1950 Directed by Joseph H. Lewis
Bart Tare is an ex-Army man who has a lifelong fixation with guns, he meets a kindred spirit in sharpshooter Annie Starr and goes to work at a carnival. 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.
Peggy Cummins John Dall Berry Kroeger Morris Carnovsky Anabel Shaw Harry Lewis Nedrick Young Trevor Bardette Russ Tamblyn Anne O'Neal Virginia Farmer Stanley Prager Harry Hayden Mickey Little Paul Frison David Bair Frances Irvin Robert Osterloh Shimen Ruskin Alex Ball Tony Barr Don Beddoe Joseph Crehan Eddie Dunn Dick Elliott Ross Elliott Franklyn Farnum Pat Gleason James Gonzalez Show All…
Deadly Is the Female, Без ума от оружия, De Man die Geen Killer Wilde Zijn
Crime, drugs and gangsters Thrillers and murder mysteries Westerns robbery, criminal, crime, heist or cops film noir, femme fatale, 1940s, thriller or intriguing western, outlaw, cowboy, shootout or gunfight gangster, crime, criminal, violence or gritty cops, murder, thriller, detective or crime Show All…
95
Gun Crazy is a horned-up, pulpy, razor-sharp Film Noir, and a clear influence on basically every 'couple falls in love and commits crime' film going forward, not to mention how distinct it is as a precursor for the French new-wave. This movie has it all: a long-take bank robbery scene from the perspective of the backseat of a car, flirting via dangerous carnival games, romantic longing, and the thrill of a chase as an extended euphemism for fucking. It's pure electricity, all the time. Joseph H. Lewis directs Gun Crazy to within an inch of its life, and master DP Russell Harlan is there to make every image and movement a memorable one. And anchoring it all is the couple of John Dall and Peggy Cummins, who both radiate a life-force meant for this movie. This is up there with Detour and Out of the Past as my personal favorite Film-Noir - packed with sensual energy and wicked ideas.
"How could anyone get hurt if we don't hurt them?"
I don't know what the American conversation about gun control sounded like, or if it even existed, in 1950, but I do know that no simple liberal partisan would ever make a movie this perverted and erotically charged - it's hard to make a political point when your characters are this internally twisted. Nevertheless it makes a fascinating study of two different relationships with firearms, she's the psycho you read about, who'd force-feed you bullets until you choked to death if she couldn't find a gun, while he's the socially awkward gun enthusiast who puts up with and enables her violence because on some sick level it turns him on. Each person thinks they can keep the other under control, but only one of them is right.
Until early last year, I was really into all things romance. Romantic comedies, Bollywood, young adult romances, the whole lot. But then I was exposed to brilliant films and realized for the first time that stories centered around romance just don't make for very compelling cinema. When the characters only care about getting together and staying together and continually spout cheesy dialogue, they almost always come off as irredeemably stupid.
I'm still a sucker for Austen novels and love songs, and always going to be an idealist about the forever kind of love. I just don't think that any film that treats love as the single most important thing in a person's life is going to appeal to me any…
"From the Saturday Evening Post story"
Passes the Bechdel Test. Meaning, Peggy Cummins shoots a cop named Bechdel in the face.
"We go together, Annie. I don't know why. Maybe like guns and ammunition go together."
About as good as a pulpy noir gets with a dynamite performance by Peggy Cummins. Some really innovative camera work. That 4 minute, uninterrupted take of a bank heist, all from inside the getaway car was so exciting & suspenseful.
B-movies were the warm-up act. They served their function by titillating and stimulating audiences in preparing for the main attraction. Celluloid fodder through which one could settle in, simmer down, and switch off. Pulp and camp were the worlds in which the B-pictures revelled. Their stories simple enough to intuit whenever you might enter the theatre. Characters so broad and obtuse that their intentions could be seen as easily on their faces as through their dialogue which may be drowned out by the roar of an impatient audience yet satiated.
Nonetheless, there is a consummate tactility to the filmmaking behind B-movies. A need for economical work spurred ingenuity. Storytelling became lean without an ounce of fat. Camerawork become careful and canny packing every detail necessary into a single sweep of the camera. Guy Crazy is a searing example of a B-movie. I dare anyone not to be entertained from start to finish. Pulp fiction at its finest. Potent, evergreen cinema.
A fairly fun Bonnie and Clyde esque story!
Peggy Cummins carries this as John Dall is sort of an odd leading man. I never quite understood his appeal, but I love her as his feisty counterpart.
Not to spoil anything but the Hays code at the time never let criminals get away without paying for their actions. Because of this, I tend to watch these kinds of movies for their first two acts and it always ends up bothering me that they can never succeed in the end.
On location driving was also pretty radical and fun. There's a great long take of a robbery shot from the backseat of a car, with Peggy Cummins actually driving that took me by surprise. It's an interesting film!
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Will be logging a bunch of Sundance movies today!! Stay tuned
Incredibly audacious on every level for a noir of such limited means. 70 years later, Peggy Cummins' introduction still feels like it shouldn't be legal.
Woof. Is it hot in here or is it just me? Gun Crazy sees The Noir at its most erotic. Where attraction spells magnetic, guns equal innuendo and the spray of bullets is enough to get you red under the collar. B-Noir sharpshooter Joseph H. Lewis (My Name is Julia Ross, The Big Combo) fires on all cylinders to deliver a strikingly shot portrait of repulsion of violence; emerging as quite possibly the only B-Noir to ever give me flashbacks to Tarkovsky. And in bursts, it’s every bit as poetic. John Dahl's Bart has an almost-familial connection to his rifles yet refuses to kill. Peggy Cummins’ Annie has an obsession closer to that of fetish. Together thrust into a quicksand…
The alternate title Deadly Is the Female sums up this film pretty well. A seductive woman pulls a small town boy back down the road of trouble after reform school and the military put him on the straight and narrow. To be fair, we don't get a lot of scenes with "good" Bart--as soon as he meets Laurie, he's falling off the cliff, even if he hasn't hit bottom yet. It's an old trope, the femme fatale, though this film uses it a little more directly, and despite its inherent sexism that dates all the way back to Eve, there's a certain amount of appeal to it for me anyway. Mostly, what I like about it, is that as far…
Gun Crazy is a poetic B-movie, filled with powerful images. The violence is a substitute for the erotic, as the central relationship becomes physical without contact. At times, Gun Crazy is ridiculous, but it's also beautiful. This is a story of a good man gone bad, but every step of that transition is pained and contradictory. Gun Crazy isn't polished, far from it, but once the central relationship and subsequent crime spree starts, it is a mesmerising low budget masterwork of fatalism.
