| Chris Polley |
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.
Planting a flagpole in the ground? That’s a phallus. Shredding a guitar on stage? That’s a phallus. Cocking a revolver and pointing it at a cashier with a lusty grin of power and control on your face, side by side with your gun-toting lover? You better believe that’s a phallus.
It’s essentially a sacred rite of any humanities undergrad to suddenly see (and never be able to unsee) phallic imagery in nearly every patriarchal text or symbol, from the iconic and obvious (the Washington Monument) to the more artistically intentional and refined (H.R. Giger’s infamous creature designs that became embedded into the Alien franchise). It was Freud, however, who arguably was the first sicko to identify the firearm as an extension of manhood and manifest destiny, giving some discomforting but real analysis of the symbol’s everlasting (not to mention destructive) impact on American culture. Nowhere is this more true than in the enduring genre of crime narratives, and Joseph H. Lewis’s 1950 noir Gun Crazy is perhaps the landmark film that acted as an official mid-century pivot from the phallus as subtext to just straight-up text.
A simple tale of lovers on the lam, what makes the romance of wayward ex-military man Bart Tare (John Dall) and circus sharpshooter Annie Laurie Starr (Peggy Cummins) so compelling all these years later is—for one—its brash, in-your-face storytelling and camerawork. Film noir scholar Eddie Muller says of the film in an interview with Hollywood Soapbox, “Its more subtle influence was in starting, albeit subversively, to erode the constraints of the Production Code in regards to depicting amoral behavior by young attractive protagonists.”1 Written by blacklisted script savant Dalton Trumbo under a pseudonym, and based on a short story by future Pulitzer Prize winner MacKinley Kantor, nearly every scene in the lean 87-minute potboiler is brimming with evocative pistol imagery and sensual looks of desire that errs just enough on the side of technically inexplicit to fool the Hays censors.
The lascivious and recalcitrant spirit of the film cemented its place in film history despite the onslaught of crime yarns in postwar America made by bigger-name directors and featuring bigger-faced movie stars. “Famously, François Truffaut arranged a screening of Gun Crazy in 1964 for eventual Bonnie and Clyde writers Robert Benton and David Newman, who were unaware that the kinetic style they wanted their own outlaw story to imitate did not originate in France, but Hollywood’s B-movie backlots,”2 divulges Beatrice Loayza for the British Film Institute. Its lurid cheapness only helped its status grow and become the gold standard for auteurs, especially those like Arthur Penn and Martin Scorsese who became known for their preoccupation with evil acts not as trauma-induced tragedy, but as disturbingly natural—human, even.
Bart and Laurie, like most anti-heroes of the time period, find unmistakable pleasure in violence, but in true noir fashion, Laurie is the femme fatale with bloodlust bursting from her eyes and fingertips, while Bart’s fixations mainly involve the eponymous weapon and the power it wields, as seen in the film’s prologue where Bart is sent to reform school after impulsively stealing a handgun from a hardware store. In both cases, though, their predilections are stepped in immaturity. Ed Grant explains in Time, “Lewis pulled out all the stops, letting his visuals convey a feeling of uninhibited youth—what [founding film critic for the Los Angeles READER] Myron Meisel labeled ‘the dizziness of irresponsibility.’”3 Make no mistake: Gun Crazy is just as much focused on the insanity brought on by a culture obsessed with youthful rebellion as it is a rebellious film in its own right.
Of course, it’s no coincidence that both a rifle and a camera (not to mention human phallic reproductive organs) “shoot” in the English language. The director often gets lost in the same sauce their subjects do, succumbing to the inebriation inherent in bringing even the darkest of fantasies to life on screen. “Lewis does not submit action to psychology,”4 screenwriter (and, later on, full-on auteur filmmaker in his own right) Paul Schrader writes in a 1971 retrospective of the film. “The action has a life of its own, and the characters often do not have time to fully contemplate or understand why they are its victims.” Lewis inserts the camera into the fray forcefully but also without judgment, gliding over Laurie’s legs or letting Bart play avatar for the viewer while grinning in the audience of Laurie’s one-markswoman-show in the big tent. Robert Keser posits for Senses of Cinema, “When Lewis floats his camera over Peggy Cummin’s freshly bathed body and down to her waiting mouth, we are not just inhabiting her lover’s viewpoint but find ourselves in some realm of abstract carnality.”5 There’s no question as to why either of these maniacs fall for each other, or why they’d risk it all for one more erotic robbery that ends with a vertiginous embrace and racing off into the sunset in a convertible (another piece of sleek metal often seen as a symbol of overcompensation).
Gun Crazy was a harbinger of more than just rampant gun lust (and good ol’ regular lust too) in cinema, naturally. Especially in 2025, looking back on the glint of lunacy in Bart’s eyes, or the detached coolness in Laurie’s, it becomes painfully clear that it had American society pegged as a whole from frame one. “The film (and later incarnations) would parallel a U.S. history of continuous military interventions, massive gun and arms industry, lucrative international weapons trade, and media culture saturated with guns, crime, and every imaginable type of violence,”6 Carl Boggs theorizes for Counterpunch. This may seem like quite the leap from black-and-white sleaze to full-scale imperialism, but it’s hard to argue when so many of us lived through domestic terrors if not the foreign ones. From Columbine to Sandy Hook alone, the thesis of firearms as fetish, gunfire as act of domination is an unassailable one to at least half of today’s America. The other half? Well, they’re the reason we don’t learn much from anything nowadays.
Footnotes
1 John Soltes, “INTERVIEW: Noir expert Eddie Muller discusses legacy of ‘Gun Crazy’,” Hollywood Soapbox. 3 June 2015.
2 Beatrice Loayza, “Killers in the mist: the final scene of Gun Crazy,” BFI. 7 June 2021.
3 Ed Grant, “Art on a Budget: Joseph H. Lewis,” Time. 31 October 2000.
4 Paul Schrader, “Three Articles, an Interview and Filmography: Joseph H. Lewis,” Cinema. Fall 1971.
5 Robert Keser, “Lewis, Joseph H.,” Senses of Cinema. November 2006.
6 Carl Boggs, “Gun Crazy: Life and Times in the Warfare State,” Counterpunch. 5 March 2018.
Edited by Olga Tcehpikova-Treon