Gun Crazy (1950)

In light of last year's Trumbo, AFI is playing a bunch of movies with screenplays written by Dalton Trumbo. Thanks to the blacklist, GC and some others did not put him in the credits at the time. (I wonder how Millard Kaufman felt about being Trumbo's front.)

From early childhood, Bart (played by John Dall in adulthood and up-and-comer Russ Tamblyn at 14) loves guns but not violence against living things. His obsession still gets him in trouble, particularly when he burglarizes a closed gun shop. After special education and service in the U.S. Army, presumably without seeing battle, he meets a female sharpshooter in a traveling show, Annie (Peggy Cummins). He matches her skill and joins the show until they both have a falling-out with the manager. Despite multiple warnings against it, Bart marries Annie, unaware that she has a history of armed robbery and will pressure him into it to support her greed.

In the first several rapid-fire (NPI) minutes, I figured that the moral of the story would be "Stay away from guns or you'll end up like this." If so, it's sloppy: The path he takes is hardly an inevitable logical upshot. Incidentally, the original title was Deadly Is the Female, which suggests a worse moral yet. I like to think that Dalton and co-writer MacKinlay Kantor meant nothing too sweeping in either case; they just wanted a crime drama and devised a setup. (I'm not convinced it counts as film noir.)

Viewers can hardly avoid thinking of Bonnie and Clyde. I stop short of declaring it a retelling of B&C. After all, Bart isn't exactly happy to rob people and doesn't approve of shooting them. Even shooting a tire on a moving police car gives him cold sweats. Why does he do it? Because love can be irrational that way. You might say the real conflict in this piece (NPI) is internal as Bart struggles to handle a bad situation as comfortably as possible.

Action-packed? For the time, I suppose. It gets more interesting near the end, when Bart returns to his old neighborhood but clearly "can't go home again." Also interesting is the makers' decision to stage a robbery without telling everyone outside the bank: You can hear a bystander honestly mistaking it for the real thing.

Apart from Trumbo and Tamblyn, I hadn't heard of anyone involved in the film before. Cummins does a fine job, even if she's not Veronica Lake like the director wanted. People have more trouble accepting Dall, who seems too preppy to make such a quick turn to crime.

I kept feeling like the plot was a little too sparse, yet it's really no more so than in many flicks I enjoy. What's the holdup (NPI)? Maybe the fast pacing got me to expect more. Or maybe the others excel on enough levels for me to overlook their weaknesses.

Overall, I find GC slightly above par for the course at best. If only it didn't have the misfortune to remind us repeatedly of bigger and better fare.