Gun Crazy
Short description
Bart Tare has been fascinated by firearms since boyhood, a fixation that lands him in reform school and later in the Army. When he comes home, friends take him to a travelling carnival, where he watches sharpshooter Annie Laurie Starr perform and accepts her challenge to a shooting contest. Bart wins, the carnival owner hires him for the show, and he and Annie fall for each other. The owner, who wants Annie for himself, forces the pair out, and at Annie's urging they turn to robbery for money, setting off a string of crimes that grows steadily more dangerous.
Joseph H. Lewis directed this 1950 American crime drama, his first credited feature in the chronological record of his work, ahead of The Big Combo and 7th Cavalry. Dalton Trumbo, MacKinlay Kantor and Millard Kaufman wrote the screenplay, and Frank and Maurice King produced it for King Brothers Productions, released through United Artists. Peggy Cummins plays Annie Laurie Starr and John Dall plays Bart Tare, with Berry Kroeger, Morris Carnovsky, Anabel Shaw and Harry Lewis among the forty credited cast members.
The film runs eighty-seven minutes and mixes crime, drama, romance and thriller elements. Its reputation has held up over time: on IMDb it scores 8.3 out of 10 from sixty-five reviews, while on TMDB it sits at 7.4 out of 10 from 317 votes, meaning audiences rate it well but noticeably lower than critics do.
What's left behind the scenes
- The film is based on a story by McKinley Kantor, published in 1940 in "The Saturday Evening Post".
- The screenplay credits McKinley Kantor, the author of the original story, and Millard Kaufman. Kaufman was a pseudonym for Dalton Trumbo, who was blacklisted at the time and deliberately reworked the story into a tale of tragic love.
- The bank robbery scene was filmed in one take in Montrose. Only the main actors and the bank staff who had been warned were involved.
- For filming the scene shot from inside the car, a long Cadillac was used instead of a regular sedan, with the camera and a jockey’s saddle for the operator placed in the back. The dialogue in the scene is pure improvisation.
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