| Penny Folger |
Gun Crazy plays at the Heights Theater on Thursday, February 20th, as part of our collaboration on the 16th Noir Festival. For tickets, showtimes, and other series information, visit trylon.org.
It’s difficult to measure the kind of influence a film like Gun Crazy has had. Like so many great films, it flopped upon its initial release in 1950. It was the only movie ever made by its B-movie producers, the King Brothers, that actually lost money. The industry thought of them as “bottom feeders” who knew how to turn a profit (except, apparently, in this instance). Like so many others that have stood the test of time, the film went on to receive cult film status and high regard decades later. It was also a major highlight of the careers of those who took part—leading actress Peggy Cummins, and director Joseph H. Lewis in particular. It was created by a group of struggling underdogs: Cummins came to the U.S. to star in the film Forever Amber, only to be fired and replaced. Gun Crazy was actually her last American film before retreating back to the UK. The film’s secret screenwriter, Dalton Trumbo, had been blacklisted and himself was heading off to jail. He was hiding behind another name when he whipped its screenplay—based on a story by MacKinlay Kantor that ran in The Saturday Evening Post—into shape.
Gun Crazy feels ahead of its time in many ways, most obviously influencing Bonnie and Clyde (1967), among others, even down to its leading lady’s choice of hat. But what arguably keeps this movie from becoming just another Bonnie and Clyde film is the charm and heat of its two leads—Cummins in particular—and its cinematography.
The “sexual symbolism”1 in this movie, as TCM commentator and author Eddie Muller puts it, is palpable. Reform school and army veteran Bart, as played by John Dall, and circus performer Annie Laurie Starr size each other up, like animals in heat circling each other, upon their first meeting at the carnival where Laurie (as she is mostly referred to) is performing.
Lewis actually directed Cummins using animalistic terminology, at least in this instance, telling her in the form of direction, “You’re a female dog in heat.”2 Said Lewis about his direction, “In every other scene, I let the audience supply the sex, but in the carnival sequence I admit that I didn’t try to hide my meaning.”3
Says her jealous employer afterward to Laurie, “I saw the two of you, the way you were looking at each other tonight, like a couple of wild animals.”
It’s this raw sexuality that makes Gun Crazy feel modern 75 years after its release. This along with a famous bank robbery scene that was shot in one take with the camera mounted in the back of a car, improvised dialogue, and real-life bystanders.
This improvised scene shot from a moving car was way ahead of its time. Also of note: Cummin’s maniacal grin.
Said Lewis, “We did the bank robbery scene without blocking off the street or informing pedestrians what we were up to. So when you hear someone yell that the bank has been robbed, that was not rehearsed.”4 Rather than pretending to drive a car in front of a green screen, as you so often saw in movies of that era, says Lewis, “We drove around the block with the camera rolling not even knowing if there would be a place to park. If there wasn’t we were going to just go around the block again.”5
Martin Scorsese spoke to this more realistic filmmaking style, which was ahead of its time, and the effect it may have had on the viewer. “There’s no more audience. There are only accomplices.”6
By noir standards, Gun Crazy is a great film for Valentine’s Day. The lovers here seem to want to devour each other with the same ferocity in which they take on the rest of the world. Laurie wears the pants in the relationship, so to speak, and much of her performance is, in fact, like a wild animal. You can see it in her kill-or-be-killed stance towards life: all hot-headed survival instinct. She’s as lively and reactive as a firecracker.
Cummins, who lived to be 92, makes animalistically gleeful faces in the role. Her Laurie is the kind of woman who would consider using a baby as a human shield, and at one point tries to. “Nobdy’d dare shoot if we take the baby with us!” As a fellow circus performer says of Laurie to Bart early on in the film, “She ain’t the type that makes a happy home.”
Laurie contemplates using Bart’s sister’s baby as a human shield.
As a young boy, Bart throws a brick through a plate glass shop window to get to the gun encased behind it. Even as an adolescent it seems to be a symbol of virility that he is unconsciously after, but it’s one that continually escapes him. He’s a man who loves to shoot but can’t pull the trigger.
