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Maybe like guns and ammunition go together
It's not true that all you need to make a movie is a gun and a girl, at least not if you're Joseph H. Lewis and the movie is Gun Crazy (1950). First you need a boy and his gun, then a girl and her gun, and then you can turn them loose on a movie that starts like a case study and ends like grand opera and in between goes like gangbusters through just about every American signifier of sex and violence and love and death and youth and speed you can imagine, not to mention the symbolism of guns. Maybe symbolism is too subtle a word. The script by MacKinlay Kantor and a blacklisted Dalton Trumbo doesn't sublimate a thing: it's all "on the level," as Annie Laurie Starr might say in her chipped English accent, this girl from a Brighton shooting gallery who bursts on the screen in the regalia of the American West, all tight trousers and hip-hugging gunbelts and a cowgirl's flat-brimmed hat, the widest, hungriest grin on her face like she could just eat up the long lanky drink of water grinning right back at her, already smitten, from the front row. She takes point-blank, tantalizing aim at him and fires off a cap instead. No other shot fired in this movie will be as harmless or as fateful. Some girls just give out their phone numbers. Laurie's never been one of those girls.
Bart Tare has never been one of those boys, either. He loves guns: "I don't know why, but I feel good when I'm shooting them. I feel awful good inside. Like I'm somebody." When he's fourteen and played by Russ Tamblyn, he's sent to reform school for smashing a hardware store window to steal a revolver in a scene so full of night and rain and hotel neon it would be a miracle if the movie that followed weren't noir; a decade later and played by John Dall, he's a former Army marksman with a connoisseur's case of pieces and no real prospects, no direction until the night he sees Peggy Cummins' Laurie bestride the sideshow tent like a sharpshooters' saint and leaps up to meet her in a trick-shooting duel that doesn't even pretend it's not a sexual display, the two of them circling one another with animal appreciation, eyes electric, handling the pistols like they're baring themselves. It's hot even if you think the American hard-on for guns is stupid. They're both so good at what they do, so thrilled to find someone to share and challenge their skill. Dall will never look as good as he does in this scene, lean and devilish, winking as his dream girl lines up a shot that could kill him if she's wrong; Cummins is incandescently cool, flicking her eyes up and down his rangy frame, gunslinger's hands equally ready to draw or unzip. The sideshow talker (Barry Kroeger) who introduced Laurie with such possessive bluster is irrelevant even before he's wound up his spiel. The audience applauds and might as well be on the far side of the moon. Like any successful courtship, the contest even ends with the exchange of a ring, sealing this trigger-happy pair to one another long before they run off and get actually married in circumstances so quick and sleazy, it's just as narratively accurate to think of them as living in sin or a state of nature. And rob drugstores and banks and gas stations, of course. Their entrance into the criminal world is haphazard and amateurish, born out of meager savings and amorphous ambitions—"I want things," Laurie declares as their picture-postcard honeymoon peters out among roadside diners and cheap hotels, "a lot of things, big things"—but as soon as that gumball machine shatters under the first blast of their inaugural stickup, it feels inevitable. There is simply nothing else they do as well as shoot. Sure, they could find another carnival, another shooting gallery, Bart could get that forty-dollar-a-week job with Remington he was talking about, but those are the tame forms of their art. There's no contest in them. No edge, no risk, no action. They can hold honest jobs and they prove it, wittily, by working for weeks at the slaughterhouse they plan to rob, but Bart in a white coat wrapping steaks in butcher's paper and bespectacled Laurie pushing pencils in the front office look like the actors and impersonators they are, so nearly parodying the kind of decent nine-to-five life they are supposed to aspire to that the real feat is less stealing the payroll of the Armour packing plant in Albuquerque than keeping a straight face long enough to do it. Together they are fucked-up and dangerous, the very definition of folie à deux; they are also their most realized selves. They come alive on the skidding cordite high of robberies and getaways, doing something crazy and together, inseparably together. A boy and their guns and a girl. You can't ask the straight world to contain a passion like that.
