Gun Crazy (1950) review
The lone figure of a boy stands in the rain, window shopping. The commodity of his dreams? Guns. His eyes tell us he sees not a revolver but, to put it in Coca-Cola terms, the real thing, the crystallization of his desire. As American as it comes: consumerism and fetishism of guns. Since the boy is poor, though, he has to steal it and is arrested.
At the court we learn of his life-long obsession with all things shooting: from gun slings to rifles. His mother says he is harmless: he does not to kill, she assures. (– Why else would he shoot then? –) The judge asks him: "You don't wanna do anything with your life except shooting guns?" Why, of course not. What else is there do? It's useless to ask an obsessive whether he'd care to try something else in the buffet of life. Once such a question is possible, it's a lost cause already.
The boy grows and so does his pathology for gun firing, and he eventually sexualizes it, or, rather, he recognizes the sexual appeal which was always there. He was harmless before, indeed, until sex comes along in the figure of a killer blonde: then it's a one-way ticket to Crazyville, with two riding shotgun–– "We go together like gun and ammunition go together". The film is a love song to danger.
In Gun Crazy (1950) death, love and madness go in high gear, and it's hard to keep track midst all the shooting. At a traveling show the boy meets his soul mate, a gun-carrying, wild-blooded and death-foolish blonde. It’s love at first shooting. He joins her and they take to the road. Folie à deux fires up like nothing else. Two lovebirds on the road, trying to make ends meet in a tough economy— both of whom happen to be excellent shooters with a taste for the trigger. It’s easy to see where such logic goes.
The rest is a blast. We follow along, almost like kids in the backseat, as director Joseph H. Lewis employs many rear seat shots, especially in the get-away scenes, making the audience feel as if they were kidnapped by this crazy shooting couple’s wild ride across the country (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=28aPxWtdaGY). And the most disconcerting thing is: they actually love each other and stick together to the end. Love is morally blind.
What begins as a private obsession quickly develops into a social malady. How? Easy: shooting. Theft, murder and mayhem: shoot, shoot, shoot, cowboy. What else does a gun-loving country expect of its citizens?
Gun Crazy might be the most uniquely American motion picture in history: there is no other country in which such a story could be so effortlessly, unmediatedly told with such a straight face— and feel veridical.
