Gun Crazy

When gun fancier Bart Tare sees Annie Laurie Starr’s sideshow sharpshooting act, he’s a dead-bang goner. He and she go together, as Bart ultimately says, “like guns and ammunition”. The two become bank robbers on the run, eluding roadblocks and roaring into movie history as one of the benchmark film-noir works. Joseph H. Lewis directs this ferocious thriller, selected for the National Film Registry and often cited as a forerunner to Bonnie and Clyde. Peggy Cummins and John Dall star, meeting in a sexually charged carny shooting contest and soon driven by impulses of violence and arousal they don’t fully understand. They’re young, foolish, doomed – and point blank in Gun Crazy’s unforgiving sights.