Movies: The Official "Movie of the Week" Club Thread II

[Ralph Spoilsport]

Gun Crazy is a movie we've all seen before, many times with different titles--They Live By Night, Breathless, Bonnie & Clyde, Badlands, to name a few--a guy on the run with a gun and a girl. It's a classic combo: romance and action, sex and violence: they go together like guns and ammunition. This is the B-movie version, memorable for the chemistry between the leads--their mutual attraction on their first meeting, when they compete in a carnival show shooting contest, is conveyed mainly through body language yet is unmistakeable. It's their gun skills that draw them together and you don't need to be Freud to figure this out. Later they bicker like any old married couple would while speeding away from their latest heist in a stolen getaway car. They're a good team. Doomed, but good.

Noteworthy also for its resourcefulness, Gun Crazy has a good eye for striking images, lighting and angles and makes good use of long takes. Particularly memorable is the bank heist shot entirely in a single take from the back seat of the car; foregoing the action of the actual robbery taking place inside, we wait instead outside and deal with the tension as Annie has to suddenly and nervously improvise when a cop wanders onto the scene. (She takes the cop out with one karate chop!?)

Gun Crazy is a rare film noir that confronts the wholesomeness of small town America, the characters seem to be drawn more from the Saturday Evening Post than from a Raymond Chandler crime thriller. There is no seedy criminal underworld for whom guns are just tools of the trade, Bart and Annie aren't obsessed with gaining power and wealth. They're just people next door with an obsession with guns chasing the American Dream.

 

[KallioWeHardlyKnewYe]

Gun Crazy
Lewis (1950)
“Some guys are born smart about women. Some are born dumb.”

Bart is bound for trouble. He’s got a love of guns. He’s a crack shooter and loves the feel in his hand. He’s someone else, someone better. We first meet him at a young age, needing to get a fix by stealing back a gun he previously lost. His short trial is the backstory. His sister and friends vouch for him. He isn’t blood thirsty, see. He isn’t a closet murderer, hiding behind some veneer. He actually cries when he makes his first kill, a baby chick. Alas, he’s given a stern talking to and sent away to a boarding school. Flash forward from boy to young man and what he really is though, is horny.

Enter the alluring Annie Laurie Starr after the two enjoy a pretty damn fine meet-cute as they engage in a shooting contest at a traveling carnival. They’re fast compatriots and soon lovers to the carnival leader’s chagrin. As young, dumb lovers are wont to do, they’re soon on the room. Jobless, without money, the duo turn to a life of crime. Annie has certain expectations out of life, a certain standard of living and the only real talents either she or Bart have are with a gun. Robbery begets death and now the duo are really in the shit. Bart, always a bit uneasy with the turn his life has taken, proposes a settled down, normal life. Of course it doesn’t take. The criminal twosome find their way back to Bart’s hometown where his friends learn the truth and give him the chance for a bloodless out ... But Annie ain’t having it, see. The pair die in a foggy swamp. Bart shoots her to protect his friends who mistakenly shoot him. Sad trombone.

If I’m being a bit flippant about this proto Bonnie & Clyde, it’s because Bart is such a dope and the whole evil wayward woman aspect of Gun Crazy is comical. I’ll say this realizing I’m dipping a risky toe into politics, but much of the setup and execution here felt a bit like the worst fever dreams of those who feel women have become too powerful and it’s a tough life out there for white guy just striving for a good life ....eeeeerrrrrrrwwww ... abrupt right turn back into the review. It may not sound like it, but I LIKED this movie. I found its dated PSA-vibe to be an amusing relic. I can see why these actors didn’t get much addition work (save for the button-cute Russ “Rusty” Tamblyn as young Bart).

I do have a few forehanded compliments. I was genuinely impressed with Lewis’ direction (and/or cinematographer Russell Harlan). The shooting competition between Bart and Annie is a hoot and I loved the staging with the crown of matches in the foreground and the shooter in the distance popping each to life with a shoot. The key robbery, shot in one take, was great. The foggy finale was a nice touch too. Horror-like.

