Gun Crazy @75: "All you need to make a movie is a girl and a gun."

by Cláudio Alves

A boy loves guns, he's obsessed with them, thrilled by them, given purpose by their dangerous nature. He grows up, and the love persists. One day, the boy finds a girl who shares the same fascination. A match made in hell, they come to love each other as much as they're besotted by the firearms, falling headfirst into a romance bound to become a tragedy. Even as they embark on a life of crime, the boy refuses to kill while the girl is all too eager. It doesn't end well, but it's a horny good time while it lasts. Guns and sex, sex and death, death as love, and love is the American way – and you know what? That's cinema, baby. That's also Joseph H. Lewis' Gun Crazy, also known as Deadly Is the Female, a B-movie masterpiece that often feels like the urtext of film noir, chronologically displaced as it might be.

Today, it celebrated its 75th anniversary – there are disputes over Gun Crazy's first release, but we're going with the January 20th, 1950 date – so let's explore what makes this violent tale such vital, essential cinema…

Gun Crazy starts in prologue, a look at Barton "Bart" Tare's troubled youth. Not troubled in the ways of abuse or deprivation, but troubled nonetheless. We meet him on a dark stormy night, shadows deep china ink slashed by silver rain. The thing has barely started, and Joseph H. Lewis is already proving to be a supreme stylist in the moving image. Of course, DP Russell Harlan deserves equal praise for those images and so does Russ Tamblyn for that matter. A decade or so before he was Riff in West Side Story and a long time before he played Twin Peaks' local psychiatrist, the actor communicates Bart's obsession with startling clarity.

For a movie made during the heights of the Hays Code's tyranny over Hollywood, Gun Crazy is remarkably sexual and that quality first emerges in the glint in Tamblyn's eyes. An adolescent he may be, but there's a disturbing compulsion driving him to break a hardware store's window to steal a pistol. Between that glint and the vaguely obscene way the camera contemplated the phallic barrels, we're off to one hell of a start. But then come the authorities, and a protracted sequence where Bart's beloved sister and friends' appeal to a judge on the young man's behalf. After all, for as much as he venerates the gun, he doesn't enjoy killing. 

Indeed, after discovering, at a young age, what happens when you fire at a living thing, he's sworn to himself never to kill again. And so, he's sent to a reform school and the film jumps to his return from military service, that state-approved context where being an expert on killing machines is virtuous rather than sinful. He's now played by John Dall – best known as one of the killers in Hitchcock's Rope – who's nothing short of perfect. Part of it comes from the grubby ordinariness of his face, his gait, the way he carries himself like an unremarkable man who's not too distant from an idiot teenage boy with more jumping hormones than wits about him.

That brainless lust certainly comes to the forefront when, upon being dragged to a carnival show by a couple of old pals, Bart first lays eyes on sharpshooter Annie "Laurie" Starr. The spark of infatuation is as instant as it is powerful. What's more, it's mutual. Take a look at how Peggy Cummins eyes her co-star, sizing him up like a hungry cat who's just spotted a particularly fat canary. She's just as good as Dahl, if not better, dialing up the picture's essential horniness to eleven as the two engage in a little shooting contest. Call it what you want – a circus performance, a marksman smackdown – but this is clearly gunplay as foreplay. 

Lewis' staging ups the ante at every turn, prioritizing the mortal tension as an erotic experience, marrying his stars' remarkable performances to a formal strategy that heightens gun violence to the stuff of movie magic. His use of deep focus is brilliant at colliding planes of action across space, underlining a sense of immediacy in every scene. Moreover, there's such beauty here, even before snow falls like sparkling diamonds over the night sky, and the two shooters turned criminals dream of a happy ending they'll never get. It's perverse and wrong, but incredibly engaging nonetheless, pulling the audience into the pair's depravity.

However, that isn't the only register or reading since the characters' bond goes beyond their attachment to guns. Gun Crazy is quintessential pulp and a love story for the ages at the same time, handling that wintery interlude with as much earnestness as it depicts a bank robbery. For Bart and Laurie, the thrills of the chase are as stirring as imagining a life together. That said, one of those scenes exists contained within the confines of a nice little studio simulacrum. The other was shot on location, a cost-cutting measure that gives the movie a rare sense of authenticity for a post-war piece of popular entertainment with no outsized ambition, no irony, no pretension.

I especially love the scenes in cars, often shot with the camera fixed to the backseats putting us in the place of an imaginary accomplice, raging across the asphalt, the wind sweeping through Cummins' hair and the character's panic almost palpable. Lick the air and you'll certainly taste fear. What a marvel of kinetic cinema, visceral like few films of that era could afford to be – such is the freedom of making B-pictures. Those qualities transcend the camerawork, the realistic sound in conflict with the sentimental score, the textual characterization of the two anti-heroes. Often, they show up in small behavioral details, lone gestures, or glimpses of raw humanity that complicate the tale. 

As much as I love Dahl, most of those glimpses come from Cummins, whose performance almost feels like an active deconstruction of the femme fatale clichés the movie's alternate title celebrates. Her Laurie might be reckless and prone to violence, but she's not evil. Instead, we often get flashes of fear, the instinctual terror of a cornered animal who attacks because they don't see any other way out. Then there's the way she regards Dahl, enchanted while melancholy shades the edges of her expression, almost like Laurie's afraid he'll disappear the moment she looks away. We see hurt and a past, personhood far bigger than what her character type should allow. 

Yet, none of that means Laurie's not terrifying. Her scenes with Bart's sister are studies in suggested threat. For once, the woman's insouciance manifests as a predatorial edge, cold ruthlessness that rankles even as nothing too violent is happening at that moment. These emotional complexities crescendo while the cutting keeps things moving at a propulsive pace, culminating in an iconic ending. It's as deadly as most viewers will have predicted, yet more devastating than anyone could have anticipated. From its misty recesses, a crane pulls the camera up to the heavens, consummating a doomed love story and going on to reverberate through film history. The French New Wave wouldn't be the same without Gun Crazy, and Bonnie and Clyde wouldn't exist in its present form. The film's legacy endures through those it influenced, but there's no beating the original. Joseph H. Lewis hit the bullseye with this one.

Gun Crazy is available to rent or purchase from Amazon, Apple TV, and Fandango at Home.