Themes: Lovers on the Lam, Crime Sprees, Self-Destructive Romance
Main Cast: Peggy Cummins, John Dall, Berry Kroeger, Morris Carnovsky, Anabel Shaw
Release Year: 1949
Country: US
Run Time: 87 minutes
Plot
The definitive Joseph H. Lewis-directed melodrama, Gun Crazy is the "Bonnie and Clyde" story retooled for the disillusioned postwar generation. John Dall plays a timorous, emotionally disturbed World War II veteran who has had a lifelong fixation with guns. He meets a kindred spirit in carnival sharpshooter Peggy Cummins, who is equally disturbed -- but a lot smarter, and hence a lot more dangerous. Beyond their physical attraction to one another, both Dall and Cummins are obsessed with firearms. They embark on a crime spree, with Cummins as the brains and Dall as the trigger man. As sociopathic a duo as are likely to be found in a 1940s film, Dall and Cummins are also perversely fascinating. As they dance their last dance before dying in a hail of police bullets, the audience is half hoping that somehow they'll escape the Inevitable. Some critics have complained that Dall is far too effeminate and Cummins too butch, but Joseph H. Lewis was never known to draw anything in less than broad strokes: recall the climax of Terror in a Texas Town, wherein Sterling Hayden participates in a western showdown armed with a whaler's harpoon. The best and most talked-about scene in Gun Crazy is the bank robbery sequence, shot in "real time" from the back seat of Dall and Cummins' getaway car. Originally slated for Monogram release, Gun Crazy enjoyed a wider exposure when its producers, the enterprising King Brothers, chose United Artists as the distributor. The film was based on a magazine article by MacKinlay Kantor; one of the scenarists was uncredited blacklistee Dalton Trumbo. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide
Review
While often compared to Bonnie and Clyde, which it preceded by nearly 20 years, Gun Crazy is in many ways a more daring and disturbing film; while the leads lack the skill and charisma of Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway, and the picture is sometimes betrayed by its obvious low budget, director Joseph H. Lewis gives his story a subversive sexual economy that's more provocative than that of Arthur Penn's later (and bolder) variation, and his bluntly energetic and inventive visual storytelling helped make Gun Crazy one of the most fabled low-budget crime pictures of the 1940s. The doomed romance between weak-willed sharpshooter Bart Tare (John Dall), who loves guns but lacks the courage to kill, and Annie Laurie Starr (Peggy Cummins), who is the aggressor in the relationship but can't shoot with the same grace and elan as Bart, can be read on several different levels, none of them especially healthy. While the film satisfied the edicts of 1940s film censorship, lust has rarely seemed more vivid than between Bart and Annie; their relationship is based less on love than on pure animal instinct, and Lewis makes it seem both compelling and unwholesome. Within moments of meeting each other, Bart and Annie seem bound for life and on the fast track to damnation, with no repentance possible or requested; Jim Thompson never imagined a couple as doomed and damaged as these two. And Lewis takes visual chances that one would hardly expect from a 1940s B-movie -- especially the justifiably famous robbery sequence, shot in one take from the back seat of a car -- giving the picture an inventive style that makes the material all the more effective. If Gun Crazy's ambitions sometimes outstrip its means, Lewis got enough of his ideas on the screen to make this one of the most fascinating and thought-provoking crime films of its era. ~ Mark Deming, All Movie Guide
Norma - Costume Designer, Joseph H. Lewis - Director, Harry Gerstad - Editor, Victor Young - Composer (Music Score), Sidney B. Cutner - Musical Direction/Supervision, Leo Shuken - Musical Direction/Supervision, Gordon Wiles - Production Designer, Russell Harlan - Cinematographer, Frank King - Producer, Maurice King - Producer, Raymond Boltz - Set Designer, Tom Lambert - Sound/Sound Designer, MacKinlay Kantor - Screenwriter, Millard Kaufman - Screenwriter, Dalton Trumbo - Screenwriter
Bart Tare (John Dall) is an ex-Army man who has a lifelong fixation with guns—they make him feel good inside. The drama opens with Tare, age 14, being grilled by a judge because he had been arrested for breaking and entering and stealing a gun. In flashbacks his friends say that while it's true that Tare loves guns, he would never kill anything. They tell the judge the number of times he's refused to kill animals. Nevertheless the judge sends him to reform school.
The next time we see Tare, he's grown up back and in town. He's also left military service behind. He reunites with his childhood friends and they decide to go to a carnival.
There he meets a kindred spirit in sharpshooter Annie Laurie Starr (Peggy Cummins) and goes to work at the carnival. They are attracted to one another and after upsetting the carnival owner who lusts after Starr, they both get fired. Soon, on Starr's behest, they embark on a crime spree for cash. Subjects of a manhunt, they are tracked by police in the hills Tare enjoyed as a boy.
The screenplay was credited to Kantor and Millard Kaufman; however, Kaufman was a front for Hollywood Ten outcast Dalton Trumbo, who considerably reworked the story into a doomed love affair.
The picture was originally slated for Monogram release, yet the producers, the King Brothers Productions, chose United Artists as the distributor. As such, Gun Crazy enjoyed wider exposure.[1]
In an interview with Danny Peary, director Joseph H. Lewis revealed his instructions to actors John Dall and Peggy Cummins:
I told John, "Your cock's never been so hard," and I told Peggy, "You're a female dog in heat, and you want him. But don't let him have it in a hurry. Keep him waiting." That's exactly how I talked to them and I turned them loose. I didn't have to give them more directions.[2]
The bank heist sequence was shot entirely in one long take in Montrose, California, with no one besides the principal actors and people inside the bank alerted to the operation. This one-take shot included the sequence of driving into town to the bank, distracting and then knocking out a patrolman, and making the get-away. This was done by simulating the interior of a sedan with a stretch Cadillac with room enough to mount the camera and a jockey's saddle for the cameraman on a greased two-by-twelve board in the back. Lewis kept it fresh by having the actors improvise their dialogue.
Reception
Eric Henderson, film critic for Slant Magazine, wrote, "Lewis, through sheer force of will, turns the script's easy ways out ("I told you I'm a bad girl, didn't I?") into the essence of blunt, adolescent sexual flowering. Wild, wam-bam pacing (early heavy petting) eventually matures into the film's most memorable sequence: a one-take robbery sequence taken from the back seat of the getaway car, a stunning tour de force that's Lewis's cinematographic slow fuck."[3]
Critic and author Eddie Muller wrote, "Joseph H. Lewis's direction is propulsive, possessed of a confident, vigorous simplicity that all the frantic editing and visual pyrotechnics of the filmmaking progeny never quite surpassed."[4]
Sam Adams, critic for the Philadelphia City Paper, wrote, "The codes of the time prevented Lewis from being explicit about the extent to which their fast-blooming romance is fueled by their mutual love of weaponry (Arthur Penn would rip off the covers in Bonnie and Clyde, which owes Gun Crazy a substantial debt), but when Cummins' six-gun dangles provocatively as she gasses up their jalopy, it's clear what really fills their collective tank."[5]
The film has a score of 96% on review aggregator site Rotten Tomatoes, based on 27 reviews.[6]
Honors
In 1998, Gun Crazy was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant."
