Frank Tuttle's This Gun for Hire (1942)

The film scores through the breathless rhythm of a chase that takes us from a miserable shack  shrouded in fog and surrounded by the police to a sensational manhunt inside a gas plant.
-- Panorama of American Film Noir: 1941-1953, Raymond Borde and Etienne Chaumeton, translated by Paul Hammond (City Lights Books, 2002, from a 1955 French original).

Reading Jean-Pierre Melville:  An American in Paris, by Ginette Vincendeau (BFI, 2006) recently I read that Le Samourai, 1967,  was strongly influenced by This Gun for Hire, made from a Graham Greene novel in  1942.  Although I am not a particular fan of director Tuttle (except, perhaps, for A Cry in the Night, 1956) I now realize that Tuttle was enough of a craftsman (he directed his first film in 1922) to use intelligently the resources of Paramount Studios to create one of the earliest examples of film noir in This Gun for Hire:  the inspired casting of Veronica Lake and Alan Ladd, the black-and-white chiaroscuro of cinematographer John Seitz (who would do Billy Wilder's Double Indemnity in 1944), the skillful writing of screenwriters Albert Maltz and W.R. Burnett.

The disorienting plot follows the confusing narrative of the Greene novel fairly closely, though the Veronica Lake character changes from a chorus girl to a magician dressed as a dominatrix singing "I've  Got You Hooked" by Loesser and Press and acting as a spy for a U. S. Senator who suspects that Laird Cregar and the chemical company he works for are selling poison gas to the Japanese.  Lake hooks up with misanthropic hit man Alan Ladd, who was paid for a  job by Cregar in marked money and is seeking vengeance while being trailed by the cops -- one of whom is Lake's lover -- who know him by the burned wrist he received from his foster mother.  Ladd rescues Lake from Cregar, who tries to kill her, and Ladd eventually kills Cregar and Cregar's crooked boss and is killed himself by the cops.

In 1942 there was a great deal of anxiety about America's role in WW II,, but the American film industry quickly switched to more optimistic films than This Gun for Hire and the film noir only flourished later, in the era of postwar disillusionment.