- Clyde Barrow: “All right, all right, now. Lookie here. I might as well tell you right off. I ain’t much of a lover boy. That don’t mean nothing personal about you. I-I I never saw no percentage in it. Ain’t nothing wrong with me. I don’t like boys!”
- Bonnie Parker: “Boy! Boy, boy.”
- Clyde Barrow: “Huh? ‘Boy,’ what?”
- Bonnie Parker: “Your advertising is just dandy. Folks would never guess you don’t have a thing to sell.
- From Bonnie & Clyde (1967)
Lovers On the Run (LOTR) is a theme not necessarily restricted to crime stories, but it does have a persistent habit of occupying noirs, e.g., ‘You Only Live Once’, ‘They Live by Night’, ‘Tomorrow is Another Day’… and one of the most celebrated, the cult favorite ‘Gun Crazy’ (1950).
What sets Gun Crazy apart from other LOTR films is the dark, unsettling psychology that hangs like a fog around the characters, their motivations and actions, and finally, their destinies.
We are introduced to Bart Tare (John Dall), a troubled, gun-obsessed boy. Years pass, and that boy is now a young man, and an outstanding marksman. One evening, he happens to enter a carnival tent and meets sharp-shooter Annie Laurie Starr (Peggy Cummins). They fall in love, he gets hired, they both get fired, they get married, then hit the road on a crime spree.
No narrative warps yet. But then, there’s this odd vibe—Bart doesn’t seem to be interested in Annie, at least as much as expected in a LOTR, and Annie clearly suffers from mental illness, erupting in spasmodic scenes of violence. Slowly, inevitably, the ‘vibe’ assumes a subtext, and it’s that which empowers this film: these people are complex and have few precedents in 1950s B-noir. There’s an unsettling sophistication about the characterizations—pushing them closer to ‘reality’. Contrary to standard noirs, the dark shadows are on the people, not the walls.
The lovers aren’t really lovers, they’re not crazy about guns, and if they’re on the run, they’re really trying to escape from the pain of being misunderstood, misdiagnosed, misguided, and doomed. How they ever ended up in a film like this is inhumane.
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