The Annotated Pauline Kael¹: Gun Crazy (Joseph H. Lewis, 1950)

John Dall and Peggy Cummins in Gun Crazy

Annie Laurie Starr: Peggy Cummins
Barton Tare: John Dall
Packett: Berry Kroeger
Judge Willoughby: Morris Carnovsky
Ruby Tare Flagler: Anabel Shaw
Clyde Boston: Harry Lewis
Dave Allister: Nedrick Young
Bart Tare (age 14): Russ Tamblyn
Bluey-Bluey: Stanley Prager
Miss Wynn: Virginia Farmer
Miss Augustine Sifert: Anne O'Neal

Director: Joseph H. Lewis
Screenplay: MacKinlay Kantor, Dalton Trumbo (credited to Millard Kaufman)
Based on a story by MacKinlay Kantor
Cinematography: Russell Harlan
Production design: Gordon Wiles
Film editing: Harry W. Gerstad
Music: Victor Young

Gun Crazy   Originally called Deadly Is the Female. (1949)² -- Peggy Cummins and John Dall in a tawdry³ version of the Bonnie and Clyde⁴ story. Cummins is a really mean broad,⁵ whose partner is her desperately eager victim.⁶ In its B-picture way, it has a fascinating crumminess.⁷ With Morris Carnovsky, Berry Kroeger, Annabelle Shaw, and Don Beddoe.⁸ Directed by Joseph H. Lewis, from a screenplay based on MacKinlay Kantor's SatEvePost story, and credited to Kantor and Millard Kaufman. Dalton Trumbo, who was blacklisted at the time, later revealed that he wrote the script and persuaded Kaufman to let his name be used. Produced by Frank and Maurice King; released by United Artists. b & w 

-- from 5001 Nights at the Movies, 1982

¹From time to time, maybe, I thought it might be fun to break format and reprint some of Pauline Kael's reviews as a basis for my own reactions to specific movies I've just watched. Why Kael? Because she's still synonymous with film criticism from her heyday as the New Yorker's chief film critic in the 1970s and '80s. Some of her critiques no longer seem on point -- I don't value Nashville (Robert Altman, 1975) or Last Tango in Paris (Bernardo Bertolucci, 1972) nearly as highly as she does, and I think more highly of "art-house" directors like Michelangelo Antonioni than she does -- but they are always provocative even when dated.

²It was made in the spring of 1949 but not released until January 1950.

³I wouldn't call Gun Crazy "tawdry" in any sense of the word. Its production values are solid: Russell Harlan was a first-rate cinematographer, with six Oscar nominations (though no wins); film editor Harry W. Gerstad won his first Oscar in 1950 for Champion (Mark Robson, 1949) and another for High Noon (Fred Zinneman, 1952); and composer Victor Young was nominated 19 times and won (posthumously) for Around the World in 80 Days (Michael Anderson, 1956). Even when it ventures into sleazy locations like the carnival where Bart meets Laurie, the sleaze is kept to a minimum.

⁴An obvious comparison after the 1967 Arthur Penn film, though there's not much evidence that anyone connected with that movie had seen Gun Crazy, which fell into obscurity until auteurist critics discovered it.

⁵Granted, she's a killer, which Bart isn't, but as "mean broads" go, Laurie is really something of a softie: She stands by her man even after their initial decision to go their separate ways after the meat-packing plant robbery, and she could have ditched Bart at any time.

⁶Yes, this description of Bart works, even though I don't think John Dall and the screenwriters put together a wholly convincing character. Would any guy who had gone through reform school and the army really be so naïve as to fall so hard for a carnival dame, no matter if she looks like Peggy Cummins? The problem lies mainly in the simplistic psychology of Bart's gun craziness: He loves them but doesn't realize what they're really for other than shooting at bottles and tin cans. You'd think he'd be smart enough to realize that armed robbery is going to to lead to someone's getting hurt.

⁷Kael was never impressed with film technique as such, which is what so many of us find fascinating about Gun Crazy. It makes brilliant use of locations like the Armour meat-packing plant (actually in Los Angeles, not Albuquerque), and the long take, shot from the back seat of the car, in which Laurie distracts a cop while Bart commits a robbery, is breathtaking. It's also notable for the actual driving scenes -- most B-pictures would resort to process screens to show what's outside the car. There's nothing "crummy" about these sequences. I think the B-picture label occurs to Kael mainly because the producers, the King brothers, specialized in cheapies, and this is the only film by director Joseph H. Lewis that still gets much respect from anyone other than hardcore cinéastes. Still, it was tapped for the Library of Congress's National Film Registry in 1998 on the strength of its later reputation.

