Annie Laurie Starr (Peggy Cummins), billed by a circus barker as ‘So appealing! So dangerous! So lovely to look at!’ is a prim English gal who trick shoots for a circus, a modern-day Annie Oakley. Bart Tare (John Dall), is a gee-aw-shucks boy-next-door with a thing about guns.
Start with a nice-looking all-American kid who loves his guns and a petite cool blonde who’s a pretty good shot herself, looks swell in slacks and wants more out of life than a steady paycheck provides.
Beat well together in a fairy tale romance of sticking up filling stations, small businesses and banks across the mythic American West, with car chases shot from the vantage point of an anxious back seat passenger at their shoulders as they lurch, buck, wobble and tear into back projected scenery.
Shoot with the studio conventions that made black and white B-pictures film noir, making sure to mix in a lot of neon-lit narcotic American night and charting their derring-do in series of newspaper front pages with banner headlines.
Fold in a dollop of postwar camp, such as tailored dude cowboy togs, and season with gratuitous gunplay. Let rise about 90 minutes.
The result proved irresistible to a generation of French filmmakers who took it seriously and made it work like a charm in films like À bout de souffle (Breathless) and Band à part (Band of Outsiders)—not to mention Jack Kerouac, whom one can imagine seeing the movie by himself in the back of an all-night movie theater in Denver with a jug of cheap wine and a lot of blue neon words racing through his head.
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| Jack Kerouac in Greenwich Village in 1958. Photo by Jerry Yulsman AP |
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