I'm not surprised that Cummins is remembered indelibly for this movie; I understand it with Dall, too. It's impossible to imagine anyone else in the roles. They're iconic without being starry, as breathless and clumsy and gleeful as real lovers inventing banditry on the fly, not screen criminals making trope-oiled moves. Neither of them is conventionally good-looking. Dall has a sly, rawboned face that's rakish with confidence but slackens alarmingly under conscience-stricken strain, Cummins a kind of hard porcelain pugnacity that becomes tender and transparent at sexually radiant moments like the successful conclusion of a heist. Laurie's half her husband's size and twice as feral, shark-swimming to stay alive and yet when offered an easy out with a suitcase of cash and no masculine scruples to slow her down, she hits the brakes right in tandem with Bart and they cling to each other like long-lost lovers found; he's as violently necessary to her as oxygen or the nickel-plated equality of a Colt Police Positive in her hand. "I've never been much good," she warns him as they stand outside the all-night cocktail-café-motel signage of the "desert justice" who'll rubber-stamp what their mutual hunger has already sanctified, "but I've got a funny feeling that I want to be good. I don't know, maybe I can't—but I'm going to try. I'll try hard, Bart. I'll try." By society's lights, she fails hard. By the terms of their own curious honor, I think she makes it. While we're on the perennial question, I can't see her as a femme fatale. She doesn't fit the most basic criteria: she doesn't seduce and deceive and she certainly doesn't achieve her goals through the manipulation of men. Annie Laurie Starr's got her own gun. If all she wanted was a profitable life of crime, she could conduct it just fine by herself—as if to prove her solo credentials, one sequence in their initial crime spree shows her carjacking a dude who thinks he's gotten lucky with the blonde hitchhiker in the trenchcoat and beret, right until she slips that pearl-gripped revolver from her purse. His Cadillac is the one they will use for the rightly celebrated one-take heist, shot entirely from the back seat of the car with Dall and Cummins ad-libbing their suggestively keyed-up dialogue as they drive around the downtown looking for a place to park, finally letting Bart off to make the withdrawal while Laurie stalls an inopportune local cop until her partner can come tearing out of the Hampton Building and Loan Association with a satchel under his arm and the alarms clattering and while he floors the Caddy, she twists around in her seat to look for pursuers and the camera dives in for her absolutely aroused, triumphant smile. She does what she does with Bart because she wants to do it with him. That means crime and that means sex; that's part of what I mean about no sublimation. The robberies committed by Bart and Laurie aren't standing in for anything. The way they can't keep their hands off each other or their same-difference guns, they obviously have a banging sex life—as![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
handful_ofdust astutely observes, John Dall has never been so heterosexual—and they play it so dazzlingly the effect onscreen is of something white-hot and stainless that only starts to look perverse when you step back. But it also looks like a partnership. I'm almost glad that Gun Crazy flopped when initially released under the studio-imposed title of Deadly Is the Female, because otherwise it might have stuck and it's missing the point just as badly as the poster for The Blue Gardenia (1953). Laurie's the spark, but Bart burns just as bright. By the time he's halfway up the San Lorenzo mountains telling her, "Laurie, no matter what happens, I wouldn't have it any other way," even with the law on their heels the audience knows it's no lie.
The clear precursor to this story, aside from Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow, is Nicholas Ray's They Live by Night (1949), but the two variations are about as far from one another as they can get without leaving the genre. Ray's lovers are essentially gentle fugitives who dream wistfully of ordinary things and fall back on crime because they don't know what else to do; Bart and Laurie are more undomesticated. Gun-craziness for him really is a matter of being good at the thing he loves. There's a weird innocence to his expertise: he'll use it for anything but killing, ever since he was seven and potted a chick with a BB gun. His sister says earnestly, "It's something else about guns that gets him." On the run with Laurie, he has trouble shooting even the tires of a pursuing police car because the crack-up might lead to a death. But he takes energetically and imaginatively to a life that requires the constant threat if not the follow-through of violence and he's too sensitive not to reckon with it eventually: "You go into a racket like this to get something at the point of a gun, you have to be ready to kill even before you start a job. I'm as guilty as you are—I've just let you do my killing for me." The girl who fired blanks in her first scene, of course, can kill without thinking about it. Her gun-craziness is more visceral and instinctive, a furious evening of societal and personal odds; she carries the same gun from start to finish, as much a part of whatever makes Annie Laurie Starr as her magnesium tousle of hair or her full, uncompromising mouth, and she uses it as casually as feet or fists or a smile. It's transgressive and natural as snakebite. "I get so scared I can't even think—I can just kill." And there's so much to be afraid of, in a world where a boss can blackmail you into bed, your job can be threatened for wearing slacks instead of skirts, where outspoken girls like Bart's sister are overruled by paternal judges and worn down by marriage into frazzled housewives. Laurie's first move when confronted with a baby is to pick it up as a hostage. Don't tread on her.
Guns, money, two crazy kids; the incredible thing about this movie is that it isn't trash pulp. It's something more romantic, more improvisatory and reckless, and Russell Harlan's cinematography meets its headlong hot blood with everything from documentary long takes to kinetically framed close-ups and off-center compositions as artificial and urgent as the dialogue, which can snap back and forth from hardboiled to realism and sometimes land both in the space of the same line. The fog-bound swamp climax backs the fatalism of noir with the formality of a murder ballad, the Cupid-shot of the lovers' first meeting recurring in a tragic key. It's over so fast, there's no time for a moral. But then there never was much morality in this movie, just Laurie saying like a law of the universe, "I'm yours—and I'm real." I have no difficulty believing that the French New Wave worshipped Gun Crazy. I still think it's one of the most American movies I have ever seen. This awful goodness brought to you by my somebody backers at Patreon.
