THE NEEDLE'S EYE AND THE DAMAGE DONE: In 2008, Walter Olson of Overlawyered recommended This Gun for Hire. So now you know how long it takes something to reach the top of my Netflix queue! Here are a few thoughts on this terrific movie.

First, Veronica Lake is extraordinary. Her sad, forgiving eyes and husky, hopeful, low-rent voice might be even more startling here than they were in Sullivan's Travels. She's a noir woman who is neither brassy nor slinky, with more future than past and more wisdom than sense.

Alan Ladd is also really good here. He gets all the sentiment of the show (based on a Graham Greene novel, which I suppose explains the brief suicidal-tendencies scene) but he makes a difficult part work about as well as it could.

The direction is classic noir, opening with Ladd, as killer-for-hire Raven, sweaty and off-kilter in his flophouse bed. We get venetian blinds, centered framing when the major villain is finally cornered, candles in a thunderstorm and searchlights raking a railyard, menacing opulence and magic tricks. This is a hugely engaging and entertaining movie.

Its characterizations also reminded me, unexpectedly, of Jamaica Inn, which I recently rewatched as part of AFI's Hitchcock retrospective. Both movies feature a smart, basically "lawful good," resourceful young woman whose sympathies are torn between a lawman and an underclass killer. In both movies compassion, guilt, and repentance are the provinces of those without much money; the rich are irredeemably cruel. I think This Gun for Hire glosses over its killer's opening violence toward a housemaid, whereas Jamaica Inn doesn't prettify the head wrecker's cruelty to his wife, but overall their characters and situations are surprisingly similar. In both movies, power corrupts--the power of the gun, but even more deeply, the power of money.

BUT SHE'S TOO ROUGH AND I'M TOO DELICATE: A reader writes, after my Catholic and Feminist review:

I share your disappointment that the book didn't tackle the real fascination of "Catholic and/or/but feminist," which is the dynamic of submission in feminism: what kinds are privileged (sorry, English major), who says so, why, etc.

Take Morrissey. One of the weirdnesses of his persona is that he is avowedly feminist, and yet he totally possesses, in Laura Mulvey's eternal phrase, "to-be-looked-at-ness." Just as much as any woman in von Sternberg or Hitchcock, he is completely constructed as an image to be consumed by the audience. He chooses to position himself as powerless and for-your-pleasure (or, according to St. Morrissey, as a Northern Woman). And while I've read about why he might like Factory girls or Northern Women as a viewer, has anyone really accounted for why he would choose aesthetic submission for himself?

Of course, I'm not trying to suggest a real equivalence. Aesthetic submission can be worn lightly because it's a pose, and authenticity is the enemy (or irritant) of art. Religious submission is another matter entirely. But in the sense that the aesthetically submissive must choose that for themselves, maybe there is something of a model there for a submission that does not become dominating and coercive and violent, as feminists fear. Or maybe it does, and Moz and Grace Kelly really are just so much siren song luring us into degradation. (Morrissey might like that.)

My readers: so much fun!