Gun Crazy (1950)
Director: Joseph H. Lewis
Honors:
Take an exciting crime story, a blacklisted screenwriter, a
B-movie director, and a low budget independent production company put together
in the correct manner you get one of the more exciting crime dramas of 1950. This
Bonnie and Clyde style story mixes love for firearms with infatuation and lust
in a thrilling lovers-on-the-run motion picture. In it audiences will both sympathize
and demonize the ways they go about their poor decisions that lead to their
ultimate demise.
Gun Crazy is a crime film noir about a young couple
with a fascination with firearms that find themselves on a crime spree. The story
follows two young people each with their own captivation towards the artful
handling of a guns falling deeply into love and marrying each other. The impressionable
and sensitive Bart Tare (John Dall) is encouraged into a desperate life of
robberies by his shrewd wife Laurie (Peggy Cummins) who proves to be the
dangerous organizer of their criminal ways. Laurie’s willingness to take the
lives of innocents that present obstacles to her schemes proves to trouble Bart,
who would not hurt a living thing, swearing off crime. Laurie convinces Bart of
one last big robbery where Laurie shoot and kills a handful of people
triggering an FBI manhunt for the unlawful lovers, leading them to hide in Bart’s
hometown. Two of Bart’s oldest friends plead with him to surrender for his and
Laurie’s safety, but the couple make one last effort to ditch the authorities
where they are surrounded and Laurie’s desperate move to pull out her gun leads
to the two lovers’ demise.
This B-movie crime drama both suffers and is augmented by
the fact that it is a low budget, independent feature. With obvious
sophistication of being written by a top-notch screenwriter rather than a low-level
writer that simply turned out quantity over quality, Gun Crazy was
directed in a manner that took its limitations and turn it to its advantage. With
a mix of creative guerrilla filming and minimalist techniques the film comes together
in a a more grand and gritty manner. With a story that is surprisingly
aggressive mixing infatuation and lust, with yearning and obsession the picture
appears rawer and more intimate than typical studio crime dramas.
The film finds its beginnings in a short story published in
the “Saturday Evening Post” that the King Brothers, Frank and Maurice, were
looking to turn into a feature directed by B-movie filmmaker Joseph H. Lewis. MacKinlay
Kantor, the author of the original story would begin the adaptation, followed by
screenwriter Dalton Trumbo, one of the “Hollywood Ten” backlisted from the
industry, being secretly hired to reshape the plot into the fated love story it
would become. Fellow screenwriter Millard Kaufman lent his name to front for
Trumbo to avoid the Hollywood authorities from discovering the true source of
the script. For the first time in five years Trumbo produced a script for a
Hollywood feature, which due to his blacklist status would aid a small studio with
his elevated nature for quality screenwriting. This would be the first a number
of celebrated scripts by Trumbo under a series of pseudonyms over the next
several years, not to be revealed until years later of their true author.
The film stars Wales born Irish actress Peggy Cummins, as
well as John Dall who was bouncing between screen, Broadway, and television
work. Cummins had been going between England and Hollywood would find Gun
Crazy to be her last American feature despite enjoying her time working stateside.
Watching this feature you would never know she was in fact Irish, only that he
carried herself with a peculiar manner with a slightly off accent that could
pass for an American from somewhere in the Northeast who tended to act first,
think second, and had trust issues. Dall who was last seen on screen in Hitchcock’s
unique long take feature Rope (1948) brings his impromptu acting ability
and slightly off manner to Bart who suffers from emotional issues, finding his
refuge a person that proves to guide him down wrong paths. Both stars bring a
youthful angst to their roles as people that find the closest centers in each
other, but the bad apple of Laurie proves to spoil that which was good in Bart.
Like many B-movies Gun Crazy would not have much in
the form of budget and it is very evident, but somehow director Joseph B. Lewis
was able to spin his creative mind and work it to his advantage. Less money
usually means less in means of studio time, space, and set decoration. Because
of this what sets they do have are sparce and generic. Lewis avoided this look
when he could by using it to his benefit. For the final scene in the picture
the young couple are hiding in the reeds in a foggy swamp leaving only the sound
of encircling men and search dogs to build up the suspense. The lack of visuals
showing the oncoming danger is intensified by the imagination of the audience
filling in what Laurie and Bart would be thinking, leading to the moment where
they make the decisions that cost them their lives.
Guerilla style tactics were needed to bring some of the
action of the picture to the much more detailed outside world. For shooting
within a car Lewis had a special camera mount in a backseat of a vehicle and a
space for a camera operator giving him the opportunity to film scenes with the
actors really driving the vehicle and conversing instead of the process shots
with rear projections many may be used to seeing. This camera set up inspired
Lewis to rethink an entire bank robbery scene in the middle of his movie.
Instead of shooting a long drawn out scene where Bart and Laurie drive up,
enter a bank, and rob it in a usual manner Lewis would have the entire scene
shot in one continuous take from the rear car seat camera. Lewis had Dall and
Cummins improvise the scene as they drove around town, pulled up to the bank,
deliberate their motives, Bart exiting the car and entering the bank where we
lose sight of him, Laurie mustering a distraction of a nearing police officer, Bart
hastily exiting the bank as the alarm sounds, and the couple escaping from the
scene of the crime.
This single shot scene would with time become the most
talked about scene from the movie by critics, filmmakers, cinema educators, and
historians for its brilliant manner in which the scene comes together in a real
life setting so seamlessly in an age where such a manner would not be done,
especially in one continuous shot. Later revelations shared that only the
actors in the car and surrounding the bank were aware of the movie being shot. He
scene was shot in Montrose, CA, where citizens would actually be going about
their day unknowingly during the scene’s filming and some of the civilian
bystanders that happened to be nearby would believe that they witness a real-life
bank robbery.
For all the film’s good writing, acting, and creativity it
was only a B-movie from a small, independent picture. The King Brother’s would coax
up wider distribution for their feature by moving from Monogram Pictures to
United Artists allowing for a better opportunity for profits at the box office.
For a B-movie the film received generally good praise, gaining attention for
its quick editing and minor special effects. With time the film would see its
praise rise. Dalton Trumbo would begin to see more work as he secretly penned
many scripts over the next decade. Some Hollywood insiders would know of
Trumbo’s secret connection to the script, but it was not until 1992 that his
authorship would be confirmed for Gun Crazy. Shortly after the film
would begin recieving many honors of the picture for its cultural significance,
including preservation in the National Film Registry in 1998, as well as
consideration as one of the finest American features of the 20th
century at the close of the 1990s.
The Bonnie and Clyde nature of the story of Gun Crazy
would aid in the attraction of the picture, but in turn it also helped to
inspire the later sharing of the Bonnie and Clyde as a feature film subject.
Warren Beatty’s 1967 feature that would go on to be considered one of the best
pictures of the year and of all-time, cementing Beatty’s legacy in movies and
reinvent star power in Hollywood. Bonnie and Clyde would own some of its
inspiration from Gun Crazy and the exciting way Dalton Trumbo and Joseph H. Lewis delivered their crime drama to the screen.
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