 

[kihei]

Gun Crazy (1949) Directed by Josheph H. Lewis

Gun Crazy has a heavy duty rep among “B” movie enthusiasts. God knows why. Maybe it’s because Jean Luc Godard liked it and claimed that it was an influence on the French New Wave. As an early take on Bonny and Clyde, Gun Crazy is fast-paced, occasionally erotic (low-grade eroticism, though—we definitely ain’t talking Kar-wai or Bertolucci here), and has attractive leads, though I preferred the one with eyebrows to the one without them. It’s one of those movies that has a good story and gets the job done--entertaining, yes; a landmark in film history, no.

Probably the most fun to be had with this flick is to pick apart its subtexts, something all movies, good, bad or indifferent, have--whether their creators want them to or not. “Subtext” refers loosely to what movies are saying just underneath the surface of their script. The subtext communicates something about the values, attitudes and, often, fears of the people who made the movie. Gun Crazy’s subtext is notable in terms of two not so hidden messages: One, women are the source of evil, and, two, maybe the American Dream was beginning to go sour a lot earlier than we think it did.

Gun Crazy had an alternate title for a while called Deadly Is the Female—which is pretty much a complete giveaway. In the film, the approach to male and female relationships is decidedly Biblical, dating all the way back to Eve getting the bad rap for convincing gormless, can’t-think-for-himself Adam for biting into the apple from the tree of knowledge and pissing off a highly patriarchal God in the process. From that time onward, women have been unfairly seen as responsible for the sins of men (one of abusers’ most common excuses is “You made me do it.”). They are perceived as temptresses who must not be trusted. The logic here has always escaped me, but it seems that God doesn’t want men to take responsibility for their own actions so if they engage in bad or even evil behaviour there must be a woman behind it all and responsible for bringing it about. This whole movie underscores how poor, likeable Bart is led astray by hot, semi-psychotic Laurie. She is literally the cause of our All-American boy’s downfall. However, at the end of the movie he stops whining about his fate and admits it was all worth it—a great endorsement, as if one was needed, for hot sex over common sense and rational behaviour. However, the highly sexist stereotype that the movie reinforces only underscores how accepted such a pernicious, Bible-thumping view of women was in the American society of this period.

The second interesting subtextural theme is how hard the American Dream is to come by for many of its citizens. Bart may love guns and have gone to reform school, but he is obviously an easy going, likeable guy—you can more easily imagine him playing baseball and saying “shucks” a lot, than zipping around the country robbing people. But easy going and likeable as he is, his society doesn’t have much to offer him. While he may be rather easily corrupted by Laurie, he doesn’t really have any other viable options out there—his not especially serious mistakes as a child have become a permanent chain around his neck. 1949 seems awfully early after the war for this kind of social pessimism about the American Dream, but perhaps not. While Bart may superficially seem like he stepped out of a rah-rah Frank Capra movie, in reality he bears a not-too-distant resemblance to The Grapes of Wrath’s Tom Joad. Though Bart lacks Tom’s moral compass, he is no less desperate and no less segregated from the privileges of middle-class white society.

The Grapes of Wrath was considered anti-American by a lot of critics when the novel was first released and even John Ford caught flack for his film adaptation years later. Nobody considers Gun Crazy un-American. Why? Because obviously American social norms aren’t to blame for Bart’s anguish about his fate--IT’S THAT DAMN BROAD.

 

[Ralph Spoilsport]

I wondered if there was a critique of American gun culture, second amendment rights etc., which seem to me crazy at times, somewhere among its subtexts. Then why mess with a perfectly good sexual metaphor?

Next pick is Barbara Kopple's Harlan County U.S.A.

 

[kihei]

November (2018) Directed by Rainer Sarnet

November takes its own sweet time getting to a story and when one emerges it is about the travails of unrequited love. In the backwoods of 19th century Estonia, peasants struggle with a hard life. Even love does not come easy. Liina is in love with Hans and willing to do almost anything to woo him. Hans, meanwhile, is smitten by a visiting German baroness who has some serious sleep-walking issues. The chances are good that neither person is going to find the happy ending that they so desire.

