No, this is not a series devoted entirely to films from 1950 -- I am now singing King Princess' "1950" in my head -- but you wouldn't know it from the first two choices. Joseph H. Lewis' Gun Crazy is the second Knowing Noir entrant from that year after we started last month with In a Lonely Place. ("I love it when we play 1950 ...")
Before I started watching, I had my doubts that this was, in fact, a good entrant for this series, as I thought it had more of a Bonnie & Clyde vibe than an In a Lonely Place vibe. (The former being just a twinkle in someone's eye at that point.)
Then the opening shot of Gun Crazy is a lonely street corner caught in a downpour of rain, and I thought, "All good."
The story does proceed along Bonnie & Clyde lines, but it makes sure to continue employeeing noir tropes so we don't ever forget what kind of film we're watching.
The story involves a man (John Dall) who has been obsessed with guns since he was a kid. (He's played by Russ Tamblyn, Amber's father, as a 14-year-old.) As the title would imply, the obsession is sort of a mania, as we open on him breaking a store window on that rainy night in order to steal a gun on display. He's caught when he stumbles in the rain, and the gun slides over the wet pavement to the foot of a police officer. In court, we see his sister defend him and various flashbacks that establish his initial interest in shooting, and his abhorrence over the idea of killing after he shoots a baby chicken.
Bart Tate wants to make a living involving shooting and becomes interested in a traveling show in which novelty shooting is one of the main attractions. That's also where he meets Laurie (Peggy Cummings), one of the performers, who can shoot cigarettes out of people's mouths and other daring stunts. They have a shoot-off that establishes their mutual love for marksmanship and paves the way for them to become romantically involved, though I had to laugh over the idea of someone coming out of the crowd and being entrusted with a live gun. Even if you could be certain that they would not turn on the audience and start shooting random people, you'd have to then trust that they would be accurate enough not to kill whatever hapless person was on the receiving end of the stunt.
Anyway, it's clear they share an obsession with guns, but Laurie's may not be as comparatively innocent as Bart's. She might not have a problem with killing. In fact, she might sort of like it.
I won't go into specifics on where the story goes, but in order to talk about Laurie's influence on Bart, I'll make suggestions that you could probably infer from your assumptions of how a felt like might play out.
The thing that makes Gun Crazy most resemble a film noir (that opening rainy street corner notwithstanding) is Laurie's classic role as a femme fatale. Bart is not a detective, but he is a guy handy with a gun who has some of the classic character flaws that define a noir protagonist (he has a kind of sweaty addiction to guns, one that makes him hyperventilate a bit) while also having a generally unpoisoned moral compass (he won't kill, even animals). She's established as a bad influence on him right from the start -- not someone with a bad agenda, necessarily, but someone who will enable him in ways he shouldn't be enabled. And her own gun mania is far worse than his, as it turns out.
There were a couple key moments I noticed that seemed like classic femme fatale behavior. When the pair inevitably turn toward crime, as you might have already guessed from my Bonnie & Clyde comparison, it's because they don't have any money, and Laurie tells Bart she can't live on the $40/week he might be able to earn from a legitimate job with his skill set. At one point she also tells him she'll "try to be good," which stood out to me as a confession of her destructive nature.
At the time it was made, Gun Crazy could have probably gotten away with having Laurie solely responsible for Bart's downfall, as we were not as enlightened on gender politics back then as we are today, to say the least. But to the script's credit -- and I just noticed this was written by Dalton Trumbo -- she's a more complicated character than that, mostly supportive and less Lady MacBeth-ish than she could have been. She certainly does steer Bart in wrong directions, but Bart might have been headed in those directions without her help, from what we've seen of him earlier in the movie. He's presented as an addict, and an addict doesn't need much to veer off the course toward recovery.
So this is another way Gun Crazy works really well. The movie happens to be about guns, but it could be about any kind of addiction. Addiction to alcohol was not widely dramatized at the time, which is probably why the best picture winner The Lost Weekend was such a revelation to audiences a few years before this, despite being painfully on-the-nose by today's standards. Gun Crazy much more effectively depicts addiction through an intermediary, guns, an addiction which afflicts far fewer people. Substance addiction is more effectively explored metaphorically than literally.
I ended up surprised at the ways this movie is subtle, given its pulpy presentation. That poster sells it almost as a piece of exploitation, with a title that, while accurate, is very sensationalist in nature. But this is quality filmmaking, not some pre-code B movie as it appears to be. I was particularly impressed by some of the unbroken takes, which involve characters moving from the sidewalk into a vehicle, and the camera following in the back seat of the car as it makes its way down the street, without any edits. (I also like the low angle shot through the steering wheel as they're driving, which seems to underscore their mounting panic -- something The Lost Weekend also would have done a lot more ham-fistedly.)
If we're looking for a final noir touch, which I thought was surely intentional, the movie climaxes in a swampy environment where the characters are hiding. There's a shot where thin fern leaves cast a shadow on their faces, very similar to the width and general appearance of the classic shadow cast on the faces of noir characters by venetian blinds.
Looks like I'm back on track with noir. Since I chose this month's movie when I wrote last month's post, might as well keep that going and commit myself to my March movie now. And that may be the one I'm most in most need of seeing in the whole series, In a Lonely Place notwithstanding. That's 1944's Gaslight, the film that contributed an entire concept to our lexicon, a concept we're all the more familiar with nowadays as we rid ourselves of the stench of Donald Trump, and particularly as we watch him on trial for impeachment.
See you then.
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