⁸Don Beddoe? A familiar character actor but he just has an uncredited bit as "Man from Chicago" in the film. More interesting is the appearance of Russ Tamblyn as the young Bart Tare. Tamblyn is one of the few child stars who survived adolescence for a later career: He's best known for his athletic dancing in Seven Brides for Seven Brothers (Stanley Donen, 1954) and West Side Story (Jerome Robbins, Robert Wise, 1961) and later for playing Dr. Lawrence Jacoby in David Lynch's Twin Peaks TV series. The problem is that because we know the grownup Tamblyn, it's clear that the kid couldn't grow up to look like John Dall. But nobody knew that at the time, just as nobody knew that Mickey Rooney wouldn't grow up to look like Clark Gable when he played the younger version of Blackie Gallagher in Manhattan Melodrama (W.S. Van Dyke, 1934).

Rope (Alfred Hitchcock, 1948)

Montage, the assembling of discrete segments of film for dramatic effect, is what makes movies an art form distinct from just filmed theater. Which is why it's odd that so many filmmakers have been tempted to experiment with abandoning montage and simply filming the action and dialogue in continuity. Long takes and tracking shots do have their place in a movie: Think of the suspense built in the opening scene in Orson Welles's Touch of Evil (1958), an extended tracking shot that follows a car with a bomb in it for almost three and a half minutes until the bomb explodes. Or the way Michael Haneke introduces his principal characters with a nine-minute traveling shot in Code Unknown (2000). Or, to consider the ultimate extreme of anti-montage filmmaking, the scenes in Chantal Akerman's Jeanne Dielman, 23 Commerce Quay, 1080 Brussels (1975), in which the camera not only doesn't move for minutes on end, but characters also walk out of frame, leaving the viewer to contemplate only the banality of the rooms in which the title character lives her daily life. But these shots are only part of the films in question: Eventually, Welles and Haneke and even Akerman are forced to cut from one scene to another to tell a story. Alfred Hitchcock was intrigued with the possibility of making an entire movie without cuts. He couldn't bring it off because of technological limitations: Film magazines of the day held only ten minutes' worth of footage, and movie projectors could show only 20 minutes at a time before reels needed to be changed. In Rope, Hitchcock often works around these limitations by artificial blackouts in which a character's back fills the frame to mask the cut, but he sometimes makes an unmasked quick cut to a character entering the room -- a kind of blink-and-you-miss-it cut.* But for most of the film, we are watching the action in real time, as we would on a stage. Rope began as a play, of course, in 1929, when Patrick Hamilton's thinly disguised version of the 1924 Leopold and Loeb murder case was staged in London. Hitchcock, who had almost certainly seen it on stage, asked Hume Cronyn to adapt it for the screen and then brought in Arthur Laurents to write the screenplay. To accomplish his idea of filming it as a continuous action, he worked with two cinematographers, William V. Skall and Joseph A. Valentine, and a crew of camera operators whose names are listed -- uniquely for the time -- in the opening credits, developing a kind of choreography through the rooms, designed by Perry Ferguson, that appear on the screen. The film opens with the murder of David Kentley (Dick Hogan) by Brandon (John Dall) and Philip (Farley Granger), who then hide his body in a large antique chest and proceed to hold a dinner party in the same room, serving dinner from the lid of the chest, which they cover with a cloth and on which they place two candelabra. The dinner guests are David's father (Cedric Hardwicke), his aunt (Constance Collier), his fiancée, Janet (Joan Chandler), his old friend and rival for Janet's hand (Douglas Dick), and the former headmaster of their prep school, Rupert Cadell (James Stewart). Everyone spends a lot of time wondering why David hasn't shown up for the party, too, while Brandon carries on some intellectual jousting with Rupert and the others about whether murder is really a crime if a superior person kills an inferior one, and Philip, jittery from the beginning, drinks heavily and starts to fall to pieces. Murder will out, eventually, but not after much talk and everyone except Rupert, who returns to find a cigarette case he pretends to have lost, has gone home. There is one beautifully Hitchcockian scene in the film, in which the chest is positioned in the foreground, and while the talk about murder goes on off-camera, we watch the housekeeper (Edith Evanson) clear away the serving dishes, remove the cloth and candelabra, and almost put back the books that had been stored in the chest. It's a rare moment of genuine suspense in a film whose archness of dialogue and sometimes distractingly busy camerawork saps a lot of the necessary tension, especially since we know whodunit and assume that they'll get caught somehow. Some questionable casting also undermines the film: Stewart does what he can as always, but is never quite convincing as a Nietzschean intellectual, and Granger's disintegrating Philip is more a collection of gestures than a characterization. The gay subtext of the film emerges strongly despite the Production Code, but today portrayals of gay men as thrill-killers only adds something of a sour note, even though Dall and Granger were both gay, and Granger was for a time Laurents's lover.

*Technology has since made something like what Hitchcock was aiming for in Rope possible. Alexander Sokurov's 2002 Russian Ark consists of a single 96-minute tracking shot through the Winter Palace in St. Petersburg as a well-rehearsed crowd of actors, dancers, and extras re-create 300 years of Russian history. Projectors today are also capable of handling continuous action without the necessity of reel-changes, making possible Alejandro Iñárruitu's Oscar-winning Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance) (2014), with its appearance of unedited continuity, though Iñárritu and cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki resorted to masked cuts very much like Hitchcock's.