John Dall and Peggy Cummins
GUN CRAZY B
aka: Deadly Is the
Female
USA (86 mi) 1950
d: Joseph H. Lewis
Some guys are born
smart about women and some guys are born dumb . . . You were born dumb.
—Carnival clown Bluey-Bluey (Stanley Prager)
An overly contrived yet subversive morality tale about America’s
mad obsession with guns that swoons with exaggerated melodrama, remaining atmospherically
moody and fatalistic, perhaps viewed as film noir’s answer to the collapse of
the American Dream, offering a postwar sense of coddled entitlement or reckless
self-indulgence, blindly overlooking the consequences or the damage done by
guns, released nearly 50 years before the disastrous Columbine High School massacre,
which seems to have set the stage for what are now routine occurrences in
America, where school shootings are considered a uniquely American phenomenon
due to the availability of firearms in the United States. This film, however, presents the obsessive
gun mania as a kind of ingrained disease, like a pathological condition that
needs to be eradicated due to the inherent dangers it presents to society. If only today we could live by the same
simple principles that drove the 50’s conservatism and conformism of the
postwar era, but this Pandora’s Box has been unleashed upon the nation, like a
toxic pandemic of irreversible sins, refusing to abide by the anti-gun message
this film presents, anticipating the worst of all possible outcomes, where death
is the only outlet, our sins finally purged.
Using the cheap B-movie format, the Bonnie
and Clyde (1967) saga has been retold for the disillusioned 50’s
generation, using a perversely fascinating couple as outsiders living on the
fringe of society, including John Dall, a gay actor, one of the alleged gay
killers from Hitchcock’s ROPE (1948), subverting the masculine stereotype as
Bart Tare, an emotionally disturbed war veteran with a lifelong fixation with
guns, and Irish actress Peggy Cummins as Annie Laurie Starr, a blonde carnival
sharpshooter equally enthralled with firearms, among the more memorable femme
fatale bad girls who holds nothing back, openly blunt, addicted to the adrenaline
rush of thrill-seeking, though she’s trouble with a capital T, hellbent on
carrying out crime sprees, robbing banks or small stores, becoming a famed
sociopathic duo making headlines wherever they go, with Bart too meek to say
no, where their torrid love affair is fueled by their mad obsession with guns,
where he boasts, “We go together like guns and ammunition.” Both provide the performances of their
careers in what is basically a portrait of small town America, viewing
masculinity as a toxic condition, where Bart is seen at the outset as a troubled
young child whose only interest is in guns, played by Russ Tamblyn, from Riff,
the leader of the Jets, in WEST SIDE STORY (1961) to the weirdo town
psychiatrist in Twin Peaks (1990 – 91,
reprised in 2017), breaking into a gun shop to steal a revolver, only to be
caught red handed. The ensuing court
scene reveals his backstory through a series of flashbacks, where he’s a
good-natured kid fascinated by guns, but something of a misfit (Bart proudly
showing his six-gun to fascinated grammar school classmates is particularly
unsettling), developing an outright refusal to kill any living thing. Nonetheless, the judge determines he’s a
potential menace to society, sending him away to reform school where he’s not
allowed to touch a gun until he comes of age, quickly serving a stint in the
Army teaching marksmanship, then welcomed back home by his old classmates, in a
safe and sound world that looks very much like 50’s television, where they
visit a touring carnival in town, with Bart challenging the female gunslinger,
outdueling her in a contest, where they quickly can’t take their eyes off each
other, inflamed by their most primal desires.
An
Appreciation - Gun Crazy | The MacGuffin Allen Almachar, January 30, 2018
What makes film noir so fascinating
is how tied in it is to history. Of all the different styles, movements, and
trends that have existed in cinema, noir is placed so firmly into the culture
of the mid 20th century that it’s difficult not to examine it without that
context. There was this incredible melding of different societal issues that
took place nearly simultaneously – resulting in an explosion of creativity
seeped in the darker side of human nature. How it all came together is almost
bewildering. There was the disillusionment of WWII, more women entering the
work force, the migration of European directors to America, the rise in
popularity of the crime novel, the lingering effects of the Great Depression –
they all merged to create one of most interesting and studied of all film
techniques.
