Deadly Is the Female

Plot synopsis:
At the age of 14, Bart Tare robs a hardware store and steals a gun. He is sent to reform school by a sympathetic Judge Willoughby (Morris Carnovsky), despite the testimony of his friends Dave and Clyde, his older sister Ruby and others that he would never kill any living creature, even though he has had a fascination with guns even as a child. Flashbacks provide a portrait of Bart who, after he kills a young chick with a BB gun at age seven, is hesitant to harm anyone with guns even though he is a good shot with a pistol.
After reform school and a stint in the Army teaching marksmanship, Bart (John Dall) returns home. He, Dave (Nedrick Young) and Clyde (Harry Lewis) go to a traveling carnival in town. There, Bart challenges sharpshooter Annie Laurie Starr (Peggy Cummins) to a shooting contest, and wins. She gets him a job with the carnival, and he becomes smitten with her. However, their attraction to each other inflames the jealousy of their boss, Packett (Berry Kroeger), who wants Laurie for himself. As Packett tries to force himself on her, Bart enters and shoots a mirror behind Packett. They both get fired, and leave together.
The couple get married and embark on a happy honeymoon. She warns him beforehand that she is "bad, but will try to be good". When their money runs out though, Laurie gives Bart a stark choice: join her in a career of crime or she will leave him. They hold up stores and gas stations, but the money they steal does not last long. While fleeing a police car, Laurie tells Bart to shoot at the policeman driving so they can escape, but he hesitates and becomes somewhat disoriented. Ultimately, he shoots the tire out and the couple escapes. Later that day, Laurie intends to shoot and kill a grocer they had just robbed, but Bart prevents her from doing so. The couple have now been identified in national newspapers as robbers and murderers.
While snowed in, Bart says he is done with a life of crime. She persuades him to take on one last big robbery so they can flee the country and live in peace and comfort. They get jobs at a meat processing plant and make detailed plans. They hold up the payroll office, but as they are leaving, the secretary pulls the burglar alarm and Laurie shoots the secretary dead. As they are fleeing the scene, Laurie shoots and kills a security guard as well. The two are supposed to split up for a couple of months and have separate getaway cars to minimize the chances of both of them being caught, but neither can bear to be away from the other that long. The FBI is brought in, and the fugitives become the targets of an intense manhunt, yet they evade a statewide dragnet and escape to California.
In California, Bart arranges for passage to Mexico, but the FBI tracks them down to a dance hall by using the serial numbers from bills from the meat plant. They are forced to flee, leaving all their loot behind. With no place else to go and roadblocks everywhere, they jump on a train and go to his sister Ruby's house. Bart's old friend, now the local sheriff, notices that Ruby's house has the curtains drawn and the children are not in school. He informs Bart's other old friend, now a news reporter, and the two plead with Bart to give himself and Laurie up. Instead, the couple flee into the mountains where Bart used to go camping in the summer. They run while being pursued by police dogs, but are surrounded in reed grass the next morning. Fog surrounds them, but Dave and Clyde approach them to try to save their lives. When Bart sees Laurie preparing to gun them down, he shoots her and is in turn killed by the police.

Tags: realism, murder, violence, atmospheric, flashback, suspenseful

Review:
I found that the movie is just as good as I remember it.The film is essentially a story of a boy named Bart Tare (Russ Tamblyn) who loves guns for sport but refuses to harm any living being with them.
In all, it is a classic scenario of "Bad Girl" leads a "Good Boy" into evil.Personal opinion is that John Dall did a better acting job in this movie than he did in "Rope".
This movie alone placed Peggy Cummins among my favorite "femme fatales", which included the queen of mean, Barbara Stanwyck, Marlene Dietrich, Beverly Michaels and other notables.If you like classic film noir, it is a good movie to remember and see again..
And I love the scenes where young Bart can't seem to put away his fascination with guns.Bart (John Dall) starts off as a boy, and in some of these early scenes (some of the best in the film), we see how he is changed by an unfortunate act, and then the story skips ahead suddenly.
Now Bart is an adult, out of the army, and gets re-introduced to guns once he meets his soon-to-be love and partner in crime, Annie, played by Peggy Cummins.
I wouldn't want to get on this woman's bad side; she can shoot cigarettes out of people's mouths, for God's sake."Gun Crazy" is such an obvious influence on Penn's "Bonnie and Clyde" that I can't believe the later film doesn't credit it directly.
They portray the Annie/Bonnie character as bored and restless, turned on by the thought of crime and by a manly man who can really use his "gun." The Bart/Clyde character is tickled by the idea of being a virile stud in the eyes of his lover, but is ultimately too sensitive for the life they choose.
