DVD Review: Joseph H. Lewis’s Gun Crazy on Warner Home Video

So .38-caliber erections aren’t exactly as subversive as they once used to be. Gun Crazy is still drenched in Lewis’s B-movie finery.

Gun CrazyIt’s actually a damned good thing that Joseph H. Lewis, proud member of Andrew Sarris’s clan of “Expressive Esoterica,” had as exciting a visual flair and as much a taste for zero-flab pacing as he did. Otherwise, Gun Crazy, his 1949 “pre-Bonnie & Clyde” would be an hour and a half of two lovers on the lam stroking their own Phallic symbols.

John Dall plays the adult version of Bart Tare. But in the prologue section of the film, Bart is shown as a child (played by Rusty Tamblyn) caught stealing a revolver from a gun shop window display. The extended hearing sequence shows, through flashbacks, that Bart might have displayed poor judgment in trying to steal the gun, and he might have a strong fixation on his growing collection of firearms, but he’s psychologically incapable of doing harm to other living creatures. (You do the math, dime-store Freud scholars.)

Bart is sent to reformatory and, then, to the military. Upon his release (Dall is a lanky with the same little-boy mop-top as Tamblyn—expert casting on Lewis’s part), he and his boyhood chums take in a gun show at the local carnival, and it’s the swaggering Annie Laurie Starr (Peggy Cummins) and her sharp-shooting show that captures his eye. They get married and things swiftly go downhill: bank robberies, betrayals, and eventually flirtation with murder.

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Gun Crazy itself flirts with misogyny (not that 95% of film noirs weren’t guilty, on the surface, of the same), and unlike any number of Raymond Chandler knock-offs of the era, its dialogue sort of rolls over and dies in the mouths of Dall and Cummings (who frequently sounds like a morose, tanked-up Judy Garland). But it’s easy to see why auteurists like Sarris insist even today (when psychosexual interpretations of gunplay come off as a punchline rather than serious foreplay) in holding up the film as a model of directorial expression.

Lewis, through sheer force of will, turns the Mackinlay Kantor and Millard Kaufman script’s easy ways out (“I told you I’m a bad girl, didn’t I?”) into the essence of blunt, adolescent sexual flowering. Wild, wam-bam pacing (early heavy petting) eventually matures into the film’s most memorable sequence: a one-take robbery sequence taken from the back seat of the getaway car, a stunning tour de force that’s Lewis’s cinematographic slow fuck.

Image/Sound

Most aren’t aware that B-movies actually looked a great deal better and fresher than their A-list counterparts. So it’s a relief that Warner’s transfers for their Film Noir Collection are as crisp as a stack of unlaundered fraudulent bills. Noir levels (I crack myself up) are mostly solid throughout (the fog sequence looks like it might have been snipped one too many times for various compilations and showcase reels). Overall, it looks stunning. The mono sound is clear (the voices are almost too clear), and the only complaint I have is that the volume seems to have a particularly wide range so that some dialogue-only sequences have to be boosted manually to catch every word, to be followed with a hasty switch back down when the swelling music score crescendos.

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Extras

Warner did not go as all out on the extras as they did with their transfer. But the single extra on the disc is a generous one: a commentary track from “film noir specialist” Glenn Erickson. His track is professional, smooth, and informative. He doesn’t exactly radiate personality, but his take on certain sequences is very helpful: comparing the one-take sequence to Hitchcock’s Rope, noting and admitting to the film’s simple schematic for the role of women (doting wife or black widow), and explicating Lewis’s career expertly. A solid track, making the absence of a doc featurette much less of an issue.

Overall

So .38-caliber erections aren’t exactly as subversive as they once used to be. Gun Crazy is still drenched in Joseph H. Lewis’s B-movie finery.

Score: 
 Cast: Peggy Cummings, John Dall, Berry Kroeger, Morris Carnovsky, Anabel Shaw, Harry Lewis, Nedrick Young, Rusty Tamblyn  Director: Joseph H. Lewis  Screenwriter: Mackinlay Kantor, Millard Kaufman  Distributor: Warner Home Video  Running Time: 87 min  Rating: NR  Year: 1949  Release Date: July 6, 2004  Buy: Video

Eric Henderson

Eric Henderson is the web content manager for WCCO-TV. His writing has also appeared in City Pages.

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