GUN CRAZY(director: Joseph H. Lewis; screenwriter: MacKinlay Kantor from his story in the "Saturday Evening Post"/Lillard Kaufman is the uncredited Dalton Trumbo-he was blacklisted; cinematographer: Russell Harlan; cast: Peggy Cummins (Annie Laurie Starr), John Dall (Bart Tare), Berry Kroeger (Packett), Morris Carnovsky (Judge Willoughby), Anabel Shaw (Ruby Tare), Harry Lewis (Clyde Boston), Nedrick Young (Dave Allister), Trevor Bardette (Sheriff Clyde Boston), Anne O'Neal (Miss Sifert), Don Beddoe (Car Owner from Chicago), Harry Hayden (Mr. Mallenberg), Mickey Little (Bart Tare age 7), Russ Tamblyn (Bart Tare: age 14), Paul Frison (Clyde Boston: age 14), Dave Bair (Dave Allister: age 14), Robert Osterloh (Hampton Policeman), Stanley Prager (Clown), Virginia Farmer (Miss Wynn, Teacher), 1950)
Reviewed by Dennis Schwartz
Bart Tare (John Dall) has always been obsessed with the love of guns. He was raised by his older sister Ruby (Anabel), who bought him his first BB gun as a child. On a rainy night in the small-town in the southwest he lives in, the 14-year-old Bart (Russ Tamblyn) sees a beautiful gun in a hardware store window and smashes the window with a rock to get it, but he is caught by the sheriff (Trevor) when he stumbles in a puddle. The judge (Carnovsky) sends him to reform school, despite Ruby's plea for mercy, bringing up the point that he was raised without a father figure. He stays for four years there and then he joins the army. Other than that incident, Bart has shown no tendency for violence or breaking the law, he just feels good when he's shooting a gun, something he is an expert in. He feels compelled to always have a gun, as it makes him feel important. But in this expressionist-like opening scene, it is shown that Bart will have little chance of overcoming his obsession. There is even one point in the robbery where he stretches his arms out Christ-like, in a symbolic gesture of what is to come of the naive child as he reaches adulthood.
Returning home for the first-time since he was sent away to reform school, he meets again his childhood buddies, David Allister (Young), who is now a newspaper reporter, and Clyde Boston (Paul), who is now a sheriff, like his father, the one who arrested him. They both thought the army would have been a natural place for him to make a career in, but he tells them he got bored with showing soldiers how to fire a gun and plans to look for work with Remington.
The boys decide to go to a travelling carnival that is in town that night and when an Annie Oakley-type shooter from England, Annie Laurie Starr (Cummins), challenges anyone in the audience to a pistol-shooting contest, Bart accepts the challenge and wins. She talks her boss, a sleazy carnival operator, Packy (Berry) into hiring him, as the two fall in love on first sight. The intimacy that grows between the two infuriates Packy, who has his eyes on Laurie, holding over-her-head the knowledge that she killed someone in a St. Louis robbery, telling her he will go to the police if she doesn't continue to give him sex. When he grapples with her, Bart fires his gun at him and the two are fired. He decides to marry her that night, even though he was warned by a clown (Prager) at the carnival that he doesn't know anything about women-that she's a bad one.
It now becomes a road movie of a crime spree, or a love-on-the run film. Laurie demands the need for action and money, threatening to leave him if he can't live up to her expectations. He has fallen so much in love with her, that even though it isn't in his gentle nature to be a criminal, he goes along with her robbery schemes. They rob their hotel, a liquor store, and a gas station, but she wants more money. For another of their robberies, they carefully come up with a more developed scheme, as she hitches a ride from an older gentleman visiting California from Illinois (Beddoe) who is suggestively coming on to her, while the conversation takes place, she, in a casual manner pulls her pistol out of her purse and steals his Cadillac, using it for their next robbery so the cops can't get their real license plates, as they bound him in their car on the roadside. The robbery takes place in Hampton, where they rob the local bank dressed in their showbiz cowboy outfits and escape when she conks the policeman (Osterloh) who is standing in front of the bank, karate-style on the neck, knocking him out. The getaway scene is dramatically filmed from the backseat of their car. The crimes become very sexually stimulating to them, as she becomes more and more passionate with Bart, even as their escape is taking place.