I still enjoy watching this periodically, even after a half-dozen viewings.John Dall and Peggy Cummins make one of the more interesting male-female pairings I've ever seen on film.
John Dall and Peggy Cummins, in the roles of the doomed lovers Bart and Annie Laurie, make a great job.
I feel awful good, like I'm somebody." Charged with "Grand Larceny" and sent to reform school, the lad later emerges from the army as John Dall.Still gunning for fun, Mr. Dall partners up with shapely carnival attraction Peggy Cummins (as Annie Laurie Starr), after besting her in a shooting contest.
Back home now as an adult, after a stint in the army, he falls for a sharp-shooting carnival girl called Annie Laurie Starr (Peggy Cummins) and promptly joins the act.
But after a fall out with the boss, the pair hit the road and turn to a life of crime; with Annie particularly showing a thirst for gun-play.No doubt inspired by real life outlaws Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow, Deadly Is the Female (AKA: Gun Crazy) is as good a "doomed lovers on the lam" picture that has ever been made.
They go to a carnival to celebrate, where Bart meets the performer Annie Laurie Starr (Peggy Cummins) that is also a crack shot.
"Gun Crazy", is a good film-noir with a story of a couple robbing several towns probably inspired by Bonnie and Clyde.
Joseph Lewis' excellent, low-budget noir, "Gun Crazy" is, in a funny way, a romance, despite all the shooting.
The film stars Peggy Cummins and John Dall as Annie Laurie and Bart Tare.
Obsession is what drives them - the obsession for one another.Low-budget but very stylish, gritty, and realistic, "Gun Crazy" gives us the nutso Annie Laurie and the nervous sharpshooter Bart, caught up in a cycle of robbery and death.
This movie was inspired by a 1920's short story about a gun-obsessed young man who couldn't bring himself to kill, who gets mixed up with a woman who brings him down.
It's classic Film Noir.Peggy Cummings is great as the manipulative woman who destroys this tragic guy, using 1950's implied sex to blackmail him into a life of crime he really doesn't want.
However, it soon becomes clear that Annie wants a shortcut to a fortune, and Bart is roped into using his guns to rob banks and shops.Unlike many other films that feature anti-heroes, this one does not glamorise their crimes and if anything shows what they are doing in a negative light.
John Dall (from ROPE and SPARTACUS) is perfect as Bart and Ms. Cummins (who apparently made many films before this and not too many after) is tough, biting, and frightening with passion that only real black and white can ooze!I know it's a "cult classic" now, but in 1949 (two years after Widmark pushed the old lady down the stairs in the wheelchair), this must have been a mind-boggler, even for a gangster "low budget" flick post-WWII.
After a brief cornball setup to explain the young boy's infatuation for guns (but not killing) in a juvenile courtroom scene via flashbacks ("guns...I just gotta have em" says the fourteen year old Bart), the film really takes hold and never lets go.The cute as a pistol Peggy Cummins plays Laurie ("I only kill, when i get scared") is a force to behold and plays it to the end.
John Dall is the Clyde to her Bonnie and is reluctant to pull the trigger, almost.The film is full of groundbreaking camera set-ups with long one takes and on the street realism with interesting angles and a feeling of cinema-verite.
It is forever downbeat with the desperadoes always in desperate situations and there is almost a feeling of empathy for the doomed couple (foreshadowed by the heist in a factory full of "dead meat"), where each of them stumbles.This movie and Film Noir, like Bart says, "goes together like guns and ammunition"..
This one is different in that most of the action takes place during the day as opposed to the dark night time of most films from this genre.The tragic anti-hero of the piece is Bart Tare (John Dall) whose love of guns is shown to us through two flashbacks to his youth.
With a growing interest in firearms began building, the studio that released this film decided it would take a chance and release this little ditty co-staring John Dall and Peggy Cummins while the main name in lights at the marquee is 'GUNS'.
A well meaning crack shot husband (John Dall) is pressured by his beautiful marksman wife (Peggy Cummins) to go on an interstate robbery spree, where he finds out just how depraved and deadly she really is.First of all, I have to say how glad I am that Russ Tamblyn was in this film.
Given Laurie's predilection for violence, this can only be the stuff of bad behavior and great film noir.Early on in the film, when Bart meets Laurie, there's a scene that typifies all that's right with "Gun Crazy" for me.
Bart (John Dall) is a crack shot whom a carnival barker challenges to outshoot his prize pistol-cracking artiste, Laurie (Peggy Cummins)...by shooting out lit matches from a crown she wears on her head.It's a scene that makes you stop and think.
