A Gun in His Hand is a 1945 short film directed by Joseph Losey.
It's part of MGM's "Crime Does Not Pay" series of short films that ran in the 1930s and 1940s. In this one Inspector Dana is leading newbie police academy recruits through a police museum. He points out one particular gun, and tells its story. It seems the gun belonged to Officer Dennis Nordell, a recruit who passed through the academy just like them. Nordell finished top of his class, donned his blue uniform, and put on his badge. The only problem is, Officer Nordell is a criminal, who joined the police force specifically to carry out a series of warehouse robberies.
Tropes:
- Bait-and-Switch: Nordell is called into Inspector Dana's office. He fears the worst, and he's obviously nervous when Dana says "I've been watching you, and the way it looks you won't be needing a uniform anymore." With his next breath Dana promotes Nordell to detective! Subverted in the end when it turns out that it was all a trick to catch Nordell.
- Chekhov's Gun: How Nordell uses wax to cast keys to break into warehouses. When Inspector Dana has all service revolvers confiscated for ballistics tests, Nordell is smug, because he didn't use his service revolver to kill Officer McGuinnes...but his service revolver has traces of the wax that he's been handing to make keys, and that's how they catch him.
- Detective Mole: Officer Nordell, who joins the police force so he can use his insider knowledge of the cops to commit crimes—beating Infernal Affairs to the punch by 57 years!
- Exposition Diagram: Nordell draws out a map to explain to his partners in crime the plan to rob the warehouse.
- Framing Device: Inspector Dana, giving the recruits a tour of the police museum and telling the story of one particular gun.
- Frame-Up: Nordell decides to frame a hoodlum. He obtains the hoodlum's prints from the files, and painstakingly creates rubber stamps that he uses to fake the prints on the gun. Too bad the hoodlum in question lost a couple fingers in jail.
- Hired to Hunt Yourself: Officer Nordell is promoted to plainclothes detective and assigned to investigate the warehouse robberies that he himself is committing. Subverted in the end when it turns out to have been a ruse by Inspector Dana, who already knew Nordell was the bad guy.
- Idiot Ball: If you are framing a guy for murder, and you are going to the trouble to place his fingerprints on a gun, make sure he still has all ten fingers.
- Narrator: The bulk of the story takes place within the Framing Device, with Inspector Dana narrating the plot to the offscreen police cadets.
- Officer O'Hara: Officer McGuinnes, the beat cop that Nordell murders after McGuinnes catches him in the act, speaks with an Irish brogue.
- Spinning Paper: A series of newspaper headlines pop up recounting the career of Nordell and his gang.
- Where the Hell Is Springfield?: A painfully stilted line in which Inspector Dana recounts the Nordell investigation as "A case which took place in our own locale, right here in the Midwest."
