This Gun for Hire
- sombre
- brisk
- intense
Sombre, kinetic, measured noir / crime, grounded in texture. Ambivalent, mid-stakes, cold, hand-scored across twelve axes of taste.
How every film is hand-scored →Sadistic killer-for-hire Philip Raven becomes enraged when his latest job is paid off in marked bills. Vowing to track down his double-crossing boss, nightclub executive Gates, Raven sits beside Gates' lovely new employee, Ellen, on a train out of town. Although Ellen is engaged to marry the police lieutenant who's hunting down Raven, she decides to try and set the misguided hit man straight as he hides from the cops and plots his revenge.
Our read · This Gun for Hire (1942) reads as a sombre, kinetic, grounded noir · crime · thriller entry — measured in intensity, mid-stakes in scope, cold in temperature, ambivalent in outlook. Hand-scored on twelve axes of taste — mood, pacing, weirdness, hope, stakes, humour, reality, density, warmth, auteur, intensity, and era — with a derived palette drawn from its dominant cinematography.
Availability in the US · via JustWatch
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The shape of This Gun for Hire
What watching it is actually like.
“You want lean noir with a wounded hitman and a nightclub magician heroine.”
Skip it tonight — You dislike wartime propaganda framing or need color and modern pacing.
The reading.
Each axis is hand-scored — not derived from votes or genre averages. The marker shows where this film sits; the gradient fill uses the film's own cinematography palette.
Eight films that read most like this one.
Closeness in the twelve-axis space — how the film actually reads, not “people also liked.”
Discussion
What does your Movie DNA look like?
Rate a few films you've seen. We map your taste across the same twelve axes and find the films you'll actually want to watch tonight.
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