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Boy meets revolver meets girl, la mort et l'amour "like guns and ammunition." The starting point is a small-town orphan astride his wooden horsie, elated by his air rifle yet dismayed by the effect it has on a baby chick. Back from the reformatory and the military ("It gets dull, nothing but teaching guys how to shoot"), the neurotic marksman (John Dall) visits the carnival and runs into the tiny personification of killer instinct: The British sharpshooter (Peggy Cummins) who storms the frame with guns blazing, scans the audience and unloads into the camera's eye. (Their onstage competition, culminating in a crown of matches lit one by one with bullets, is practically a live sex show.) Honeymoon's over, the bride demands someone to "kick over the traces and win the world for me," there are stores to rob. The crime spree is midway between You Only Live Once and Bonnie and Clyde, Joseph H. Lewis charts it with a perverse artisan's dynamic glee, one jolt after another. Pulp Freudianism is dispensed humorously, Dall polishes a pistol's barrel while Cummins slides on her black stockings under a white robe, the office matron who censures the heroine for donning slacks takes a blast to the face. The freshness of invention is continuous, and continuously startling: The camera rides in the back of the thieves' car, hops over to the passenger's seat to watch a nervous flirtation with a cop while a stickup unfolds inside the back, then dollies in as they drive off for an euphoric close-up of Cummins—four unbroken minutes that left teeth marks on À Bout de Souffle and Bande à Part. "Let's finish it the way we started it." The swamp mist in the oneiric climax is really the smoke from a pair of burned-out comets, the embodiment of outlaw passion flowing from trauma to mania to delirious sublimity. Cinematography by Russell Harlan. With Berry Kroeger, Morris Carnovsky, Anabel Shaw, Harry Lewis, and Russ Tamblyn. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |