness, he was transformed from an extra to a phenomenon,” wrote the critic David Thomson in his Biographical Dictionary of Film. “His calm, slender ferocity made it clear that he was the first American actor to show the killer as a cold angel.” Ladd himself had a more prosaic take on his peculiar brand of mordant intensity. “I’m the most insecure guy in Hollywood,” he once said. “If you’ve had it good all your life, you figure it can’t ever get bad, but when you’ve had it bad, you wonder how long a thing like this will last.”
I’m the most insecure guy in Hollywood. If you’ve had it good all your life, you figure it can’t ever get bad.
In fact, Ladd was a Hollywood golden boy through much of the 1940s and early fifties, but the concept of precarity was baked into his psyche from the start. He was born Alan Walbridge Ladd in Hot Springs, Arkansas in 1913, the only child of Ina Raleigh, originally from County Durham, and Alan Ladd Sr., who would die of a heart attack when his son was four. At the age of five, Ladd accidentally burnt down the family home while playing with matches; during the economic hardscrabble of the 1920s, he and his mother moved to California, living first in a migrant camp. Ladd excelled at amateur dramatics at North Hollywood High School, and was among a number of young ‘discoveries’ signed to Universal Pictures in 1933, but was dropped after six months for being “too blond and too short” (Ladd’s ‘official’ height would fluctuate between five foot six and seven over the years, dependent perhaps on the deployment of heel lifts). “I was a dummy in school and I was never trained for anything,” he later recalled, perhaps proving his point by working variously as a fruit picker, cash register salesman and short-lived restaurateur (his burger and malt joint, Tiny’s Patio — named for his inevitable high-school nickname — closed after a few months). Tragedy would also strike in 1937, when Ladd’s mother, staying with him after a break-up and hopelessly alcohol-dependent, asked for money to go to the store; Ladd obliged, assuming it was for drink. Instead, she bought arsenic-based ant paste and drank it in the back seat of Ladd’s car. “How do you deal with something like that?” Ladd asked in a later interview; one answer, in his case, was to become increasingly reliant on alcohol himself.
Ladd initially broke through on radio, where his rich, deep baritone was neither too blond nor too short. He worked on as many as 20 shows a week as the sole actor at L.A.’s KFWB station before graduating to small roles in the Disney film The Reluctant Dragon and Citizen Kane (where he went uncredited as a newspaper reporter). But This Gun for Hire put him firmly on the map: Paramount signed him to a long-term contract, and he and Lake cemented their reputation as a deliciously twisted Bogie and Bacall in further noirs, including 1942’s The Glass Key, based on a Dashiell Hammett story in which she accuses his corrupt political enforcer of being complicit in murder (spoiler alert: he is, but redemption isn’t far away), and 1946’s The Blue Dahlia (which was Raymond Chandler’s first screenplay), in which he plays a demobbed serviceman (Ladd himself served in the air force in world war II) who enlists Lake to help clear his name after his wife is murdered.
