Director: Joseph H. Lewis
Cast: Peggy Cummins, John Dall, Berry Kroeger, Morris Carnovsky
Have I Seen it Before: Nope.
Did I Like It: Here’s the problem with writing a review for a movie nearly a month after actually watching it. Unless it was overwhelmingly memorable, the whole thing might have disappeared from my memory, and only insists on becoming a viable review because it’s not like its going to suddenly leap off my to-do list.
The film hits all of the right notes for a noir. There’s a hapless protagonist (Dall), probably ultimately a bad egg, but he goes full blown villain the moment he drifts into the proximity of a woman (Cummins) who is either the anti-christ, or possibly just a sociopath who enjoys far more money than their mate is ever likely to come up with via honest means.
What’s the twist here? Well, take a look at that title again. There are lots of guns here. Too many guns? And maybe just a bit too much of a semi-sexual obsession with the items on the part of the two main characters. I’m not sure if any of this was intended to be a comedy, but your humble correspondent and the people around him just couldn’t help ourselves when it turned out these two murderers were capable of love, but only for their revolvers.
I might have found the film more memorable if those two main performances left more of an impression. It’s difficult to look at Dall as anything other than the murder enthusiast from Hitchcock’s Rope (1948), but that’s hardly his fault. Unfortunately, Cummins fails to display much of a personality in her role, so the frisson that can really ignite the watchability of film noire never quite comes to pass. There is no tension—and probably not a lot of believability—as Dall falls for her, and there is no tragedy when they come to their inevitable end.