After another harrowing robbery, their pictures appear in the newspaper, as Packett names them as the wanted criminals sought, even mentioning the killing she did in St. Louis, and their names go over the wire service, so that his hometown of Cashville is now aware of his crime spree. After spending some time on-the-run, they plan one more big robbery and have hopes of getting enough money from that one to retire from crime (at least he feels that way). The both get jobs in an Armour meat-packing plant in New Mexico and rob the payroll office, but this time the office manager, Miss Sifert (O'Neal), rings the burglar alarm in the middle of the robbery and Laurie plugs her. In their getaway, it also becomes necessary for her to shoot a company guard who is in their way. She tells Bart, that when she gets scared she uses her gun to kill. Bart comments: "Two people dead, just so we can live without working!"
The two make plans to split-up for a few months and then get together again, but they can't go their separate ways, having fallen too passionately in love with each other. In town, they are staying in a California hotel near the ocean and have made arrangements by bribing some officials to get across the border into Mexico. Bart hopes to use the money to buy a ranch in Mexico and maybe raise a family there. Celebrating their changing luck by going on some amusement rides and then dancing in the fairgrounds, they notice some federal agents have spotted the marked money from the robbery they were using and assume they are waiting for them back in the hotel, where they kept the stolen loot. They are now broke and on-the-run again, as they flee town by carjacking a cab and then riding the rails out of town.
With no place else to run to, they return to his small-town and force their way into Ruby's place. She has a few children and is not pleased to see them. The neighbors notice she has her blinds down and they inform Clyde about it, who brings Dave along with him to Ruby's place, suspecting he is there and that they can talk him into peacefully surrendering. The two desperadoes have no intention of surrendering, and after locking Ruby in the garage, they try to escape by going up a mountain road. When trapped overnight in a swamp, chased by dogs and a police posse, Dave and Clyde find them in the old hiding spot they used as youths. When Laurie tries to kill them, Bart shoots her, the only killing he does, and is shot in return by the sheriff, who mistakingly thinks he was shooting at them. The swamp was used because this low-budget film couldn't afford the money to pay extras and the swamp scene would require only a limited cast.
As film noir, this hard-boiled story is much superior to the more popular and more critically acclaimed "Bonnie and Clyde," which covered the same territory story-wise: amour fou- the running away together by lovers. Both films were based on the real lives of the infamous criminal couple. This fast-action film, with its typically notorious femme fatale depicted, is subversive to the nth degree. It celebrates the couple's disregard for the law and their insatiable appetite for their own desires, which causes them to disregard middle-class values, as they act with a sense of bold impropriety. This is in line with what The Nation's former iconoclastic film critic, Manny Farber, called many films such as this one, that were now accepted by the surrealists and the new brand of intellectual youths, revolting against the middlebrow critics who called this merely a B- "pulp" film. He complimented films of this kind by endearingly calling them, "perceptive trash." Whatever weakness the story had as it waivered between art and entertainment, and even if it was acted by not the most accomplished of actors, yet there was a raw innocence about it creating a special kind of appeal to those who could feel its lively pulse beating to their resentment of the establishment. It should be remembered that this film came out at a time before there was rock & roll, a civil rights demonstration, and a Vietnam War protest movement, that even if the film appears dated in certain spots when presently viewed, it still retains its revolutionary spirit of youth being forced to find their own identity in the world, as they profoundly and uninhibitedly search for love.
REVIEWED ON 1/20/2000 GRADE: A
Dennis Schwartz: " Ozus' World Movie Reviews "
http://www.sover.net/~ozus
ozus@sover.net
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