However, this is no ordinary backwoods Estonia. This is a backwoods Estonia infused with lost souls, strange spirits, werewolf-like creatures, witches, and devils. And then there are the Kratts—decidedly odd creatures constructed from what seems like animal skeletons and discarded plumbing pipes and bicycle spare parts found in some untidy barn or garage. They come in many different forms actually. They can also be snowmen and even rivers for that matter, depending on the circumstances. Most long for a soul to call their own, but that comes at a high price to the user of the Kratt. This is the Estonia of folk legend, dark fairy tales, and rich imagination. Employing black and white cinematography, the movie is first and foremost a beautiful art object to observe, a dark dream of a film in which the supernatural and the mundane seamlessly mix as if it is the easiest thing in the world to go down to the creepy cemetery and have a chat with one’s dead mother. Much of the movie is shot at night when the forest seems at its most enchanted and magical. Throw in a lot of convincing looking peasants whose homely faces and sometimes deranged superstitions grab one’s attention, and the movie casts a spell that is akin to a Grimm’s fairy tale, eastern European variety. Finally, November is filled with haunting images of great beauty—a movie that tells its story in true cinematic fashion relying on pictures more than on words to communicate its secrets.

The world of November is so convincing and so detailed and so beautifully constructed that I was fascinated by this film from first frame to last. As someone who prefers the visual over the verbal in film, I loved the creativity with which director Rainer Sarnet used the medium to reveal his story, an adaptation of a novel interestingly enough. I wish more movies took this kind of approach and that there were more artists capable of bringing a work of such bewitching imagination to life.

subtitles

 

[kihei]

My next pick is Fred Zinnemann's The Day of the Jackal.(1973).

 

[KallioWeHardlyKnewYe]

I wondered if there was a critique of American gun culture, second amendment rights etc., which seem to me crazy at times, somewhere among its subtexts. Then why mess with a perfectly good sexual metaphor?

Next pick is Barbara Kopple's Harlan County U.S.A.

I was feeling that critique in the opening trial sequence. But then that hottie came in and well, women are a bad influence.

 

[KallioWeHardlyKnewYe]

November
Sarnet (2017)
“Put me to work.”

Rural Estonia. A peasant community set alongside a stately manor. We meet all sorts of denizens from the doomed young people in love to the handful of haves, to the many, many superstitious have-nots willing to throw their pants on their head to ward off illness. There’s folktales and magic and a semblance of plot, but that’s not really all that important, so let’s just move on.

WTF. In a good way. But still, WTF. You consume enough movies and eventually it feels like everything is a twist on this or that. Visual style A mixed with plot B and updated for a modern sensibility or whatever. I can truly say I haven’t experience anything quite like November. Sure there’s a classic story of two young people doing the whole ships in the night dance, but what I really want to talk about are the Kratts. What wonderful, memorable creations. Part bone, part mechanical with human souls and a need for physical labor. I imagine the opening scene could be a make-or-break for some. WTF good or WTF bad. It held me about as tightly as the bizzare whirrlygig held that cow. And when the thoughtful, poetic Snowman Kratt was melting toward the end, I’ll admit it was oddly emotional.

November is a wonderful, memorable creation. I can’t say I understood all parts of it, but it was mezmerizing throuhout and the oh that rich, beautiful black-and-white cinematography ... I settled down to watch this Sunday afternoon fresh off the annual 24-hour horror marathon I attend every year. I was a little worried that after only about an hour of sleep in the previous 30 hours, that this might be a tough watch or maybe I wouldn’t be in the right mindset. I was wrong. That wasn’t a problem at all. In fact, I think November would have fit nicely into the event itself as a thoughtful, atmospheric representative of the genre. Not to say it is horror, because it isn’t quite that. There’s certainly some grotesque imagery at times and an eerie “haunted woods” vibe throughout. There’s death and demons, of a sort. But November is surprisingly funny. There are these absurdist pops, such as the pants scene or when the man makes a woman a “chocolate” dessert. Weird and more than a bit juvenile. But I laughed dammit.

What an odd, original, lovely film.

 

[TP]

https://hfboards.mandatory.com/threads/the-official-movie-of-the-week-club-thread-iii.2557081/