While Gun Crazy (originally titled Deadly is the Woman) conforms to certain film noir conventions like the bleak ending and crime as its subject matter, it’s the film’s subversive attitude towards violence, lust, love, and sex – all combined with Joseph H. Lewis’s innovative directing style – that qualify it as landmark in film and an outright B-movie masterpiece of style and substance. Bart (John Dall, eerily resembling an early James Stewart) returns home after spending his adolescent years in reform school as punishment for his obsession with guns, but quickly meets, and is instantly smitten with, the beautiful Annie Laurie Starr (a wonderful Peggy Cummins) at a traveling carnival show where she is revealed to be a gun enthusiasts herself. It is from here that Lewis and screenwriters MacKinlay Kantor and Dalton Trumbo (working from MacKinlay’s short story) begin layering a seemingly conventional story of criminals-on-the-run into a fascinating cautionary tale of the connection between violence and sex. After taking a job alongside Annie in the carnival troupe, Bart quickly begins to feel Annie’s influence (usually in sexually suggestive language fitting a true Femme Fatale) to leave the show to pursue something bigger and grander. Annie’s declaration to her boss that he’s a “two-bit guy” and that she wants a man with guts (“I want action!”), reveals her restless spirit and dangerous ambitions. Leaving together, Bart and Annie begin a spree of bank robberies and hold-ups in every town they pass through, both for money and, for Annie, the sheer thrill of the act itself. Even after Bart’s countless requests to stop their destructive life and settle down, Annie’s proclamations of love and sexuality keep their lives spiraling to its inevitable violent conclusion. The techniques Lewis employs in bringing the story to life are a far cry from standard noir films made during the time. Instead relying solely on the techniques of German Expressionism and the play between light and shadow, Gun Crazy is filled with inventive camera work and framing, all subconsciously hinting that both characters are not normal, that they exist in a world of their own and isolated from regular society. John Dall is usually shot off-center, framed in front of windows like a criminal behind bars. There is also a brilliant sequence during a bank robbery that is pulled off in one take from the back of the getaway car, heightening the suspense and implicating the viewer in the crime. The ideas Lewis and the screenwriters play with – that Annie and Bart must stop their criminal behavior and conform to 1950’s domestic life – is revealed to be nothing more than a fallacy, not something that their nature will allow; they can’t deny that they are criminals at heart and that their destructive behavior is indeed liberating – a notion that Gun Crazy masterfully conveys. As a side note, according to imdb.com, this film is banned in Sweden!
Richard Saad
© Cinephile Magazine, 2006