Movie: Gun Crazy (1949)
B-Movie Film Noir Masterpiece Mixes Sex, Crime and Gun Obsessions
Jul 22, 2008
Bonnie and Clyde is rightly hailed as one of the counterculture classics that changed everything. Among other accomplishments, it helped mark the emergence of genuine anti-heroes and the effective end of genteel American moviemaking in which blood was spilled but rarely seen.
But this landmark film owes a gigantic debt to Gun Crazy, which was shot for about $58 and starred two unknowns and a director little noted then or now, except by movie geeks.
The connection is no accident. Robert Benton wrote Bonnie and Clyde with David Newman. He told author Suzanne Finstad that acclaimed French director Francois Truffaut insisted they study "Gun Crazy" before embarking on the now-classic 60s film. (“Warren Beatty: A Private Man,” by Suzanne Finstad, Harmony Books, 2005)
And the parallels are striking.
Bonnie and Clyde Similarities
Each film concerns a run-amok man-and-woman team of ruthless bandits. Each contains a sexual component to the gunplay.
Both female leads are working class blondes, and each favors a beret which makes her appear stylish beyond her station in life.
Both couples lead lives of crazy desperation, cat-and-mouse chases and grisly ends.
And both bring a romantic fatalism now de rigueur to anti-heroic films today.
John Dall and Peggy Cummins Co-Star
Gun Crazy Director Joseph Lewis was talented but second-tier. He nonetheless wrangled remarkable performances out of stage actor John Dall (as the ineffectual Bart Tare) and obscure British actress Peggy Cummins (playing the spitfire Annie Laurie Starr).
Dall is best remembered today as half of the murderous gay couple in Hitchcock’s experimental “Rope,” released a year before “Gun Crazy.” And Cummins? Sadly, she’s not remembered for much of anything, except perhaps the B horror movie “Night of the Demon” – itself fairly obscure – from 1958.
The great Dalton Trumbo wrote the film, but didn’t get screen credit until recent years when the once-blacklisted writer’s name was restored as the screenplay’s primary author.
Sexual Desire
Where “Gun Crazy” and “Bonnie and Clyde” diverge is an actual or implied sexual relationship. Warren Beatty’s Clyde Barrow was admittedly impotent. That in itself a compromise from the fact some historians believe the real Barrow was gay.
But the sex and eroticism in “Gun Crazy” are key to the characters’ motivations and actions. Just their obsession with shooting reveals how they equate gunplay with foreplay.
Again, no accident. According to author Danny Peary in Cult Movies I (Dell Publishing, 1981), Director Lewis specifically instructed his leads to think raw, nasty sex just before shooting their “cute meet” at a carnival.
Late in the film, the couple checks into a Santa Monica, California hotel room. The sexual implication is clear – and pretty radical stuff for 1949.
One debate among fans of the film involves Annie Laurie and whether she really loves Bart, or is just using him – for sex and profit.
But it’s a moot point, because their demise – atop a fog-shrouded mountain at dawn, the search dogs howling off-camera, Bart’s terror-stricken eyes forming a perfect counterpoint to Annie Laurie’s rage – is pitch-perfect in its depiction of love as sacrifice.
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