Bart Tare has never been one of those boys, either. He loves guns: "I don't know why, but I feel good when I'm shooting them. I feel awful good inside. Like I'm somebody." When he's fourteen and played by Russ Tamblyn, he's sent to reform school for smashing a hardware store window to steal a revolver in a scene so full of night and rain and hotel neon it would be a miracle if the movie that followed weren't noir; a decade later and played by John Dall, he's a former Army marksman with a connoisseur's case of pieces and no real prospects, no direction until the night he sees Peggy Cummins' Laurie bestride the sideshow tent like a sharpshooters' saint and leaps up to meet her in a trick-shooting duel that doesn't even pretend it's not a sexual display, the two of them circling one another with animal appreciation, eyes electric, handling the pistols like they're baring themselves. It's hot even if you think the American hard-on for guns is stupid. They're both so good at what they do, so thrilled to find someone to share and challenge their skill. Dall will never look as good as he does in this scene, lean and devilish, winking as his dream girl lines up a shot that could kill him if she's wrong; Cummins is incandescently cool, flicking her eyes up and down his rangy frame, gunslinger's hands equally ready to draw or unzip. The sideshow talker (Barry Kroeger) who introduced Laurie with such possessive bluster is irrelevant even before he's wound up his spiel. The audience applauds and might as well be on the far side of the moon. Like any successful courtship, the contest even ends with the exchange of a ring, sealing this trigger-happy pair to one another long before they run off and get actually married in circumstances so quick and sleazy, it's just as narratively accurate to think of them as living in sin or a state of nature. And rob drugstores and banks and gas stations, of course. Their entrance into the criminal world is haphazard and amateurish, born out of meager savings and amorphous ambitions—"I want things," Laurie declares as their picture-postcard honeymoon peters out among roadside diners and cheap hotels, "a lot of things, big things"—but as soon as that gumball machine shatters under the first blast of their inaugural stickup, it feels inevitable. There is simply nothing else they do as well as shoot. Sure, they could find another carnival, another shooting gallery, Bart could get that forty-dollar-a-week job with Remington he was talking about, but those are the tame forms of their art. There's no contest in them. No edge, no risk, no action. They can hold honest jobs and they prove it, wittily, by working for weeks at the slaughterhouse they plan to rob, but Bart in a white coat wrapping steaks in butcher's paper and bespectacled Laurie pushing pencils in the front office look like the actors and impersonators they are, so nearly parodying the kind of decent nine-to-five life they are supposed to aspire to that the real feat is less stealing the payroll of the Armour packing plant in Albuquerque than keeping a straight face long enough to do it. Together they are fucked-up and dangerous, the very definition of folie à deux; they are also their most realized selves. They come alive on the skidding cordite high of robberies and getaways, doing something crazy and together, inseparably together. A boy and their guns and a girl. You can't ask the straight world to contain a passion like that.
I'm not surprised that Cummins is remembered indelibly for this movie; I understand it with Dall, too. It's impossible to imagine anyone else in the roles. They're iconic without being starry, as breathless and clumsy and gleeful as real lovers inventing banditry on the fly, not screen criminals making trope-oiled moves. Neither of them is conventionally good-looking. Dall has a sly, rawboned face that's rakish with confidence but slackens alarmingly under conscience-stricken strain, Cummins a kind of hard porcelain pugnacity that becomes tender and transparent at sexually radiant moments like the successful conclusion of a heist. Laurie's half her husband's size and twice as feral, shark-swimming to stay alive and yet when offered an easy out with a suitcase of cash and no masculine scruples to slow her down, she hits the brakes right in tandem with Bart and they cling to each other like long-lost lovers found; he's as violently necessary to her as oxygen or the nickel-plated equality of a Colt Police Positive in her hand. "I've never been much good," she warns him as they stand outside the all-night cocktail-café-motel signage of the "desert justice" who'll rubber-stamp what their mutual hunger has already sanctified, "but I've got a funny feeling that I want to be good. I don't know, maybe I can't—but I'm going to try. I'll try hard, Bart. I'll try." By society's lights, she fails hard. By the terms of their own curious honor, I think she makes it. While we're on the perennial question, I can't see her as a femme fatale. She doesn't fit the most basic criteria: she doesn't seduce and deceive and she certainly doesn't achieve her goals through the manipulation of men. Annie Laurie Starr's got her own gun. If all she wanted was a profitable life of crime, she could conduct it just fine by herself—as if to prove her solo credentials, one sequence in their initial crime spree shows her carjacking a dude who thinks he's gotten lucky with the blonde hitchhiker in the trenchcoat and beret, right until she slips that pearl-gripped revolver from her purse. His Cadillac is the one they will use for the rightly celebrated one-take heist, shot entirely from the back seat of the car with Dall and Cummins ad-libbing their suggestively keyed-up dialogue as they drive around the downtown looking for a place to park, finally letting Bart off to make the withdrawal while Laurie stalls an inopportune local cop until her partner can come tearing out of the Hampton Building and Loan Association with a satchel under his arm and the alarms clattering and while he floors the Caddy, she twists around in her seat to look for pursuers and the camera dives in for her absolutely aroused, triumphant smile. She does what she does with Bart because she wants to do it with him. That means crime and that means sex; that's part of what I mean about no sublimation. The robberies committed by Bart and Laurie aren't standing in for anything. The way they can't keep their hands off each other or their same-difference guns, they obviously have a banging sex life—as
