Gun Crazy (which a classmate raved about a few years ago in our J.D. Connor class -- I should've listened to him) is technically a B-picture, but it doesn't feel like one. It's full of clever, visually stunning shots, like a gumball machine being shattered by a bullet (the opening of the duo's first robbery - which is not coincidentally preceded by a love scene and a filmy dissolve). Doing some research, I discovered that the screenplay was ghostwritten by Dalton Trumbo, and it's pretty good as noir scripts go. But what's most interesting for me is the comparison to one of my all-time favorites, and one of the films Harris focuses on, Arthur Penn's Bonnie and Clyde.
While I still like Bonnie and Clyde better -- you might say it's a major work, while Gun Crazy is a great minor work -- watching the B-picture made me reexamine the other film. Gun Crazy's Peggy Cummins and John Dall are no Faye Dunaway and Warren Beatty (who is?). They're both good-looking ordinary people, not movie stars. They don't have the innate glamour of a slip-clad Dunaway leaning in the doorway (who does? Though Dunaway had help from the great costumer Theodora van Runkle, who I'll talk about in an upcoming post on great costume designers.) The only time they're remotely glamorous is when they come in contact with their shared obsession: guns. Cummins' character Annie is a sharpshooter who performs at fairs. When Bart Tare (played by Dall), first sees her, she brings a strange intensity to her shoot-'em-up routine that immediately attracts him.
They bond over their love of guns and soon begin robbing stores and banks to fund their free-wheeling lifestyle. But unlike Bonnie and Clyde, they're, well, kinda awkward. For example -- getting ready to rob a grocery store, Bart gripes about trying to find a parking space.* Even their heist targets are sort of lame. And Bart, who's clearly the more conflicted of the two, keeps trying to get them back in the straight life.
Gun Crazy's alternate title is Deadly Is the Female, and the film's take on the femme fatale is particularly interesting. Noir femme fatales are usually glamorpusses along the lines of Barbara Stanwyck in Double Indemnity, Gloria Grahame in In a Lonely Place, or Rita Hayworth in Gilda. But Annie is plain - no turbans or lamé gowns here - and bordering on pathetic. She's constantly begging Bart to stay with her, and almost nagging him to commit the crimes. Not only is it a bold break from noir tradition, but it actually seems believable. She's more of a fully realized character than those untouchable femmes fatales who walked straight out of a Raymond Chandler novel. And instead of hypnotizing the man, she merely brings out violent tendencies that were already there. Bart is shown as a young boy** playing with guns and being obsessed with them, and Annie just brings out his obsession further. His evolution, or I guess, devolution as a character is more understandable because he was already "gun crazy."
But what does this have to do with Bonnie and Clyde? Arthur Penn and the film's screenwriters had an arduous time bringing it to the screen, and directors from Francois Truffaut to Jean-Luc Godard and even Warren Beatty himself were originally attached. (However, both New Wave icons proved flaky, and Beatty figured he couldn't be producer, director and star all in one -- a rare lapse in ego for him.) And during that period of time, the film changed. Originally, it was heavily inspired by the French New Wave, but the end product is more naturalistic. The most memorable scene is, of course, the final shootout. It stands out not just because of the gore, but because it's the first time we see the duo for what they are -- small-time, unglamorous criminals, who die slowly and awkwardly. Despite the fame they've built up in the heartland and their considerable charisma, we can't help but see them as human in this scene as they're bleeding before us. I love Godard and like what I've seen of Truffaut, but it strikes me that if either of them had been involved this would have been an exercise in style, not substance. What's poignant about the final scene is that it undercuts what we've seen up till that point. We see Bonnie and Clyde for who they are, and they're something like Bart and Annie: small-time, pathetic, relatable, and in love.
*According to imdb, this line was improvised. In fact, the film was shot on such a shoestring budget that the man exclaiming about a robbery in the background was a townsperson who really thought a robbery was going on.
**In a bit of movie-buff bliss, young Bart is played by Russ Tamblyn pre-West Side Story.
P.S.: I should probably mention another of my favorites in this genre: Badlands. The Terence Malick flick is based on a different pair of criminals, but has a lot in common with the other two films. Unfortunately, it's so beautiful it's almost hard to write about logically. I'll just say that it's the slower, muter, dreamier version of Bonnie and Clyde, and I like it just as much, I'd say.
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