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Directed by Joseph H. Lewis

Genre: Crime / Drama / Film Noir

Joseph H. Lewis' Gun Crazy is a stylish example of the doomed-lovers-on-the-run subgenre inspired by real-life outlaws Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow, and one of the best B movies ever made.

Fourteen-year-old Bart Tare is sent to reform school for stealing a gun. Back home after a hitch in the army, the adult Bart (John Dall) falls for carnival sharpshooter Laurie (Peggy Cummins) and joins the show. But the lovers soon find themselves out of work and drift into a life of crime, for which Laurie shows a feral aptitude. She eventually commits murder during a heist, and the law--including Bart's boyhood friend, Clyde (Harry Lewis), now a sheriff--begins to close inexorably in.

"We go together like guns and ammunition," says Bart to Laurie: this film was among the first in the US to make explicit the symbiotic connection between sex and violence, as well as the worship of guns and their role in American culture. It revels in Bart and Laurie's perverse psychology and the nihilistic aspects of their escapades, and Lewis made the most of his leads, playing off Dall's air of ambiguous sexuality and mental instability (as did Alfred Hitchcock in ROPE) and the Welsh-born Cummins' unbridled carnality. Director Joseph H. Lewis is one of the great, unsung stylists of the American cinema. The film's four-minute bank robbery sequence is a tour-de-force shot in one continuous take from the back of the car, as the lovers talk while driving into town, park, get out, steal the money, beat up a cop, jump back into the car, and speed away. Lewis' sophisticated visual style is evident throughout in his use of deep focus, long takes, ornate compositions, and odd angles, punctuated by swift, violent camera movements and rapid cutting that signify the relationships of characters and their state of mind. The film was based on a magazine article by MacKinlay Kantor; one of the scenarists was uncredited blacklistee Dalton Trumbo.

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