John Dall and Peggy Cummins are Gun Crazy!

Gun Crazy is a tough little, fast-paced entry in the film noir genre that plays more like an early thirties gangster picture. Originally titled Deadly Is the Female, it boasts a taut screenplay by MacKinlay Kantor and Dalton Trumbo (using the pseudonym Millard Kaufman) and energetic direction by Joseph H. Lewis. It tells the story of Bart and Annie (think Bonnie & Clyde) a young couple that commits a string of ever more daring robberies, escalating to a climactic showdown in a foggy swamp somewhere in the mountains of California.

The story begins with a teenaged Bart (played by a 14-year-old Russ Tamblyn) breaking a store window to steal some guns. He gets caught and we next see him before a judge. His older sister, with whom he lives, pleads to keep him out of reform school. We are shown Bart at age seven killing a baby chick with his first BB gun and feeling remorse. A couple of his friends testify about the time he refused to shoot a mountain lion even though a reward had been offered for it. In short Bart is gun crazy but has much respect for life.

Bart gets sent to a home for boys and then does time in the military. Upon his return he reunites with his boyhood chums and the three of them attend a carnival that happens to be in town. He falls for the sharp-shooting Annie and takes a job as her fellow trick shooter. Time passes and Bart and Annie fall in love, leave the carnival, and get married.  A bored Annie wants a life of thrills and easy money. She threatens to leave Bart unless he agrees to commit robberies with her, and so their crime spree begins.

One thing that makes this a great action movie is the fact that most of it is shot on location in actual cars. Very little rear projection is used. A camera mounted in the back seat allows us to watch the actors driving around. One bank robbery scene has become legendary because only the actors and crew knew what was going on. Bart tells Annie he hopes they find a parking space and John Dall, the actor, really meant it. At the end of the scene when the alarm goes off a passerby on the street, not realizing that a movie was being filmed, can be heard yelling about the bank being robbed.

John Dall and Peggy Cummins have great chemistry together and deliver the somewhat clichéd dialogue like old pros. He makes the perfect average Joe, so blindly in love that he allows his woman to drag him down into a quagmire of violence and crime. When he reads in the paper that Annie actually killed two people during their last job (she had lied and told him she had fired shots only to frighten them) he blurts out, “Two people dead, just so we can live without working!” Peggy as Annie is the perfect bad girl. She wants to LIVE! Or as she tells her man, “Bart, I've been kicked around all my life, and from now on, I'm gonna start kicking back.”

Gun Crazy never lets up until the credits roll.
 

Did you enjoy Patrick's review? +17 -0