A Film Canon

Like Nightmare Alley, Gun Crazy identifies the traveling fairground with the emergent noir cityscape, thereby extending the latter's oppressive claustrophobia to the countryside and Midwestern town, most poetically in the final attempt to ensnare husband-and-wife robbery team Bart Tare (John Dall) and Annie Laurie Starr (Peggy Cummins), via a blockade of every rural transport network. This necessitates their retreat to the mountains, producing an extended chase sequence that recalls the conclusion of High Sierra, albeit without the panoramic sublimity that was its most distinctive feature, as if even the most ostensibly crystalline stream were just another gutter, and nature itself little more than a giant, fetid swamp, inhabited by tortured grotesques. The result is a horizon so fleeting that it can only be glimpsed from the back window of a rapidly moving car, as evinced in the central hold- up, which consists of a single, prolonged take, and stands in relation to the back seat as Out Of The Past does to the front, while this rapidity is itself offered both as the ultimate motivation for Annie's compulsion to kill, as well as what allows Bart to remain (relatively) detached from this compulsion: "Everything's going so fast...it's all in such high gear, that sometimes it doesn't feel like me...does that make sense...as if nothing were real anymore?" From this perspective, Bart's lifelong elevation of pistols to a fetishtic, aesthetic object is less an indication of some restraining, ethical impulse (he loves to shoot, but hates to kill) than a mere instance of this reduction of everything - including death - to so many inanimate, commodified, beautified surfaces, artfully encapsulated in the critical murder that takes place against the backdrop of an abbatoir, as well as, more generally, in the couple's slick, stylised rapport, largely attributable to Cummins' smouldering charisma.