Film noir or that stylishly dark crime drama cloaked in smoke
involving shadowy figures lurking about dangerous or threatening looking
settings, may have originated in 1920s German Expressionism but it kicked into
high gear in the mid-1940s when American filmmakers began pushing bleaker, more
realistic stories into cinemas.Though
referred to at the time as melodrama, in hindsight they’re characterized by
their uncompromising bleakness, their aura of danger and their intentional
absences of a moral center.Usually
involving cigarette smoking, gun-toting stray characters navigating hard boiled
underworlds of crime fiction, film noir has evolved over the years into a
variety of forms parodied as well as channeled into new arenas such as neo-noir
or tech-noir.
Which brings us to the 1950 killer couple thriller Gun Crazy, a film that remains the benchmark of movies about criminals on the run in love. Opening on teenager Bart Tare (a very young Russ Tamblyn) who is obsessed with guns, so much so that
he breaks into a hardware store to steal one, landing him in reform
school.Years later after a brief bout
in the Army, Bart (played as an adult by John Dall), Bart and childhood best
friends Dave (Nedrick Young), Clyde (Harry Lewis) and his older sister Ruby (Anabel
Shaw) attend a traveling carnival where they witness skilled sharpshooter Annie
“Laurie” Starr (Peggy Cummins) pulling off incredible feats with her
pistol.Awestruck, Bart challenges her
to a contest and wins, sparking a mutual attraction in one another much to the
chagrin of her piggish boss who fires her.Hitting the road spending what’s left of Bart’s money, Laurie proposes
an ultimatum: join forces in gunpoint robberies or she’ll leave him.Dumb, lovesick and easily impressionable, he
agrees and the two embark on a nationwide crime spree. One of the quintessential examples of the tropes of film
noir is Terror in a Texas Towndirector Joseph H. Lewis’ timeless crime
epic Gun Crazy, a film that seemed to predict the Starkweather love
couple’s murder spree while paving the way for such iconic crime cinema fare as
Bonnie and Clyde (upon which Bart and Laurie were based), Badlands and
even Natural Born Killers.Penned
by then-blacklisted screenwriter Dalton Trumbo and based on a short story in
The Saturday Evening Post by MacKinlay Kantor, this raw and realistic
unglamorous crime saga is an uncompromising study of madness, the power and
thrill of wrongdoing and at heart a down-to-Earth story of two doomed lovers
racing each other to the end of their lifelines taking innocent lives with them
on the way.Most strikingly, it
introduced into the film world one of late-50s noir’s most formidable femme
fatales and serial murderesses to stalk the silver screen. The first aspect signifying Gun Crazy as a brooding
and gradually harrowing noir is its gloomy yet stylized look by legendary To
Kill a Mockingbird cinematographer Russell Harlan.Using light and shadow, focus and closeness
to the actors meticulously from start to finish, Gun Crazy is visually
dynamic with an almost hyperactive sense of blocking and framing.Take for instance the aforementioned contest
on the carnival grounds with the soon-to-be deadly duo’s challenge of lighting
candles above their heads with bullets, a scene that could go any number of
ways but winds up consummating their relationship.There’s an uncomfortable tension in the room
thanks to the camera being placed behind Peggy Cummins’ head as John Dall
points his pistol at her (and us).Then
there’s the use of close-ups that encroach dangerously close to each actors’
faces, letting you see and feel the sweat of their brows dripping down their
cheeks.Immensely, almost intimately
detailed camerawork including but not limited to most of the car scenes being
done without rear projections.
Then there’s eventual Around the World in Eighty Days composer
Victor Young’s dark and foreboding score that forecasts trouble before our troubled
antihero/villain Bart comes onscreen.Aggressive and tense without becoming bombastic save for key moments, the
score strongly exudes the anxieties and psychoses shared by the two main
characters.There’s also just the right
amount of sardonic humor that’s at once knee deep with this serial murdering
couple while also poking jet black fun at the Hell of their making.As police forces start a nationwide manhunt
for the couple, pursuing them relentlessly into rougher rural terrain, the
score becomes all the more desperate with heavy implications things won’t end
well for them. Of course, the ensemble crime drama wouldn’t have the
lasting power without the pitch perfect casting of Peggy Cummins and John
Dall.Tall, lanky and with a face that
could double for Lee Marvin’s stoic mug, Rope actor John Dall manages to
convincingly make Bart into a skillful oversized pushover who is at the mercy
of the wily manipulator Laurie, also played excellently (and intimidatingly) by
Irish actress Peggy Cummins despite being half of her screen partner’s
size.When first introduced, she points
her gun directly into the eye of the camera, effectively at us.Over the course of the film, most of the
bloodletting comes from her cajoling or threatening Bart with either leaving or
perhaps trying to take one of his own sister’s family members hostage.At once the antithesis of and the essential
component to Bart’s existence, their pairing invariably brings things out of
each other they never thought themselves capable of.
Released by United Artists at the height of the film-noir
movement, Gun Crazy at the time was one of the more shocking and
disturbing studies of sociopathy and obsession with the destructive power of the
gun to come out and terrorize moviegoers.
In the years since, the film understandably was canonized by its
induction into the National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as well as
the American Film Institute’s Top 100 Movies.
A movie that ushered in a never-before-seen kind of femme fatale and one
of the earliest examples of the killer couple film that helped ensure films
like Bonnie and Clyde and Badlands would get made, Gun Crazy is
something of a timeless masterpiece that remains startlingly fresh and hasn’t
lost its sharp bite to age. Though the
two actors remained active in film over the years, they never quite reached the
heights of this one which left an indelible imprint onto the American understanding
of what noir-ish crime sagas about happy-go-lucky serial killer couples would or
would not become.
