An icy hit-man seeks revenge after being double-crossed by his employer.Catch those early scenes with an over-heated Vickers (Daisy).
Short Cut to Hell (1957)A strained effort all around, including James Cagney giving a personal introduction standing next to an imposing movie camera, assuring us his two new leading actors were terrific, before we get a chance to see for ourselves. We can wonder about his motivations, but on the surface two things seem clear.
Jimmy Cagney directs a movie! ...
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.
Robert Ivers and Georgeann Johnson never quite had the careers that were predicted for them in the introduction to this film by their director. But both give a reasonably competent road show adaption of the Paramount classic This Gun For Hire.
***SPOILERS***Fairly decent re-make of the 1942 crime classic "This Gun for Hire" directed by, in his first and only attempt, James Cagney. It's the cat loving hit-man Kyle Niles, Robert Iver, who after murdering buildings inspector Carl Adams, Peter Baldwin, and his secretary in cold blood gets double-crossed by the person who hired him "Fat Man" Bharwell, Jacques Aubuchon, to get him out of the way.
The first and only movie directed by James Cagney is a remake of the 1942 classic THIS GUN FOR HIRE starring Alan Ladd and Veronica Lake. This time the gun for hire is Kyle Niles played by Robert Ivers.
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.
Robert Ivers ,mainly in the first part ,gives an impressive performance:impassive ,deadpan,cold as ice ,he will make you shiver with his robotic swagger.When he kills the secretary after her boss,the directing(and performance) seems years ahead of its time.
.jpg)
