“I feel good inside when I shoot. Like I can be somebody.” Bart Tare’s (John Dall) childhood fascination with guns only intensifies as he grows up, especially after meeting carnival sharpshooter Laurie Anne Starr (Peggy Cummins) whose passion for the bullet exceeds even his own. Only after they take off together, get married, and begin surviving off a life of crime does Bart learn that Laurie’s not fully satisfied unless she’s using her gun to kill (“I told you I was no good,” she says. “I didn’t kid ya, did I? Well, now you know”). Despite Laurie’s deadly tendencies, Bart finds it impossible to separate from her, so their fates are glued. Scripted under a pseudonym by blacklisted screenwriter Dalton Trumbo, Joseph H. Lewis’ Gun Crazy was shocking in 1950 for its random depravity, the couple running and shooting until doom finally closes in on them, hunted deep into the woods and cornered in a fog-shrouded swamp like animals returning to their natural habitat (note how they both tear into their hamburgers like animals in the diner scene too). In their final act, both obtain jobs in a meatpacking plant so they have inside tracks for holding up the payroll office, which they do successfully but murderously, setting off their collision course with a police manhunt. Perhaps the more memorable crime, however, is the now iconic bank robbery sequence which Lewis famously shot from the stripped-out backseat of a car for six full minutes without a cut and with the public outside unaware of the filming: Bart parks the car and goes inside as Laurie distracts a policeman until the bank alarm goes off, Bart runs out with the money, and they speed away, Laurie staring to the rear on the lookout for cops, her expression turning to wild sexual satisfaction. In what is unquestionably the best performance of her career, Cummins is sensational, a femme fatale who flaunts — rather than hides — her amorality and genuinely loves — rather than manipulates — her male target. “The next time you wake up in the middle of the night, look over at me,” she says. “I’m real. And I’m there.”