In the spring of 1964, François Truffaut came to New York to work on his book of interviews with Alfred Hitchcock and to meet with a pair of fledgling screenwriters, Robert Benton and David Newman, who had sent him their treatment (synopsis) of a script they were writing, “Bonnie and Clyde,” in the hope that he would direct the film. To help them develop the project, Truffaut arranged for a screening of the 1949 film “Gun Crazy,” which I discuss in the clip below. At the screening, Truffaut, the screenwriters, Newman’s wife, and the film’s prospective producers were joined by Jean-Luc Godard and a woman, who, according to Benton, were “sitting in the front.”
“Gun Crazy” is altogether different from the blood-spattered pop-culture happening that Arthur Penn would ultimately make from the script. It’s a strangely inward, muted depiction of a pair of criminals who take little pleasure in their crimes. Bart Tare and Annie Laurie Starr are sharpshooters who meet at a carnival. Bart is sketched out with psychological depth; his backstory—as an orphan for whom guns play a symbolic role that diverges from his aversion to violence—takes the first ten minutes of the film. Annie Laurie, who eggs him on to a life of crime to satisfy her material cravings, remains opaque throughout the film, to him, to viewers, and to herself.
The director, Joseph H. Lewis, is a masterful stylist as well as a daring innovator. For instance, he films one bank robbery from inside a car, on location, with portable sound equipment, in a single take that runs three and a half minutes. (He discusses it in detail in a superb interview in Peter Bogdanovich’s book “Who the Devil Made It.”) His artistic inventions extend to the direction of actors: his stars, John Dall and Peggy Cummins, aren’t the last word in charisma, but, by directing them to speak in virtual whispers, he conjures an ambivalent intimacy that draws viewers uneasily close to a world of depravity. Lewis ingeniously plays down the violence but, by playing up Bart’s sensitivity to violence, brings the world of cinematic crime menacingly close to most viewers’ real-world aversions. In short, it’s a strikingly modern, complex, disturbing, and yet sad, touching, and romantic film. Robert Benton told me, “After the film [‘Bonnie and Clyde’] came out, [Andrew] Sarris wrote, ‘The film you should really see is “Gun Crazy.” ’ And maybe he was right.”