Gun Crazy ***** (1949, John Dall, Peggy Cummins, Berry Kroeger) – Classic Movie Review 2566

‘We go together, Laurie. I don’t know why. Maybe like guns and ammunition go together.’

Director Joseph H Lewis’s 1949 film noir favourite stars John Dall as gun-loving Barton ‘Bart’ Tare, a World War Two veteran who teams up with the equally disturbed carnival markswoman Laurie Starr (Peggy Cummins) as husband and wife. Prompted by the greedy and violent Laurie, they then set off on a daring Bonnie and Clyde-style cross-country bank-robbing and shooting crime spree.

Director Lewis’s dynamic and inventive low-budget cult classic still packs a hefty punch. Surprisingly in its lean 88 minutes and spare B-movie shooting, Lewis finds the time and inclination to develop the psychology of his characters while concentrating on slap-up action sequences.

The movie is extremely smart in developing its typical 40s film noir theme of lovers on the run and characters doomed by their warped psychology, making it haunting and special.

This is a vintage B-movie gangster thriller, with career-best performances from Dall and Cummins, who are ideal as the weak-willed male and tough and tarty female leads, obsessed with guns. It was surely an influence on Bonnie and Clyde itself.

Russ Tamblyn, then called Rusty, plays the Dall character as a 14-year-old kid. Also in the cast are Berry Kroeger, Morris Carnovsky, Anabel Shaw, Nedrick Young, Trevor Bardette, Paul Frison, Virginia Farmer, Anne O’Neal, Francis Irwin, Don Beddoe, Robert Osterloh and Harry Hayden.

The original 1940 The Saturday Evening Post short story is by MacKinlay Kantor, who also wrote the screenplay with the blacklisted Dalton Trumbo, who had to hide his identity under the front of pseudonym Millard Kaufman. Trumbo was responsible for reworking the crime story into one of a doomed love affair.

The bank heist sequence was shot in one long take in Montrose, California, with only the main actors and people in the bank in the know. The actors improvised their dialogue.

Lewis said he instructed Cummins: ‘You’re a female dog in heat and you want him. But keep him waiting.’

It was remade by Tamra Davis as Guncrazy in 1992 with Drew Barrymore and James LeGros.

Peggy Cummins (1925–2017).

Peggy Cummins died on 29 December 2017, aged 92.

© Derek Winnert 2015 Classic Movie Review 2566

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