The Brattle begins August with the bluntly titled shot of Gun Crazy (1950).  The film concerns Bart Tare (John Dall), a sharpshooter prodigy with a soft heart and an impulsive nature.  Shooting is his only talent and shooting makes him “feel awful good inside.”  When he meets Annie Laurie Starr (Peggy Cummins) at a carnival their mutual facility with firearms binds them fanatically.  The pistol crossed couple quickly get fired, get married, and turn to an inevitable stick-up career.  What follows is a frenzy of fast money, fast cars and fatalistic desire.  Director Joseph H. Lewis keeps things going headlong and heedless.  Criminals and spectators thrill to the open road outlaw fantasy and it’s aggressive vision of the American dream.  Fans of early Jean-Luc Godard will recognize the criminal-by-accident DNA and inventive ride-along camerawork.  As Bart and Annie are subsumed in the chaos the film asserts the inherent volatility and brutality of their fixation.  Perhaps the guns have more agency than those wielding them.  What is a tool and what exerts control?  The effect of the campy examination of social ills is almost as gleefully mordant as the last movement of “Happiness is a Warm Gun.”  Bang bang, shoot shoot.

Gun Crazy
1950
dir. Joseph H. Lewis
87 min.

Monday, 8/1 @ 3:30, 7:30
Tuesday, 8/2 @ 3:30

Part of the ongoing series: 75 Years of Film Noir, Part 6: Femmes Fatale
Double Feature with Born To Kill.
35mm