One thing that is fascinating about this movie, depending on your perspective, is that Bart is in the more stereotypical female role: he’s the doubting, cautious one with a conscience, being pulled along by a much more aggressive, confrontational, and action-oriented partner. One wonders if the fact that Dall was gay in real life encouraged his casting in the mind of the film’s director.
Said Lewis, who took a lot of the credit for what went right in this movie, “For the character of Bart I wanted an actor who by osmosis or scent or whatever projected an inner weakness.”7 Lewis knew that Dall was gay in real life. However, Danny Peary, in his book Cult Movies, didn’t believe that Lewis equated Dall’s gayness with weakness or that Bart himself was supposed to be gay. (Interestingly, Dall had starred in Hitchcock’s Rope two years earlier, a film with intentionally gay subtext.) Rather, said Peary, “what I believe Lewis finds in common between any gay [person] (in 1949) and Bart is an implied ongoing internal struggle in regard to self-identity and self-definition.”8 Laurie feels fully formed with a strong and defiant sense of self, and without a moment’s hesitation, whereas Bart is struggling, pliable, and introspective. He is the film’s conscience, and because this is a noir film, that conscience is mowed over like a steamroller.
Nevertheless, if Bart is impotent within the film language of this movie, where guns seem like a stand-in for sexuality (Bart’s reluctance to actually shoot anything is explained early on in the film), Laurie is anything but. Laurie has the more stereotypically masculine role here. She drives the plot while Bart is driven. This is sadly progressive even by today’s Hollywood storytelling standards, so one can imagine it was doubly so in 1950. Says Bart to Laurie towards the end of the film, by way of his impotence and accompanying shame, “I’m as guilty as you are. I’ve just let you do my killing for me.” As far as shame goes, Laurie doesn’t seem to feel an ounce of it.
Said Cummins, who was always drawn to the roles of Bette Davis, but was often underestimated by casting directors due to her small stature and youthful appearance, “I thought, here’s a chance. It’s not Bette Davis, but it’s near.”9 She definitely has more sex appeal in this than Davis was generally known for, though ironically she lost her role in Forever Amber, because she was deemed not “sexy enough.” Her crazed, take-no-prisoners spirit in this is delightful to behold. Said Cummins decades later, “Until Gun Crazy, I played pretty blonde types, so I loved the idea of this character. This was a meaty part I’d been hoping for.”10
Muller, in his intro to Gun Crazy during his Noir Alley program on TCM, once pronounced Cummins “the tiniest but most ferocious femme fatale in the history of film noir.”11 Coming from an expert on film noir, a genre known for its femme fatales, this is high praise.
The tiniest but most ferocious femme fatale in film noir history.
Footnotes
1 Peggy Cummins, TCM Festival, (April 14, 2012). Hollywood, CA.
2 Peary, Danny. Cult Movies: The Classics, the Sleepers, the Weird, and the Wonderful, Delta Books, 1981.
3 Peary, Danny. Cult Movies: The Classics, the Sleepers, the Weird, and the Wonderful, Delta Books, 1981.
4 Peary, Danny. Cult Movies: The Classics, the Sleepers, the Weird, and the Wonderful, Delta Books, 1981.
5 Peary, Danny. Cult Movies: The Classics, the Sleepers, the Weird, and the Wonderful, Delta Books, 1981.
6 Lawrence Van Gelder, “Joseph H. Lewis, 93, Director Who Turned B-Movies Into Art,” The New York Times, September 13, 2000.
7 Peary, Danny. Cult Movies: The Classics, the Sleepers, the Weird, and the Wonderful, Delta Books, 1981.
8 Peary, Danny. Cult Movies: The Classics, the Sleepers, the Weird, and the Wonderful, Delta Books, 1981.
9 Peggy Cummins in Conversation with Jo Botting, Cinema Museum April 2, 2011.
10 “Peggy Cummins: From Girl Next Door to Evil in a Tight Skirt,” Beautiful Bad and Bizarre, July 29, 2023.
11 Noir Alley, Turner Classic Movies, July 16, 2017.
Edited by Olga Tchepikova-Treon