You would think that right after
the war, films would take a lighter approach, but it turns out the opposite was
true. Many felt a growing cynicism as the horror of the war came to light. This
lead to an increase of small budget crime dramas that had a darker tone in
subject matter and visual style. Characters often lived on the opposite side of
the law, and held a more ambiguous moral compass. Criminals became the
protagonists. Cops and detectives had dirtier personalities, even turning to
corruption to have their way. This was different than the gangster pictures of
the 1930s – more psychological, more desperate. Falling in love didn’t mean
“happily ever after,” it meant a one-way ticket to the slammer or the grave.
And above all was greed: greed for money, greed for sex, or both.
Noir is a means to examine humanity
under intense duress. It boils our desires, fantasies, and nightmares to their
fundamentals. We all want a better life and fall in love, but how far do we go
to attain that? There is a fine line between good and evil, and that is where
noir works best. Of all the films that can be labeled under this category, Joseph H. Lewis’ Gun Crazy (1950) stands as one of the most provocative. Not
only does it break the normal conventions of narrative storytelling, it breaks
the normal conventions of noir itself. It tells the tale of two criminal lovers
on the run without wasting the time to explain their disturbing behavior.
Before Jean-Luc Godard redefined
what it meant to be “cool” in Breathless (1960), and before Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway lit up the screen in Bonnie and Clyde (1967),
there was Gun Crazy.
With symbols galore to fascinate viewers (guns may as well
be a phallic symbol), turning this into a deliriously fun cult experience, the
film lacks the haunting emotional devastation of Nicholas Ray’s love story on
the run They
Live By Night (1949) made just a year earlier. Made for $400,000, shot in black and white in
30 days by Howard Hawks’ regular cinematographer Russell Harlan, where the
source material was a ten-page Saturday
Evening Post story by novelist MacKinlay Kantor, author of Andersonville, which won the Pulitzer
Prize in 1956, and Glory for Me,
which became the Academy Award winning film THE BEST YEARS OF OUR LIVES (1946). One of the screenwriters, working under the
name Millard Kaufman, was Hollywood blacklisted Dalton Trumbo, a socialist that
loved being rich, who refused to name names for the House Committee on Un-American
Activities and was branded a national threat, creating a script
filled with hyperbolic melodrama and familiar cliché’s, yet emphasizing violence
as an American prototype. United Artist producers,
schlockmeisters known as the King Brothers, initially released the film under
the conspicuous title Deadly Is the
Female, which has brazenly aggressive misogynistic intonations, with overt
sex-insinuating advertising, though the title never stuck, having the dubious
distinction of being the only King Brothers production to lose money, where it
confuses the message so openly highlighted in the initial title, yet prominently
placed in the back of our minds is the recurring theme from Bart’s childhood,
his reluctance to kill. Among his pals,
he seems like a regular guy, but once he sets his eyes on Laurie, dressed in
full Wild West cowgirl regalia with guns blazing, shooting targets from between
her legs, it’s as if the earth tilted on its axis, suddenly destabilized, where
he couldn’t stop himself from craving to be near her. Both fired by the carnival owner for flouting
their sexuality, they go on a whirlwind romance that includes marriage, each
revealing a checkered past, with Laurie claiming “I am bad, but will try to be
good,” wearing that infamous beret made famous by Bonnie Parker, leading to a big
spending spree, living in high style until the money runs out. Pressed into taking a normal job with regular
wages, Laurie bolts at the thought, saying it’s the last he’ll see of her, dressed
only in her white bathrobe, slowly lacing on black stockings, exuding
sexuality, claiming she is tired of getting kicked around and has plenty of
living left to do, “I want a lot of things – big things!... I want action!” Despite her questionable moral character, she
remains oddly sympathetic throughout, where viewers get the sense she really
can’t help herself, that she wants to be good, but can’t when relying upon her
own feral instincts. Unable to face life
without her, they embark on a life of crime, where an element of danger has
followed her for her entire life, now setting a trap for themselves, yet living
like there’s no tomorrow. Sex and
violence have never been so fatefully aligned, as what arouses them both is the
sight of guns, both feeling useless without them, so they may as well let their
guns do the talking. But while it’s been
established that Bart has a moral conscience about shooting people, Laurie’s
another matter altogether, as she has a tendency to shoot first and ask
questions later, where shooting is a compulsion that settles her nerves, that
leaves her empowered, always having the last word. While Bart’s under no illusions about what
he’s getting himself into, he does so anyway, willingly, as he can’t break from
the sexual allure, fueling his desires like a moth to a flame, where he feels
like nothing is real, as if none of this ever happened, where he’s a completely
different person, showing little regard for others, repeatedly violating the
law, fatefully living a life on the run.
