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Gun Crazy
Directed by	Joseph H. Lewis
Produced by	Frank King Maurice King
Written by	MacKinlay Kantor (story, screenplay) Dalton Trumbo (screenplay, as Millard Kaufman)
Starring	Peggy Cummins John Dall
Music by	Victor Young
Cinematography	Russell Harlan
Editing by	Harry Gerstad
Distributed by	United Artists
Release date(s)	January 26, 1950 (U.S. release) August 24, 1950 (re-release
Running time	86 min.
Language	English
IMDb profile

Gun Crazy is a 1950 film noir spun from a short story written by MacKinlay Kantor and published in 1940 in The Saturday Evening Post. The screenplay was credited to Kantor and Millard Kaufman; however, Kaufman was a front for Hollywood Ten outcast Dalton Trumbo, who considerably reworked the story into a doomed love affair.

A wild young couple with a love of guns (he's an army sharpshooting veteran, she's a trick shooter in a carnival show) and a knack for violence go on a crime spree. In an interview with Danny Peary (Cult Movies, New York: Delacorte Press, 1981), director Joseph H. Lewis revealed his instructions to actors John Dall (Bart Tare) and Peggy Cummins (Annie Laurie Starr):

I told John, "Your cock's never been so hard," and I told Peggy, "You're a female dog in heat, and you want him. But don't let him have it in a hurry. Keep him waiting." That's exactly how I talked to them and I turned them loose. I didn't have to give them more directions.

The bank heist sequence was shot entirely in one long take in Montrose, California, with no one besides the principal actors and people inside the bank alerted to the operation. This one-take shot included the sequence of driving into town to the bank, distracting and then knocking out a patrolman, and making the get-away. This was done by simulating the interior of a sedan with a stretch Cadillac with room enough to mount the camera and a jockey's saddle for the cameraman on a greased two-by-twelve board in the back. Lewis kept it fresh by having the actors improvise their dialogue.

Writing in The New York Times (August 25, 1950), Howard Thompson said "this spurious concoction is basically on a par with the most humdrum pulp fiction," but praised the dialogue, the photography, and the "colorful tempo."

Andrew Sarris: "The director's one enduring masterpiece is Gun Crazy, a subtler and more moving evocation of American gun cult than the somewhat overrated Bonnie and Clyde. The performances of John Dall and Peggy Cummins suggest the vitality of the American action movie despite its relative obscurity." (The American Cinema, 1968)

Peter Bogdanovich: "Joseph H. Lewis's forties Gun Crazy, which directly inspired the sixties Bonnie and Clyde, remains one of the singular glories of the 'B' crime picture." (Who the Devil Made It, 1997)

Eddie Muller: "Joseph H. Lewis's direction is propulsive, possessed of a confident, vigorous simplicity that all the frantic editing and visual pyrotechnics of the filmmaking progeny never quite surpassed." (Dark City, 1998)

The film today is considered a quintessential film noir. Critic Leonard Maltin calls it "a knockout of a sleeper" and gives it 3½ stars (out of 4).

In 1998, Gun Crazy was selected for preservation by the United States National Film Registration Board.

• Gun Crazy at the Internet Movie Database
• Greatest Films review
• The Films of Joseph H. Lewis

• On the Lam: Narratives of Flight in J. Edgar Hoover's America, by William Beverly (2003)
• Muller, Eddie, Dark City: The Lost World of Film Noir