Joaquim da Silva Fontes, Significação e Estabilidade do Género no ...

2.4 Joseph H. Lewis
Considered as an American B-movie director, Joseph H. Lewis is best known for
his work in film noir from the late forties and the fifties and the way he made notable use
of location photography. His creative use of props and of shooting from odd perspectives,
and his use of plots and characters with intricate or obscured strategies enhanced their
strange power but no less importantly enabled him to face the rather difficult budgetary
limitations of B-pictures.
His reputation rests on two major contributions to the film noir canon: Gun Crazy, a
transgressive and boundary-breaching of l’amour fou (or mad love, the epitome so often
associated with couples on the run) and The Big Combo, a striking chiaroscuro film which
will be analysed next. As for Gun Crazy, it is perhaps the most acclaimed noir production
directed by Joseph H. Lewis. To recapitulate, this 1950 film stars Peggy Cummins and
John Dall (as Annie Laurie Starr and Bart Tare, respectively) in a story about the crimespree
of a gun-toting husband and wife, forerunners of the infamous film duo, Bonnie and
Clyde. This dark romance about numerous stick-ups, a dominant femme fatale, an erotic
love and gun-obsession is also remarkable for its use of location photography. This is a
low-budget film with scenes of robberies all across the country filmed largely from the
backseat of the holdup getaway car.
This film is one of a trio of noir movies that also have this component of amour
fou, with the flight of a fugitive pair of lovers running from the law: Fritz Lang’s You Only
Live Once (1937) with Henry Fonda and Sylvia Sidney and Nicholas Ray’s They Live by
Night (1948) with Farley Granger and Cathy O’Donnell. These films are generally seen as
the forerunners to Arthur Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde (1967) or the prototype for the “couple
on the run” sub-genre. 98 However, in all of these three noir productions the main
protagonists are either unfairly convicted of a crime (or murder, as is the case for Bowie
(Farley Granger) in They Live by Night) or are just tempted to criminality by some deadly
female, as in the case of Annie Laurie Starr in Gun Crazy. In any case, the compulsive
98 See chapter 1.2 “The Gangster Film” (p. 72).
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