I first saw "Gun Crazy" at some point in my early to mid twenties and it didn't make a lasting impression, This isn't a reflection of the quality of the picture, so much as it is another piece of evidence proving I was an idiot for much of that decade. In a way, though, that's appropriate, as it's a picture about being young and stupid, specifically when it comes to love and the choices it forces us to make before we've lived and learned to know better.
We open on a rainy corner and young Rusty Tamblyn, as Bart, breaking the front window of a store so that he can steal a gun. See, this kid is crazy obsessed with gun's, to the point he's unable to function without one in his life. If this were today, the kid would certainly be on some kind of watch list and be going to therapy five day's a week. At the court hearing for his crime we flashback to Bart bringing his gun to school and the kid's gathering around to ogle it. It's a jarring scene to view through a modern filter and all the intervening year's of tragedy and caution. Bart's sister pleads his case, saying that although her brother might be gun crazy, the one thing he won't do is harm anything. In order to illustrate this we flashback to young Bart shooting a baby chick and becoming overwhelmed with grief when it dies. It's a simple, yet profound document of the moment in one boy's life when he learned he has the power to kill and how awful it makes him feel, anticipating Peckinpah's penchant for intertwining death imagery with childhood.
Bart's story picks up year's later after he has graduated reform school and done a tour in the army. He celebrates his new freedom by- what else- shooting gun's with his buddies and then heading to a carnival where they take in a performance by sharpshooter Annie Laurie Starr (Peggy Cummins). Bart is captivated by this hot blonde who shares his affection for ballistic machinery, and, after winning a shooting contest against her, he joins the show as a performer.
The two gunslinger's fall for each other, but the carnival owner, Packett (Barry Kroeger), tries to get in Laurie's way. Seems he thinks he's got a claim to her, something about a dead guy in St. Louis. Laurie thinks otherwise, and soon there's two unemployed sharpshooter's on the road. "I've got a funny feeling I want to be good. I don't know, maybe I can't", Laurie says to Bart before their late night wedding chapel marriage. Being young, dumb and horny, Bart pins his hopes on this pretty dame, naively assuming he's the one with the shameful past.
But, Laurie is a hardened survivor who's been around. Cummins is perfect as a woman who is ice cold, materialistic and makes no bone's about it. She begins wearing away at Bart's moral code, and the two set off on a stick-up spree. John Dall ,as Bart, perfectly exudes the right combo of boyish innocence and romantic hopefulness of a schmuck in love with a morally absent femme fatale, who's too stupid to leave.
The scenes of the couple running from their various job's contain some of the most iconic "Bonnie and Clyde" type imagery ever captured on film. There's a modest grit to Joseph Lewis' shot compositions; he has a gift for expressive close-up's and simple camera move's . The film's centerpiece, an extended one-take scene of a bank job shot from the backseat, with realistic, banal improvised dialogue, is a thrilling marvel of simple, efficient technique and staging. Just as de Toth does at the start of "Crime Wave", Lewis forces the audience into the role of voyeuristic co-conspirator.
If you're going to make a robbery picture, you gotta have cool outfit's. It's a time honored tradition as exemplified by film's like "The Killing", "Reservoir Dogs", "Point Break" and countless others. Lewis understands that the aesthetics of wardrobe are important to the genre and dresses his leads in various disguises, most memorably their carny cowboy outfit's and their sunglasses and trench coat get up's. He uses wardrobe to illustrate the moral compromise that has overtaken Bart when he shows him wearing a stolen military outfit, when he once honestly wore his own uniform. Conversely, the couple's costume western attire takes on a new meaning when they become real life outlaws right out of the Old West. "Sometimes it doesn't feel like me", says Bart about his new life.
"You're the only thing that is [real], Laurie. The rest is a nightmare.", he says to his vicious, cut-throat blonde bride. She's a tough broad who's decided to survive on her own term's, and who presents herself as the only reward Bart should need for the felonious quicksand she has led him neck deep into. At it's heart this is a film about that first relationship with someone who was wrong for you, but you didn't care and instead you did stupid shit even though you knew better; it's a film about how love can corrupt.
As a final job they decide to knock off the Armour factory payroll. Laurie ice's a couple people during their getaway- a teeth grindingly intense sequence. I don't know that I've ever heard the selfish inanity of crime so succinctly described as when Bart says, "Two people died, just so we can live without working." It's a hell of a line, in a hell of a script, written by Dalton Trumbo, a hell of a writer, who at the time was on the blacklist because he wasn't a rat.
With all bad relationship's, eventually they have have to meet the family, and that never goes well, and it certainly doesn't when Bart and Laurie hide at his sister's in an attempt to duck the law on their tails. Neither does Bart listen when his friend's try and talk some sense into him. The picture ends with the couple's flight from inevitability into the mountains. Winded and dirty they try and stay ahead of the siren's and dog's. Even nature conspires against them as the high altitude robs them of their breath, They become immersed in the disorienting fog of their marriage as the the ending approaches.
"Gun Crazy" is a story of unhealthy romance, perfect for a cynic's Valentine's Day. It's a story of how blind affection can change us for the worse and where incautious devotion can lead. And it's about the time in your life when you couldn't give a damn about any of that jazz.
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