The Tough Guys: Alan Ladd

Alan Ladd in the title role of 1953's great western, Shane, saying goodbye to Brandon deWilde's Joey

Alan Ladd is not a name mentioned much anymore, but he has always intrigued me. No star is exactly who they are on screen: Clark Gable wasn't born the he-man womanizer he portrayed; he adapted that persona from director Victor Fleming. Bogart wasn't the wisecracking private eye/noir hero; he was the son of an affluent Upper East Side New York City family. Even Robert Mitchum, whose offscreen persona seemed to match his onscreen one more closely than any other actor, was only partly what he played on screen. While Mitch could also mix it up with the best of them, he was also a very sensitive, sweet guy who sang and wrote poetry.

For most film fans, the classic western Shane is just about the only time Alan Ladd's name is mentioned out loud without snickers or in an off-handed way. Ladd's reputation has not worn well. Even his films noir, which are more than respectable, don't generate the same heat as Robert Mitchum's or even Dick Powell's, though Ladd was a bigger star when Mitchell and Powell were his contemporaries.
 

The breakthrough: Ladd plays Graham Greene's killer, Raven, in 1942's This Gun For Hire.

Alan Ladd was born in Hot Springs, Arkansas, on September 3, 1913. His father died when he was only four, and after his mother's remarriage, his family settled in North Hollywood, California. Ladd graduated high school in 1934 and settled into a seemingly normal life, starting a business and marrying his high school sweetheart in 1936. Around this time, however, his mother, who was increasingly emotionally unstable, swallowed ant poison after a fight with her son and died. Her suicide was a shock from which Ladd never completely recovered.

Ladd and his wife had a son in 1937 (Alan Ladd, Jr., established himself as an agent and eventually become production head at 20th Century-Fox. It was "Laddie," as his friends called him, who gave the greenlight to George Lucas's Star Wars.), but "normal" was short-lived when Ladd left his business and his wife behind to pursue an acting career. His rich, distinctive baritone voice was well-suited to the radio, and he found work in that medium as well as dozens of small film roles, including a minor part in Orson Welles's Citizen Kane. Signing with agent Sue Carol in the late 30s helped him enormously, as she promoted him vigorously. Alan and Sue married in March 1942.

A great and underrated screen team: Ladd and Veronica Lake in This Gun For Hire.The duo appeared together in four films.

Sue's aggressive promotion paid off  when Ladd landed the role of Raven, a hired killer, in Paramount Pictures adaptation of Graham Greene's crime novel, A Gun For Sale. In the film, renamed This Gun For Hire, Ladd - billed fourth - stole the show. Also impressive was Veronica Lake as the nightclub entertainer Ellen Graham. Ladd and Lake continued to be paired together in such 40s noir thrillers The Glass Key, The Blue Dahlia, and Saigon. Veronica Lake was small - a good physical match for Ladd who only stood about five-foot-seven.

The height thing was a real problem for Ladd. The characters he played were the rough-and-tumble kind who were meant to be physically impressive. Ladd was supposed to have a Gary Cooper or John Wayne toughness, not be an Elisha Cook little guy who only thinks he is tough. Of course, not all tough guys are tall - Bogart's a good example - but I have never heard of stories about his leading ladies having to stand in ditches to appear shorter than he was or of Bogie having to stand on a crate to look taller. It's these kinds of stories about Alan Ladd's height, however, that are legendary.

With wife, manager, and agent, Sue Carol

The golden period of Alan Ladd's film career was 1942 to 1953. Noir-style thrillers were big box office in post-war America, and Ladd made a good number of them. He also appeared in the sea epic Two Years Before the Mast in 1946, the weepie And Now Tomorrow opposite Loretta Young in 1944, and the first sound version (after the 1926 silent) of The Great Gatsby in 1949. (The public domain copy of Gatsby that had been available on YouTube has disappeared, which may be a blessing, considering its awful picture quality made the movie nearly unwatchable.) Ladd also made a few successful westerns among which the best was 1953's Shane. 

