A crazy mixed-up kid is dragged to hell by a sexy dame in Gun Crazy (not for nothing also known as Deadly Is the Female), a film that has us by the scruff of the neck right from its fabulous opening scene. In super-sharp close-up a kid smashes the plate glass window of a hardware shop, steals a gun and then falls flat on his face in the rain as he tries to run away.
Bad luck of this sort is to dog Bart Tare for the whole of his life. Flashback scenes flesh out this pretty decent kid with a strange obsession with guns – “Shooting’s what I’m good at. It’s what I want to do,” he says early on. But Bart has already taken the decisive wrong turn in his life as the film is opening and from there he is doomed – after being arrested he is sent to reform school and then the army, where being good at shooting is a big plus, though Bart is strangely reluctant to kill.
Fate steps in again when Bart (now played by John Dall) leaves the military and runs into Laurie Starr (Peggy Cummins) at a carnival. She’s a sharpshooter and is undressing Bart with her eyes even before he has shown her how good he is with a rifle – writer Dalton Trumbo leaves the censors powerless to object to the obvious innuendo here, with firearms doing double duty as a metaphor for male and female sexuality. Bart and Laurie are soon an item, and Laurie is soon leading Bart back onto the wrong road it looked like he had left.
Thanks to Trumbo – blacklisted but writing using his friend Millard Kaufman as a front – Cummins gets a fabulous little speech at one point about being bad in her bones but doing her best to stay on the primrose path, only for Laurie to contradict herself almost immediately with an ultimatum to Bart: become a “stickup man” or scram.
And so a Bonnie and Clyde style partnership is formed, between the decent dude and the femme fatale, with Laurie laying carnality on Bart every time he hesitates or makes as if he’s going to leave. Bart is powerless to resist, hypnotised by Laurie’s animalistic sexuality. What a weak vessel is a man; what a piece of work a woman.
They are brilliantly paired, the excellent John Dall (he should have been a bigger star) and the luminous Cummins (in her last Hollywood movie, aged only 25, before returning to the UK), the pair of them putting just enough flesh on the bones of their characters but not getting too bogged down.
Joseph H Lewis starts sharp and fast and continues like that, with scenes compressed, montages used to convey the passing of time and the piling on of event and experience. He catches speed well too, in the various scenes set in cars as well as on foot. Known for his ability to lay on the style, Lewis is at full operating temperature here, but gets a great assist from Russell Harlan’s cinematography, which is reason enough on its own to watch. There is a lot of complicated lighting in this movie, a lot more than you might expect for a production on a low budget.
Any good? The New York Times thought it was “pretty cheap stuff”, Variety thought it pacy but superficial. Later generations now see it for what it obviously was – an archetypal noir, with fate and a bad girl as the drivers and dirty sex and trashy morality as the come-ons. No longer fighting against hundreds of other films with similar themes, this stands out. If you’re after the essence of noir – capricious fate and bad, bad girls – this is your man/woman.
Gun Crazy – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2026