Shot a little too low.""So did I.""Gun Crazy" isn't a movie for people who want sensible cinema.
From the opening scenes, featuring a young "Rusty" Tamblyn as a teenaged Bart, we know what we are seeing is not real exactly, but fed to us through Bart's fevered imaginings, a life where all is nightmare, as he puts it, and only Laurie is real.Dall was a stagey, mannered actor in other films, but here he plays in a surprisingly intuitive way that makes you feel his anxiety.
The scenes of Bart's hometown, Cashville, are a bit clichéd in their folky good nature, and one scene where Bart tells Laurie crime is a bad thing feels shoehorned as DVD Savant writer Glenn Erickson notes in his expert commentary, setting up Dall's only bum notes on screen.The reason that scene feels wrong is because Lewis is otherwise making a cleverly subversive film that encourages us to root for the bad guys.
We aren't only privy to their insecurities, but given a backseat pass on many of their crimes, for example during a three-and-a-half minute sequence as we watch them drive up to a bank, do a robbery, and ride away in real time.People compare this film to the more celebrated "Bonnie And Clyde", but for all that film's high stylistic points I felt more involved in the characters here.
I really enjoyed the scenes when Annie, played by Peggy Cummins and Bart, played by John Dall were in the car and the camera was placed in the backseat.
Lewis manages to make the film jump back and forth from documentary-like to highly stylized with quicksilver cuts, the sum of which somehow melds together into a crazy- great melodrama that clearly serves as the precursor for later couple- on-the lam movie classics such as Arthur Penn's "Bonnie and Clyde" and Terrence Malick's "Badlands".
Motivated by what he sees as his own self-worth, he becomes an expert sharpshooter as he moves from reform school to a stint in the Army and then to an uncertain existence as Bart isn't sure what he's supposed to do with his life.Enter Annie Laurie Starr, a dead-shot trick-shooter who comes to town as part of a traveling carnival, and the fireworks ignite immediately when she shoots at him with a prop gun and then competes in a marksmanship contest where each shoots matchsticks on a crown placed on the other's head.
This is a dynamite, breathless, action-filled film noir featuring the misadventures and demises of a latter-day Bonnie and Clyde-type couple, who meet through their mutual love of guns and shooting.John Dall's Bart Tray character gets accorded a prologue of his boyhood which helps introduce characters and locations which will assume more significance at the conclusion as well as demonstrating his love/hate fascination for weaponry - he knows that using a gun is morally wrong but can't help himself from possessing and enjoying the thrill of firing one.Fast forward to him as an adult where a random night out with his friends at a fun-fair sees him fatefully enter a shooting competition against the carnival girl hot-shot, Laurie played by Peggy Cummings, where a mutual admiration for one another's shooting skills leads to what is initially a one-sided relationship, she the controlling one and he the more needy of the two before they get together, she leaves the carnival and the coupling deepens and becomes more complex.There's so much to like here, two fantastic lead performances, Dall and Cummings are wholly convincing, not only in their passion for guns but for each other.
There's a great line uttered by Dall as he ponders their relationship, that they go together like guns and ammunition, which summarises up their combustible pairing in three succinct words.There's brilliance too in Joseph E Lewis's direction, not only on his taut hold on the sometimes breakneck narrative, but in his innovative use of hand-held camera shots, extreme close-ups and high P.O.V. takes, plus it's not every film, even in the dark world of noir, where you see an old woman shot dead in cold blood and by another woman too, with said killer apparently turned on by the act of killing.
So, that, in turn, rendered its climatic, final showdown as being nothing but a complete and total let-down.Another thing that didn't impress me much about Gun Crazy was its two light-weight, lead actors, Peggy Cummins and John Dall.
Sexy Annie unlike Bart is cold blooded however and with him under her spell they begin to pull armed robberies and establish a body count.Highly stylized and featuring a florid use of cinema language Joseph Lewis made a pocket masterpiece with Gun Crazy that features one of the finest and coldest noir femme fatales in history played by Peggy Cummins.
At a time when gangster movies, thrillers and film noir were very popular - think Cagney, Bogart, Donlevy, Mitchum, Powell, Ryan, Raft et al - director Joseph Lewis and screen writer Dalton Trumbo, collaborated on a movie which casts a couple of ostensibly ordinary citizens, and not criminals, (Dall and Cummins) as two people with a special talent: both crack shots with guns.
Lewis directed this memorable film that stars John Dall as Bart Tare, who is portrayed as a gun-loving child in trouble with the law, who grows into an expert marksman, just out of the army, who meets Annie Laurie Starr(played by Peggy Cummins) in her sharpshooting act in a carnival.