While also directing one of the strangest westerns, Terror
in a Texas Town (1958), also written by Trumbo, Lewis was one of the great
low-budget stylists of his era, able to tell stories with gripping narrative
skill and great economy, where this film was added to the National Film
Registry in 1998. Perhaps the best and
most talked-about scene of the film is an early virtuoso bank robbery sequence,
offering a sense of visual style, shot in “real time” from the back seat of the
getaway car, all captured in a single shot from the vantage point of the back
of the car, giving it a documentary style realism as they drive into town, both
dressed in their Western attire, checking out the bank location, and improvise
dialogue while searching for a parking place that suddenly and magically arises,
with no blocking ahead of time. Bart
exits the vehicle to enter the bank, which is never shown, saving time and
money, not having to construct a bank interior and hire extras, turning a 3 to
5-day shoot into a single day. The
camera sticks with Laurie in the car, who is immediately threatened by the
presence of a cop walking in front of the bank and waiting, so she creates a
diversion, talking with him, distracting his focus, waiting for Bart to come
running out the bank, then pistol-whipping the officer as the bank alarm sounds
during Bart’s dash back to the car, making a clean getaway, both feeling the
pangs of anxiety mixed with the euphoric thrill from actually having pulled it
off, Gun Crazy (1950) Heist Scene YouTube
(3:27). This film was the director’s
favorite among all of his 40-odd films before retiring to make highly
successful television westerns, and bears a resemblance to another
controversial picture, Noel Black’s Pretty
Poison (1968), starring another gay actor, Anthony Perkins playing off his
mentally challenged persona in Psycho
(1960), but meets his match in the perpetually youthful Tuesday Weld, a
cheerleader turning fantasies into a darkly disturbed and violent reality, unleashing
a sordid underside of America, where in each film the dominating personalities are
ballsy, free-spirited women who are not only the brains behind the operation,
but the brawn, subverting their beauty, crossing the moral line of ethics to
kill with no compunction. Both men are
blindsided by this behavior, but drawn to their sexual allure nonetheless,
entering a bleak, forbidden territory that previously existed only in their
imaginations. Lewis foreshadows their
fate through accomplished musical scenes as they are about to make their escape
to Mexico, set in Los Angeles at the Danceland Music Hall, as a musical
interlude of “Mad About You” plays before singer Francis Irvin takes the stage
with her jazzy rendition of “Laughing on the Outside,” with the lyrics
suggesting love offers a fatalistic spell that can’t be overcome, “Cause I’m
still in love with you.” The full power
of this moment is realized by the presence of police surrounding their hotel
room, where their dreamy fantasy of a happy everafter becomes coopted by a
deathly serious reality, challenging their survival instincts and their will to
live as the noose is tightened. The finale
has a dreamlike texture to it, as they head for the top of a mountain, breaking
through police barricades, with Bart eventually dragging Laurie through some
rough terrain, ending up hiding in the weeds of a swamp engulfed in fog, where
they can’t see but can only hear the approaching police dragnet, leaving them
no avenue of escape, literally a THELMA AND LOUISE (1991) blaze of glory moment
as their freedom comes to a quick end and their doomed dream is over, Eddie
Muller's afterword to "Gun Crazy" (1950) on TCM "Noir
Alley" YouTube (5:00).
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