Gun Crazy Blu-ray Movie

Rating summary

Movie		3.0
Video		4.5
Audio		4.5
Extras		4.0
Overall		4.0

Gun Crazy Blu-ray Movie Review

Bonnie and Clyde, Take One

Reviewed by Michael Reuben May 9, 2018

One of the best things on the Warner Archive Collection's new Blu-ray of Gun Crazy isn't even part of the movie. It's an hour-long documentary on film noir that was previously available only with Warner's Film Noir Classic Collection: Vol. 3, which is currently out of print. Gun Crazy features prominently in the discussion, along with other noir classics released by WAC (or Warner), including Murder, My Sweet, Out of the Past and On Dangerous Ground, plus a slew of titles that one can only hope are on WAC's future schedule. WAC has added the documentary to Gun Crazy's extras.

As for the film itself, Gun Crazy doesn't have a twisty plot or memorably snappy dialogue, but it effectively encapsulates many of the qualities that have come to distinguish film noir as a genre. A point effectively made in the documentary is the difficulty of defining exactly what makes a film "noir", but as the late Sydney Pollack laughingly observes, "you know it when you see it!" Pollack's borrowing of a famous definition of pornography is appropriate, since sexual attraction is central to the genre. In Gun Crazy, it's almost the whole story.

Film noir routinely involves a male protagonist lured to his destruction by a female he can't resist (the familiar "femme fatale"), but there has to be a flaw in the hero's character that makes him susceptible to a bad girl's charm. In Gun Crazy, the hero's weakness is right there in the title. From the time he was little, young Bart Tare was so attracted to guns that he stole one from a hardware store and got himself sent to reform school. But—and this is a crucial point—however much he may love guns, Bart hates the very thought of killing, which is illustrated in a flashback during the boy's trial recounting how the kid once fired a BB gun at a tiny chick in his yard and was reduced to tears by the result. (Bart is played as a teenager by Russ Tamblyn, later a fixture in musicals like West Side Story and Seven Brides for Seven Brothers and the future Dr. Jacoby on Twin Peaks. As an adult, he's played by John Dall, the cool-headed killer in Hitchcock's Rope.)

After a stint in the military, Bart returns to his home town with no idea of what to do next, but that changes when his two boyhood friends, Dave Allister (Nedrick Young) and Clyde Boston (Harry Lewis), take him to a traveling carnival, where Bart lays eyes on a sharpshooter who goes by the name of Annie Laurie Starr (Peggy Cummins). It's lust at first sight, especially when Bart answers a challenge by the carnival's owner, Packett (Berry Kroeger), for any audience member to outperform Annie's marksmanship—and Bart succeeds, in a scene that amounts to a seduction with bullets. Before he knows what he hit him, Bart has run away with both the circus and Annie.

Bart and Annie are soon on their own, thanks to Packett's jealousy, and that's when Gun Crazy shifts into high gear, as the young lovers marry and begin stealing to support themselves. Bart and Annie are no criminal masterminds. Their thefts are impulsive, the equivalent of modern-day smash-and-grabs. Their most carefully considered job, which involves the payroll of an Armour meat-packing plant, is so poorly planned and executed that the alarm is sounded before they get five steps from the scene of the crime. Throughout their extended spree, whether their fortunes are up or down, they remain attached to each other by their mutual love of firearms, which Gun Crazy uses as a stand-in for the physical attraction that the Hays Code wouldn't allow filmmakers to show directly. Their critical difference is over Annie's willingness to kill. In the film's taut conclusion, that's what finally tears the couple apart.

Director Joseph H. Lewis isn't particularly well known today, maybe because he never graduated from B pictures, shifting to television in the Fifties and remaining there for the rest of his career. But Lewis' work in Gun Crazy is creative and original, with staging and camera setups that made the most of his limited budget. Perhaps the film's best-known scene is the couple's first major robbery, a bank heist filmed in one long unbroken take, with the camera looking over Bart's shoulder from the back of the couple's car, then remaining outside the bank with Annie, as she distracts a nearby cop. It's a tense and memorable shot, and Lewis achieved it long before the invention of the Steadicam that enabled Martin Scorsese to follow Ray Liotta and Lorraine Bracco into the Copacabana and Paul Thomas Anderson to track Burt Reynolds and Julianne Moore to their table in a Valley disco. But those directors (and many others) have Lewis to thank for the inspiration.