Ladd at his best as the iconic gunslinger Shane, 1953

Directed by the great George (Gunga Din, Woman of the Year, A Place in the Sun) Stevens, Shane is an intentionally mythic western about a lonely gunslinger who passes through a farmer's homestead only to stay and help the farmer and his family fight to keep his land from an evil cattle baron. The film received six Oscar nominations, including Best Picture (a rare thing for a western in those days) and won the award for it's still impressive cinematography (the jolting sound and the pinpoint editing were unjustly overlooked). In the finest work of his career, Ladd was overlooked by the Academy.

Legend persists that Paramount refused to lend any of its promotional muscle to Ladd in his bid for Oscar gold. Ladd had just left the studio that was his professional home for nearly a dozen years to start his own company, so Paramount made the big Oscar push for William Holden in Stalag 17.  Ladd was left odd man out, which is too bad because his portrait of a weary gunslinger who hopes to put his past behind him is touching in its tender toughness. Shane's relationship with the farmer's son, Joey, is the crux of the film; if it weren't as effective, the audience wouldn't get misty-eyed (as I do) in the film's final scene when Shane tells Joey he has to move on, that a man has to be what he is. For Shane, who has tried to change and could not, that means going back to his wandering, gunfighting ways until the day comes when he meets someone who is a faster draw than he is. Ladd's Shane may be the most touching character in any western.

Life lessons: Saying goodbye to Joey in Shane
(If you don't get choked up at the end of this movie, it's time to have your pulse checked.)

Ladd was able to ride the wave of Shane's popularity for a few years; in 1953, he was number 4 and in 1954, number 6 in the Annual Exhibitor's Top Ten Box Office Stars. Unfortunately, Ladd made a string of poor films in England right after Shane wrapped. Dismal efforts like Paratrooper, Hell Below Zero, and The Black Knight were filmed in quick succession in 1953 and 1954. By the time Ladd was back in America and made slightly - though just barely - better films, it was too little too late.

His last love: Ladd and June Allyson in 1955's The McConnell Story

By the mid-50's the effects of the drinking problem Ladd had developed began to show on his face. A puffiness and tired, downcast look took hold. His marriage to Sue Carol, which had always seemed one of Hollywood's most solid, took a hit in 1955 when Ladd appeared to fall in love with June Allyson while filming The McConnell Story. He briefly moved out of the Holmby Hills home he shared with his wife, though the two soon patched things up. Still, he returned home without  his ambition or the drive to improve the success of his film roles. Ladd began drinking more than ever.

1956 should have brought good news: Ladd was up for the part of Jett Rink in George Stevens new film, Giant. The big production would have been the hit he desperately needed, but Sue, who still managed his career, thought the part too small, and they passed on it. . . . Giant went on to be a terrific movie, earning several Oscar nominations, including one for James Dean, the actor who did take the Jett Rink role, and making a boat-load of money. Instead, Alan Ladd made Hell on Frisco Bay with Edward G. Robinson, a throwback to the tough guy films Ladd did so well in the 1940s, albeit this time in color and filmed in CinemaScope. While Hell on Frisco Bay was not a bad film - was even a modest hit - at this point Ladd needed more. He thought he had found the hit he'd been looking for with the splashy widescreen, technicolor film Boy on a Dolphin, replacing Robert Mitchum who had dropped out of the production. The film was shot on location in Greece, but the real attraction for moviegoers was Italian bombshell Sophia Loren making her English language debut.

Step lightly, Mr. Ladd. Alan and Sophia in Greece for 1957's Boy on a Dolphin. Notice Loren on a step below Ladd and still matching him in height.

Sophia Loren had both a physical and acting presence that left Ladd intimidated. Their height was approximately the same - when Loren was on a step below Ladd. As writers Marilyn Henry and Ron DeSourdis point out in their book The Films of Alan Ladd, Ladd was paid about $290,000 to appear in the film as essentially box office insurance. His "complex about his height had intensified over the years with the passage of time and the gradual dwindling box offices receipts." On the plus side, the film was a solid box office performer - the best he'd had in some time. The downside was that the public really turned out for Sophia Loren, and Alan Ladd knew it.

