Popular reviews

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  Review by SilentDawn ★★★★★ 5

  95

  Gun Crazy is a horned-up, pulpy, razor-sharp Film Noir, and a clear influence on basically every 'couple falls in love and commits crime' film going forward, not to mention how distinct it is as a precursor for the French new-wave. This movie has it all: a long-take bank robbery scene from the perspective of the backseat of a car, flirting via dangerous carnival games, romantic longing, and the thrill of a chase as an extended euphemism for fucking. It's pure electricity, all the time. Joseph H. Lewis directs Gun Crazy to within an inch of its life, and master DP Russell Harlan is there to make every image and movement a memorable one. And anchoring it all is the couple of John Dall and Peggy Cummins, who both radiate a life-force meant for this movie. This is up there with Detour and Out of the Past as my personal favorite Film-Noir - packed with sensual energy and wicked ideas.

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  Review by Joe ★★★★½ 3

  "How could anyone get hurt if we don't hurt them?"

  I don't know what the American conversation about gun control sounded like, or if it even existed, in 1950, but I do know that no simple liberal partisan would ever make a movie this perverted and erotically charged - it's hard to make a political point when your characters are this internally twisted. Nevertheless it makes a fascinating study of two different relationships with firearms, she's the psycho you read about, who'd force-feed you bullets until you choked to death if she couldn't find a gun, while he's the socially awkward gun enthusiast who puts up with and enables her violence because on some sick level it turns him on. Each person thinks they can keep the other under control, but only one of them is right.

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  Review by Patrick Willems ★★★★ 2

  I wish I loved anything like these crazy kids love their guns

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  Review by noen ★★★★½ 1

  A feverish delirium of film noir, a raw and unrelenting explosion of desire and destruction, in which the camera fearlessly follows its characters as they spiral into absurd violence and passion. The story of Bart and Laurie — the reluctant gunman and the femme fatale with blood in her eyes — unfolds in a very predictable way, but it feels right, is lethal and lyrical. Laurie is one of those ultimate archetypes of the fatal woman: a fusion of magnetism and manipulation, leading Bart to his downfall with a whisper and the promise of eternal love. It’s impossible to look away from her burning presence, the embodiment of danger wrapped in silk and gunpowder.

  To be truly honest, this is…

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  Review by Will Sloan ★★★★★

  (*sees a deep-focus shot with something in the extreme foreground and something else in the extreme background*) "That's that Joseph H. Lewis magic." (*chef's kiss*)

  Cinematic ecstasy. Ferociously directed. Peggy Cummins' performance is an all-timer. The scene where they split after a difficult getaway, but then turn their cars around at the same time and drive back towards each other because they're crazy and in love, had me levitating.

  A good Valentine's Day movie!

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  Review by Liz ★★★★★

  This review may contain spoilers. I can handle the truth.

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  Review by comrade_yui ★★★★★ 1

  there's an astonishing vivacity to this that feels just as fresh today as it did in 1950, most prominently shown with a great long take of a improvised heist seen entirely from the backseat of a car, no rear-projection, a bunch of overlapping dialogue, using the structure of the vehicle to frame the action from multiple angles, allowing us to inhabit the space of being an outsider accomplice in their fast-paced crimes; gun crazy legitimately looks and acts like the tough-skinned cousin of an orson welles or sam fuller film. the montage we see of our doomed lovers-on-the-run enjoying themselves at a carnival, riding a roller-coaster, slow-dancing, you feel like they actually enjoy each other's company, two disaffected weirdos huddled…

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  Review by Josh Lewis ★★★★★ 4

  One of the all-time great examples of B-noir pulp being elevated by intelligent craftsmanship, and also in the running for the most aptly titled film ever made. A proto-Bonnie & Clyde doomed lovers-on-the-run armed robbery thriller given a forceful, expressive and psychosexual charge from an uncredited and then-blacklisted screenwriter Dalton Trumbo who directly ties the perverse American tradition of obsessive gun fetishism with the romantic passions of youth + exhilarating nature of the crime-action genre formula; an idea then sharply and kinetically realized by under-sung B-movie technician Joseph H. Lewis who (with the help of regular Howard Hawks cinematographer Russell Harlan) replicates all the propulsive excitement and lethal attraction these characters feel via pure style.

  Through Lewis' lens the unhealthy, Freudian…

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  Review by eely 🌻 ★★★

  that one shot scene where the camera stays in the backseat of the car while they drive up to rob a bank in cowboy outfits is so GOOD oh my GOD need me a bank robbing cowboy like that

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  Review by Scott Tobias ★★★★

  Incredibly audacious on every level for a noir of such limited means. 70 years later, Peggy Cummins' introduction still feels like it shouldn't be legal.

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  Review by theriverjordan ★★★★½ 8

  The only thing more gangster than what happens onscreen in “Gun Crazy” is what happened to make the movie possible. 

  Written through obscured credit by the blacklisted Dalton Trumbo, director Joseph H. Lewis didn’t let his disdain of decency laws stop there. Lewis’ direction to lead actress Peggy Cummins was to behave “like a dog in heat” (she nails it, by the way), and he filmed the movie’s signature bank heist guerrilla-style - with limited warning to onlookers, and all in one, marvellously long take. 

  This ‘be nobody’s fool’ attitude carries over to every frame of the lovers-on-the-run story in “Gun Crazy;” a movie so stylish in its chill, that it makes everything else of its era look like melted…

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  Review by Rida ★★★★½ 10

  Until early last year, I was really into all things romance. Romantic comedies, Bollywood, young adult romances, the whole lot. But then I was exposed to brilliant films and realized for the first time that stories centered around romance just don't make for very compelling cinema. When the characters only care about getting together and staying together and continually spout cheesy dialogue, they almost always come off as irredeemably stupid.

  I'm still a sucker for Austen novels and love songs, and always going to be an idealist about the forever kind of love. I just don't think that any film that treats love as the single most important thing in a person's life is going to appeal to me any…