Gun Crazy Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

Gun Crazy was photographed by Russell Harlan, who shot seven films for Howard Hawks as well as such classics as Witness for the Prosecution and To Kill a Mockingbird. The film's nitrate negative is currently housed at the UCLA Film and Television Archive. For this 1080p, AVC-encoded Blu-ray, the Warner Archive Collection commissioned the creation of a new fine-grain master positive, which was generated by YCM Laboratories, one of the few remaining facilities equipped to process film. The new fine-grain was scanned at 2K by Warner's Motion Picture Imaging facility, followed by color correction and WAC's customarily thorough cleanup to eliminate more than a thousand instances of scratches, dust, streaks and other age-related defects.

The Blu-ray image is exceptional, with dark blacks, bright whites and subtly graded shades of gray revealing layers of fine detail in faces, costumes and settings. The detail is sharpest in closeups and medium shots, although it falls off slightly in longer shots, especially outdoors where Harlan was probably shooting with available light (Gun Crazy was a low-budget quickie). Densities are superior throughout, and the image is free of any noise, aliasing or other artifacts. WAC has mastered Gun Crazy at its usual high average bitrate, here 34.99 Mbps.

Gun Crazy Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

Gun Crazy's original mono audio has been restored by the UCLA Film and Television Archive and encoded by WAC in lossless DTS-HD MA 2.0. UCLA derived the track from a positive struck from the camera negative, a procedure that has been found to improve fidelity and dynamic range. Clicks, pops, hiss and other interference have been digitally removed. The result is an excellent mono mix with clearly rendered dialogue, appropriately prioritized sound effects and an effective rendering of Victor Young's (Shane) purposefully melodramatic score.

Gun Crazy Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

WAC's Blu-ray ports over the commentary from Warner's 2004 DVD of Gun Crazy and adds the supberb 2006 documentary noted in the introduction, which, until now, has only been available with Warner's Film Noir Classic Collection: Volume 3.

• Commentary with Glenn Erickson: Erickson, who is better known by his online monicker, "DVD Savant" (now updated to "CineSavant"), provides a detailed overview of the film's themes, casting, production and imagery, and he also notes differences between the film and the original Saturday Evening Post story on which it was based. While there are occasional pauses, the commentary is loaded with information and insight, and its only negative is that Erickson is obviously reading from a prepared script, which makes his delivery somewhat mechanical. (By contrast, his interview contributions to the Film Noir documentary discussed below are conversational and engaging.)



• Film Noir: Bringing Darkness to Light (480i; 1.33:1; 1:07:37): This feature was directed by Gary Reva, who has been making first-rate documentaries about film and its practitioners for the last fifteen years. His subjects include both contemporary releases (e.g., Sully) and classics (e.g., Michael Curtiz: The Greatest Director You Never Heard Of for the 70th anniversary release of Casablanca). Reva has assembled a who's who of participants, some of them specifically recorded for the documentary, others culled from archival footage. They include novelist James Ellroy (L.A. Confidential); writer/directors like Christopher McQuarrie (The Usual Suspects) and Frank Miller (Sin City); an array of cinematographers from Newton Thomas Sigel (Drive) to Janusz Kaminski (Spielberg's DP since Schindler's List); editor Carol Littleton (Body Heat); and many more.

Gun Crazy Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

Gun Crazy isn't a great film by any means. Its dialogue is clunky, despite an extensive overhaul of Millard Kaufman's origial script by screenwriter Dalton Trumbo (hiding behind a pseudonym to evade the Hollywood blacklist). By modern standards, the performances are wooden, and the plot is so basic as to be almost dull. But Gun Crazy supplied a template for many films that followed, including Bonnie and Clyde, They Live by Night, Wisdom and Thieves Like Us, and Lewis' visual inventiveness lifts the film above its B-movie origins. WAC has given Gun Crazy a superior treatment that is highly recommended—and be sure to watch the Film Noir documentary, which is worth the price of admission all on its own.