WE CAN LIVE WITHOUT WORKING!
That’s one cultural oddity of fate that I will now briefly attempt to rectify.
No seriously …I’m really going to do just that right here and right now.
“Bart, I've been kicked around all my life, and from now on, I'm gonna start kicking back.”
Like I “said,” it was 1949 when a spindly, weakly handsome post-war American male named Bart (John Dall) who loved guns, met carnival pistolero and dangerously liberated post war female Annie Laurie Starr (Peggy Cummins). You figure out it’s all over quick because of that gleam in little Laurie’s eye isn’t just lust, it’s greed and a murderously sexualized anger that overwhelms Bart and draw the couple into crime, violence, and unavoidable doom. (don’t forget: GUN CRAZY’s original-release title was Deadly is the Female.) It’s a low-budget take on the true story of Bonnie and Clyde is as fiercely sexual as a film from the Hayes code era as you’re ever likely to see, and it’s all expressed sans glimpses of flesh, with a palpable, animal longing that vibrates off any screen you happen to catch the film on whenever the well-matched protagonists are together—which is for practically every second of GUN CRAZY’s 86-minutes.
“It's just that some guys are born smart about women and some guys are born dumb.”
GUN CRAZY’s masterful set pieces—most notably Bart and Laurie’s robbery of a meat-packing payroll office; the celebrated bank robbery sequence, filmed in a continuous take without a single cut; and the finale in a misty swamp--excite cineastes, and rightly so, but my favorite moment is when Bart and Laurie decide to take separate cars and temporarily split up. They peel off in opposite directions, and slam the brakes simultaneously, as if the ESP of lust and pathological dependency has spoken to them at the same moment. They wheel their big cars around in the highway and meet in the center of the road to hungrily embrace through the cars’ open windows. The two have become one; that’s how they’ll live, and that’s how they’ll die. Actor John Dall had been impressive in Hitchcock’s Rope wherein Hitchcock interpreted Dall’s blatant homosexual-vide as a “weakness” that could be exploited to produce queasy screen effects.
“Honey, I'll make money like you want me to. Big money. But it takes time, you gotta give me time.”
“You'll never make big money. You're a two-bit guy.”
From one end of GUN CRAZY to the other the matter of weakness is debatable, of course, but there’s no denying that Bart, though heterosexual, is a pliable fellow whose desire for Laurie is an unhealthy transmutation of his immature obsession with firearms. He’s clearly a fetishist--a cheeky notion for a film made in 1949. British actress Peggy Cummins had been brought to Hollywood by Fox in 1946 to star in Forever Amber, but her footage was scrapped after a few weeks and THE MARK of ZORRO’s Linda Darnell assumed the role. Cummins found herself on the low-budget slope, which was unfortunate for her but good for the rest of us; her interpretation of Laurie as 110 pounds of pheromones in the shape of a woman is sexually exciting and intimidating. We soon realize that Laurie’s basically insane, a sweet young demon and although Bart finally realizes it, too, he remains at her side, as much lamprey as lover. Lewis’s direction is inventive and efficient, aided by Russell Harlan’s fine monochrome photography.
“I saw the two of you, the way you were looking at each other tonight, like a couple of wild animals. Almost scared me.”
By the way GUN CRAZY is has become primary foundation of a robust Joseph Lewis cult of cinephiles, and presages some of the tone and stylistics of his later noir, 1955’s The Big Combo.