The infamous Bonnie and Clyde pair of the Depression years is updated in this film of 1950, but with the femme fatale as a supposedly British woman from London (actually, Peggy Cummins was born in Wales), possibly because no US female could be half as bad (the real Bonnie was, though) and no self-respecting US actress would soil her image by taking on such a depraved role.As it turns out, Cummins does indeed look crazy throughout the film, killing as a matter of course, and even thinking of kidnapping her own baby nephew.
Curiously, the one thing that works is that these two misfits really love each other, and cannot be apart, even when it would be wiser to split for a while and reunite somewhere else.Inconsistencies of character undermine what could potentially be a very good film noir, but photography, some wonderful car chases, and assured direction make GUN CRAZY well worth watching..
Although John Dall did a few cinema classics like The Corn Is Green, Rope, Spartacus, he will probably go down with this small B film noir Gun Crazy which even with the Code firmly in place managed to come across with a finely etched portrayal of two young people with serious self esteem issues which are represented by their obsession with firearms.With Dall it's self esteem, with British import Peggy Cummins it's a great deal more than that.
She really loves her work and never more when someone gives her an excuse to fire fatal bullets.There's a lot of action in Gun Crazy, but ultimately the film is a fine character study of two flawed individuals.
Other players skitter  distantly around the periphery; John Dall and Peggy Cummins take and  hold the screen (she radiantly and naturally, he more reticently and  stagily), making Gun Crazy in essence a two-character movie.
He's sent to reform school for the theft, goes into the Army for four years but does not see combat, and here it is the present - 1950 - and he's returned home for a visit.So here Bart is an adult, he has good support from family and friends but he's still gun crazy and has the misfortune of running into sure shot Annie Laurie (Peggy Cummins), a little lady who has big dreams without the problem of a pesky conscience.
So Bart's dilemma is that of so many in film noir - a bad set of coincidences coupled with a fundamental character flaw - he just can't say no to Annie Laurie.
If he hadn't gone to the carnival that night and done trick shooting against Annie Laurie in a scene that sure looks like foreplay with guns, he probably would have gotten that job with Remington for forty bucks a week and been happy with that.
Bart goes for Annie Laurie because he can't believe that a girl so pretty and so exciting seems to "get" him and actually wants an ordinary working stiff like himself - but isn't this how so many guys feel on their wedding day?
Dall, whom I enjoyed in ROPE, has another interesting role in Bart Tare, who, from boyhood, loves guns, but can't bring himself to kill after shooting dead a chick at the age of seven.
Bart(John Dall) returns home from the army, after serving reform school for attempting to steal a gun, meeting quick-drawing Laurie(Peggy Cummins) at a carnival, falling hard.
I am sure the producers of "Bonnie and Clyde" were influenced by "Gun Crazy." I wonder why John Dall did not do more films.
At various times during their relationship, Bart becomes troubled about what they're doing and especially about the killing but he never has the strength of character to distance himself from Laurie or their criminal activity."Gun Crazy" makes a terrific impact, has great drive and is simply an exceptional movie..
I didn't know what was going to happen, but I kept saying to myself "run you idiots!" The movie, however, ended like any film noir with the main characters having the law catch up with them.
Bart (John Dall), Dave (Nedrick Young) and Clyde (Harry Lewis) go to a traveling carnival in town, Bart challenges sharpshooter Annie Laurie Starr (Peggy Cummins) to a contest and wins.
Dall is good as the gun-fixated man led astray, Cummins is equally good as the smouldering and psychotic femme fatale, they make a great sinister couple, it is tightly drawn story and plot, there are many exciting sequences, and it has all the right ingredients you expect from a movie in this category, a minor masterpiece film noir.
Even though the two lovebirds fit together like a bullet in a gun-chamber it's Laurie who has the killer instinct having murdered a man in a holdup, together with Packett, some time back and that gave her a taste for blood that would eventually lead to her and her husband Bart's doom.Razor sharp black-and white film noir photography together with some of the most innovated camera work, just watch the documentary-style driving scenes in the film, make "Gun Crazy" one of the best as well as underrated American movie ever to be released in the 1940's or 1950's.Running up a string of bank robberies as well as one kidnapping both Bart and Lourie decide to call it quits only after the "big one" a robbery of a meat packing plants payroll that would put them on easy street for the rest of their lives.
There's something erotic about femme fatale Peggy Cummins' obsession with guns in this superb film noir, the best low budget example of the genre since "Detour".