Superb film by Dalton Trumbo. TCM on demand now.



This movie shows how crazy women can be.

I've never seen that one.

And while I really like MUCH of his work, what can I say about him?

Not so much good.

Watched it yesterday.
Enjoyed it ~ where else can a guy just out of juvee, the military come home and the first day back shootin' guns and drinking beer all the same time?

I don't think it's correct to credit this film to Dalton Trumbo. He didn't write the story. MacKinlay Kantor wrote the story upon which the film is based, and although Trumbo contributed to the screenplay, so did Kantor himself.

I think the credit for the film should go to director Joseph H. Lewis, who directed at least one other film noir with the theme of amor fou, namely, The Big Combo, in which Lewis included a scene between Richard Conte and Jean Wallace which suggests that Conte is performing cunnilingus on Wallace.



Yes, that scene made it into the film, most likely because no dialogue in the scene suggests anything sexual, and that's what the censors went by- the shooting script.

For Gun Crazy, in the scene where John Dall meets Peggy Cummins, Lewis' direction to Dall was this: "You see her. Your dick's never been so hard." Later in the film, there's a scene in a diner where Cummins is wearing a sweater and probably not much of a bra (if any) under it, because her nipples appear to be hard as saphires, and you just don't see that in American films made between 1934 and 1966.
If you want to see Cummins' perky cannons trying to push through her sweater, go to the 32 minute mark of the film at TCM On Demand. There is simply no way that either Lewis or cinematographer Russell Harlan missed this.

So, what I see in Gun Crazy is not the capitalism-is-evil horse shit of Trumbo; I see the imprint of Joseph H. Lewis, who sometimes skirted the edge of the Production Code with his sexual themes.

Here's a screenshot I made off of TCM On Demand.



Ms. Cummins tits have "Joseph H. Lewis" written all over them. Gun Crazy belongs to him.

That women was no good.

Unless you needed to etch glass.

Miss Cummins is definitely not-quite-hiding a pair of shapely strawberries in her sweater. My favorite line in the film is when they are escaping the big heist and he says 'We're shooting people and being chased by the police just to avoid work?'.

Veronica Lake also 'stretches fabric point to point' in her white dress in 'I Married a Witch'.

In the noir genre, I tried to get her movies 'Saigon', 'This Gun for Hire', and 'The Blue Dahlia' through Inter-Library Loan.

I always had a thing for Veronica Lake and her hair covering one eye.

quote:

Originally posted by mr kablammo:
My favorite line in the film is when they are escaping the big heist and he says 'We're shooting people and being chased by the police just to avoid work?'

I don't know if that line was in the original story or if Kantor himself added to to the script, but, to me, it sounds like something Trumbo would say: "Look at the damage done by capitalism, forcing common people into lives of crime, whereas in communism, all workers are happy and no one is without." Actually, most people are without, except for party leaders. Everyone is on the same shitty level except for the ruling class (which is not supposed to exist in communism).

The movie Trumbo does its best to rehabiltate Dalton Trumbo by changing or ignoring the facts.