This is probably the worst acted and worst scripted film I've ever seen rated this high. The dialogue is laughably bad and the acting is without exception execrable. Now, if people are saying this is so bad it's good, then I get it. If they're actually saying this has any subtlety or depth as a real drama, they're a bit cracked.

***SPOILERS*** I'm not sure about the spoilers, given as many reviews that have gone before me; what the hey... The first time I saw this was when I was a kid - on the late late show (compared to today, it was tame; about midnight); I remember something just made me uncomfortable. It took quite a while to figure out (I don't think it showed for another twenty five years) what it was. I'll break it now - - It's the concept of Annie Oakley and Frank Butler gone bad. I mean, the what-ifs are a nasty possibility of two expert sharpshooters loose with little conscience. Still pretty spooky, ain't it? Annie Get Your Gun, indeed. deranged murderers as a musical?... It's a 10. p.s. the girl was really sexy; a MUST for a noir film.

Between classics They Live by Night (48) and Bonnie and Clyde (67) featuring male female duos on the run from the law is this outstanding B entry; also worthy of classic status. Joseph Lewis's Gun Crazy is pulp at its best.Young Bart Tare ( Rusty Tamblyn ) is so gun obsessed he resorts to stealing one in his small town and immediately caught sentenced harshly to a reformatory. Flashing ahead to adulthood he returns to home after a stint in the army as a weapons instructor and hooks up with his established pals. They take in a carnival where he becomes smitten with sideshow Annie Oakley, Annie Starr (Peggy Cummins) with both sharing a passion for guns. Sexy Annie unlike Bart is cold blooded however and with him under her spell they begin to pull armed robberies and establish a body count.Highly stylized and featuring a florid use of cinema language Joseph Lewis made a pocket masterpiece with Gun Crazy that features one of the finest and coldest noir femme fatales in history played by Peggy Cummins. Homicidal and into the next big rush she softens only once and even that is with passion. Unapologetic from start to finish she dominates the film while leaving the playing field littered with men (subserviently played by John Dall, grovelingly and snidely rich by Barry Kroeger) emotionally destroyed by her allure and others by her aim.In addition to brilliantly framing and informing Starr's character Lewin along with master cinematographer Russell Harlan offers up a series of fine tracking shots in which one in particular puts you in the back seat of a getaway car in essence making you an accomplice to a bank job. Harlan had six Oscar noms in his future but he would never shoot a scene as memorable.Well edited and to the point Gun Crazy's pace is also enhanced by it's clipped dialogue and tight composition establishing suspense in no time, surrendering occasionally to mawkish devices but nearly throughout it is a smoothly well made economical work. It is the archetypal B that A directors have been making the past 25 years with millions more and an hour longer and getting rave reviews yet paling and failing in the face of this black and white treasure.

At a time when gangster movies, thrillers and film noir were very popular - think Cagney, Bogart, Donlevy, Mitchum, Powell, Ryan, Raft et al - director Joseph Lewis and screen writer Dalton Trumbo, collaborated on a movie which casts a couple of ostensibly ordinary citizens, and not criminals, (Dall and Cummins) as two people with a special talent: both crack shots with guns. Nothing too unusual about that, though, because guns have always been a factor in American culture.Incidentally, it would be later that same year that Hollywood would release Annie Get Your Gun with Betty Hutton and Howard Keel - and also both crack shots with guns - in an upbeat musical-comedy biopic about Annie Oakley, full colour, big budget ($3.8 million) family type Saturday afternoon matinee, reinforcing all the positive aspects of American Individualism and the American Dream. And presenting guns as cute toys with which you too could do some darn good tricks; that is, if you work hard enough to achieve your own particular goals in life.No such dream with this offering and a budget of less than one-tenth of Annie, however. In this outing, Dall (Bart) is swept off his feet by a woman who brags about having killed a man already. Was that true in this fiction? Probably, because later in the plot, Cummins (Annie) has no compunction about shooting anybody, even a person cowering on the floor. Dall, who still can't forget about a chicken he killed when only seven, is completely under her spell, driven, and driving across USA, to murderous excess to satisfy and justify his lust for Annie and her pathological dreams of wealth; and how to get it all - violently. In effect, she's the boss, no question.In crisp black-and-white, we're with both all the way, right to the bitter end - sometimes in the back seat of their car, voyeuristically listening, watching, seeing what they see - and knowing what the poor saps don't, or won't face: the cops will get 'em, in the end, for sure. Though it would spoil that end for you, for me to say anymore.Trumbo's script (assisted by MacKinlay Kantor) is appropriately effective, detailing the manner in which a person's skill set can be subverted and manipulated, by another, into socially self-destructive behaviour. Cinematography by long-time expert Russell Harlan (Red River, The Thing from Another World, Blackboard Jungle, Lust for Life, too many to list...) is - no pun intended - picture perfect, in my opinion. And direction by Lewis is faultless to this viewer's eyes as we take in this devastating critique of a key aspect of American culture.I'd seen Dall only twice before, in Rope (1948), in which I think he was, chillingly, much more effective as an actor; on the other hand, his continuous self-effacing attitude, as not-so-smart Bart, fit the bill for this story; the other time I saw Dall was in Spartacus (1960), but didn't recognize him. Had not seen Peggy Cummins, before or since; one thing's for sure, though - she was no one-trick pony; and made a beautiful, ice-cold killer. One can speculate whether Arthur Penn watched this classic movie prior to directing Bonnie and Clyde (1967), there being so many thematic and plot similarities between both stories. The one question, though, still unanswered for me is: was it only simple coincidence that Annie Get Your Gun was released only six months after Gun Crazy? Hey, both movies have heroines called Annie, after all; and perfect counterpoints for the American Good and the American Bad. By the way, I liked Annie Get Your Gun; Gun Crazy, however, is the better story and movie, I think.Recommended for all suitable ages. At only 87 minutes, it's definitely worth your time to see another true American classic. And a solid eight out of ten movie. April 6, 2018