Gun Crazy
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| Gun Crazy | |
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| Directed by | Joseph H. Lewis |
| Produced by | Frank King Maurice King |
| Written by | MacKinlay Kantor (story, screenplay) Dalton Trumbo (screenplay, as Millard Kaufman) |
| Starring | Peggy Cummins John Dall |
| Music by | Victor Young |
| Cinematography | Russell Harlan |
| Editing by | Harry Gerstad |
| Distributed by | United Artists |
| Release date(s) | January 26, 1950 (U.S. release) August 24, 1950 (re-release |
| Running time | 86 min. |
| Language | English |
| IMDb profile | |
Gun Crazy is a 1949 film noir spun from a short story written by MacKinlay Kantor and published in 1940 in The Saturday Evening Post. The screenplay was credited to Kantor and one Millard Kaufman; however, Kaufman was a front for Hollywood Ten outcast Dalton Trumbo, who considerably reworked the story into a doomed love affair.
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[edit] Plot
A wild young couple with a love of guns (he's an army sharpshooting veteran, she's a trick shooter in a carnival show) and a knack for violence go on a crime spree.
In an interview with Danny Peary (Cult Movies, New York: Delacorte Press, 1981), director Joseph H. Lewis revealed his instructions to actors John Dall (Bart Tare) and Peggy Cummins (Annie Laurie Starr):
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.
The bank heist sequence was shot entirely in one long take on city streets, with no one besides the principal actors and people inside the bank aware that a movie was being filmed. 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 station-wagon by a Cadillac hearse with room enough for a documentary camera and its operator in the back. Lewis kept it fresh by having the actors improvise their dialogue.
[edit] Critical reaction
Writing in The New York Times (August 25, 1950), Howard Thompson said "this spurious concoction is basically on a par with the most humdrum pulp fiction," but praised the dialogue, the photography, and the "colorful tempo."
The film today is considered a quintessential film noir. Critic Leonard Maltin calls it "a knockout of a sleeper" and gives it 3½ stars (out of 4). Eddie Muller, writing in his book Dark City, praised the film's pace and noted its influence:
"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. Bonnie and Clyde may have been a better movie than Gun Crazy, but nothing in it matched the breathtaking four-minute single take in which Cummins and Dall rob a small-town bank."
In 1998, Gun Crazy was selected for preservation by the United States National Film Registration Board.
[edit] External links
[edit] References
- On the Lam: Narratives of Flight in J. Edgar Hoover's America, by William Beverly (2003)
- Muller, Eddie, Dark City: The Lost World of Film Noir
