Growing up a second-generation movie nut in the days before home video meant helping Dad gather 16mm films from a sometimes bewildering array of resources. Not to mention a gaggle of Hollywood fringe people, hustlers, shut-ins and mom's-basement-dwellers. Among these people, there were a handful of movies they hadn't seen in ages but that they discussed in reverant tones, as they recalled when and where they first saw them. One was Joseph H. Lewis' "Gun Crazy" from 1949 (also known as "Deadly Is The Female").
It's a Bonnie and Clyde type story: two gun-obsessed lovers (John Dall, Peggy Cummings) embark on a crime spree with typically tragic results. What makes this B movie something worth seeking out (and these days that's as simple as plunking down $15 at deepdiscountdvd.com) is what Joseph H. Lewis, cinematographer Russell Harlan and the cast do with it.
Lewis was one of those directors who could do a lot with a little, and I'd argue that if he had had any real money to work with, his films wouldn't have been as good. He kept his pacing tight--there's no fat on any of his pictures. And he did some crazy inventive stuff to stretch his budgets. "Gun Crazy" features the perfect example: a single-shot bank robbery sequence (with the camera in the back seat of the getaway car) that plays more like TV's "Cops" than it does a late-Forties motion picture. It's a stunning piece of film that has been imitated or ripped off countless times in movies that spent more on catering than this film's total cost. And that's just one example: this is one of the best-looking B movies ever, filled with bizarre camera angles and weird lighting.
As an adult with a swelling DVD collection, I've had a chance to see a lot of the obscure films my dad and his collector buddies were such fans of.* Unfortunately, few of them have lived up to the years of movie-geek hype I was subjected to. "Gun Crazy" does. In fact, I think they undersold it. What's more, it even holds up to the psycho-babble and over-analysis film scholars have heaped upon it to since film noir became a big deal in the Seventies.
Other Jospeh H. Lewis pictures worth checking out: "Invisible Ghost"(1941) with Bela Lugosi, "The Big Combo" (1955) and the incredible Sterling Hayden western "Terror In A Texas Town" (1958). Good stuff.
* That availability has to be the true benefit of the home video revolution, with the downside being that we now see great works like "Citizen Kane" on the same box we use to view "Celebrity Fit Club." There's something troubling about that.
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