For Ladd, the days of the 1950s turned into wasted weeks, months, and years, though the decade ended in a flurry of film roles. He made seven movies between 1958 and 1960, though none were especially noteworthy. The 1958 western The Badlanders was based on the 1950 John Huston heist film The Asphalt Jungle, and is an interesting movie that is worth a look. By 1961, Ladd found himself working in Italy in a true B-movie - a sword and sandals epic called Duel of Champions. When Ladd found out he wasn't being paid for this low budget opus, he walked off the picture. He returned and finished the film, yet it was hardly worth the effort. The film had a quiet New York opening before it was forgotten. He appeared in a solid crime film, 13 West Street, opposite Rod Steiger in 1962. While it was the kind of film he had made his name on in the early 40s, the time had passed when a Ladd film would have solid results on his name alone.

A tired looking Alan Ladd in the early 1960s

After the Duel of Champions debacle, Ladd spent time at his various properties (wife Sue was a wise and shrewd financial manager in spite of the questionable decisions she made regarding her husband-talent's film roles). Ladd took to wandering from one property or another - to the hardware store in Palm Springs for company and to his nearby house for privacy. In November 1962, he was found in a pool of blood with a bullet lodged near his heart. He recovered, and the incident was ruled an accident (explanations/excuses included cleaning a gun when it went off as well as hearing a prowler and tripping in the dark, causing the gun to go off), yet friends and family who knew of Ladd's unhappiness weren't fooled. Rumors of attempted suicide flew around Hollywood.

After a period of inactivity, Ladd signed on for the adaptation of the sensational Harold Robbins novel, The Carpetbaggers, though not as a lead. The lead role of Jonas Cord was played by up-and-comer George Peppard. Ladd took second billing and played the role of Nevada Smith. It's hard not to wonder if Ladd hoped for The Carpetbaggers to bolster his career like Giant might have done. The Carpetbaggers went on to make oodles of money for Paramount when released in April 1964, but it is a guilty pleasure rather than the highly regarded classic Giant became. That didn't matter much, though; by the spring of 1964 Alan Ladd would be dead.

Ladd with one of the real stars of The Carpetbaggers, the very sexy Carroll Baker

The Carpetbaggers is one of those bad movies movie lovers wallow in. Like The Oscar, one of the other great guilty pleasures of the 1960s, the film is an "inside" look at Hollywood and how the agents, producers, sex symbols, and studios really operate (apparently by thoroughly chewing the scenery). Supposedly a spin on Howard Hughes, the film became the number one box office attraction of the year, grossing a boffo $25 million. In an all-star cast, attention was lavished on George Peppard and, especially, Carroll Baker, who would briefly become one of cinema's reigning sex symbols, rather than second lead Alan Ladd. Ladd's notices were respectful, with some reviewers suggesting a successful career as a character actor might have been his for the asking if he'd still been around.

One more picture of Ladd with stardom just around the corner in 1942

On January 29, 1964, Sue Ladd got a call from the police informing her that her husband was dead from a combination of drink and sedatives. Cerebral edema was official cause of death. Ladd was only 51 years old. Suicide? Perhaps, though no one knows for sure. The one thing many agree on is that Alan Ladd did not seem happy or content in the last five or six years of his life. A kind of melancholy had taken over. People's lives are messy, and Ladd's past was particularly painful. Growing up practically fatherless, his mother's suicide, the neglect of his oldest son, the June Allyson affair, and the diminished career had left him with more than his share of regret and what-might-have-been's. In the end, it may all have been too much for the sensitive tough guy who could no longer put up a brave front. Unlike Shane, the iconic hero he personified so well, Alan Ladd just could not continue as the man who had to be what he was.