handful_ofdust astutely observes, John Dall has never been so heterosexual—and they play it so dazzlingly the effect onscreen is of something white-hot and stainless that only starts to look perverse when you step back. But it also looks like a partnership. I'm almost glad that Gun Crazy flopped when initially released under the studio-imposed title of Deadly Is the Female, because otherwise it might have stuck and it's missing the point just as badly as the poster for The Blue Gardenia (1953). Laurie's the spark, but Bart burns just as bright. By the time he's halfway up the San Lorenzo mountains telling her, "Laurie, no matter what happens, I wouldn't have it any other way," even with the law on their heels the audience knows it's no lie.The clear precursor to this story, aside from Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow, is Nicholas Ray's They Live by Night (1949), but the two variations are about as far from one another as they can get without leaving the genre. Ray's lovers are essentially gentle fugitives who dream wistfully of ordinary things and fall back on crime because they don't know what else to do; Bart and Laurie are more undomesticated. Gun-craziness for him really is a matter of being good at the thing he loves. There's a weird innocence to his expertise: he'll use it for anything but killing, ever since he was seven and potted a chick with a BB gun. His sister says earnestly, "It's something else about guns that gets him." On the run with Laurie, he has trouble shooting even the tires of a pursuing police car because the crack-up might lead to a death. But he takes energetically and imaginatively to a life that requires the constant threat if not the follow-through of violence and he's too sensitive not to reckon with it eventually: "You go into a racket like this to get something at the point of a gun, you have to be ready to kill even before you start a job. I'm as guilty as you are—I've just let you do my killing for me." The girl who fired blanks in her first scene, of course, can kill without thinking about it. Her gun-craziness is more visceral and instinctive, a furious evening of societal and personal odds; she carries the same gun from start to finish, as much a part of whatever makes Annie Laurie Starr as her magnesium tousle of hair or her full, uncompromising mouth, and she uses it as casually as feet or fists or a smile. It's transgressive and natural as snakebite. "I get so scared I can't even think—I can just kill." And there's so much to be afraid of, in a world where a boss can blackmail you into bed, your job can be threatened for wearing slacks instead of skirts, where outspoken girls like Bart's sister are overruled by paternal judges and worn down by marriage into frazzled housewives. Laurie's first move when confronted with a baby is to pick it up as a hostage. Don't tread on her.
Guns, money, two crazy kids; the incredible thing about this movie is that it isn't trash pulp. It's something more romantic, more improvisatory and reckless, and Russell Harlan's cinematography meets its headlong hot blood with everything from documentary long takes to kinetically framed close-ups and off-center compositions as artificial and urgent as the dialogue, which can snap back and forth from hardboiled to realism and sometimes land both in the space of the same line. The fog-bound swamp climax backs the fatalism of noir with the formality of a murder ballad, the Cupid-shot of the lovers' first meeting recurring in a tragic key. It's over so fast, there's no time for a moral. But then there never was much morality in this movie, just Laurie saying like a law of the universe, "I'm yours—and I'm real." I have no difficulty believing that the French New Wave worshipped Gun Crazy. I still think it's one of the most American movies I have ever seen. This awful goodness brought to you by my somebody backers at Patreon.
no subject
So true!
The fog-bound swamp climax backs the fatalism of noir with the formality of a murder ballad
I find that foggy sequence one of the most visually beautiful and haunting in all of film history.
no subject
I find that foggy sequence one of the most visually beautiful and haunting in all of film history.
It's incredible, like something out of The Night of the Hunter (1955). Neither
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You see what I mean!
I knew Gun Crazy by reputation as one of the important noirs I had not seen. Nothing I had read about it had managed to communicate that it would be one of the movies I am on some level amazed exists.
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Enjoy! My sole regret is that I didn't see it while Cummins was alive, but it was the right thing to watch in her memory.
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Thank you. It's a great film! It has all the WTF of a cult movie and all the stature of a classic. I like this combination.