Given this, I actually kind of like this back to the past aspect of contemporary digital television despite the fact that many of these future past retro channels like WYBN here in upstate New York, are often poorly run by hacks who regard commercials as the real star attraction of their we want their money stations. The problem for those of us who actually want to watch the television shows or films rather than the commercials on these stations is that these stations are run by money grubbers who care more about commerce and profits than the shows or films they run and so they run their commercials, many of which make you wonder about their professionalism (amateur is actually too kind of a word to describe their incompetence), literally over the shows and films they broadcast. This makes watching any shows or films broadcast on these stations and their sub-channels next to impossible because these commercials often run over the end of the television show or at critical points during a film making it literally impossible to make sense of them. Such, I guess, is media life in neo-liberal America where the surreal is no longer surreal. It is the neo-American way.
Amidst the uber-amateurish retro TV stations out there in digital TV land there are some good stations, stations which are actually run by professionals who know what they are doing and who actually know how to make bot technologies properly. They don’t, in other words, incorrectly use one size all automation programmes to run their stations so they can milk them for the largest profits possible disrupting the flow of television shows and films in the process. One of my favourite of these quality retro TV networks is the Movies network.
The Movies network is a retro joy to watch for those of us who became cinephiles in the 1960s and 1970s thanks, in large part, to TV stations, particularly independent television stations, independent stations which showed classic Hollywood movie after movie on their channels in the 1960s and 1970s. And watch movie after movie on these channels my sister and I did. It was only after I went up to college that I discovered another way you could watch classic Hollywood flics, namely, in second run film theatres and in film society showings, both of which ran classic Hollywood films but who also added into the mix classic and current foreign films for ones viewing pleasure.
It was on the Movies channel that I finally saw the celebrated film Gun Crazy, a 1950 noir made by the poverty row studio Monogram, produced by Monogram’s King Brothers, directed by Joseph Lewis, written by MacKinlay Kantor and blacklisted writer Dalton Trumbo, and starring Peggy Cummings and John Dahl as the two leads, Laurie and Bart. The film, originally titled Deadly is the Female, which is often cited by critics and historians as a precursor to the 1967 film Bonnie and Clyde given that both films, as is Fritz Lang’s 1937 film You Only Live Once, centre around a couple who, in Gun Crazy’s case, meet cute at a gun shooting exhibition at a low rent carnival, and who proceed to rob their way across the American Midwest.
I liked Gun Crazy quite a lot but then I am a sucker for the cynicism and darkness of film noirs. They suits my perspective on the world quite well. So, after watching the film I picked up Jim Kitses’s book on the film, Gun Crazy (London: BFI, BFI Film Classics series, 1996), to read more about the film. Kitses does a nice job of putting the film in its production contexts giving readers details about its writing, the impact of censorship on the film, its making, and those who made the film. Kitses, in a swipe at auteur theory, argues that the film was a collaboration between the King’s who produced the film with a proletarian chip on their shoulders. They were aided and abetted by the aforementioned Kantor and Trumbo, the latter of whom wrote under an assumed name, who wrote it, and the craftspeople, including the actors, who helped make it and helped give it meaning, even though it is, I would argue, the director, the general or the conductor, who ultimately leads the troops or players who make it into film battle or film performance.
Kitses also does an excellent job of exploring the noir context of the film. Additionally, he makes interesting connections between the noir aspect of the film with its narrative, character, and mise-en-scene codings, and other genres and tones the film, according to Kitses, draws on, including, surprisingly, the Western and Screwball Comedy. Kitses asserts that Gun Crazy is playing off of American myths about the freedom American frontier and the ideological spaces our two protagonists are confined in and which they try to break out of, to no avail, of course, in the deterministic world of film noir. It is on this cultural level that Kitses links the cultural to the political, to an America increasingly standardised and packaged and which is not particularly, as a consequence, palatable to our protagonists.
It is also on the cultural level where Kitses’ interpretive analysis, one grounded in exegesis, an analysis of the how the text was produced, gave me pause. Kitses utilises the standard operating practises of contemporary scholarly film criticism to explore, for example, the psychological and psychoanalytic aspects of Gun Crazy, but largely does so without documenting these presumed aspects of the film in the archival record. And while these suppositions may have validity one would, or at least I would, would like to see them linked to the historical record rather than to problematic and interesting conclusions based largely on a reading of the text. Sometimes it really does seem that the criticism aimed at so much film criticism is true: it far too often over analyses and over interprets a film on the basis of less than fully documented information in such a way that it appears that the socialised eyes of the beholder/critic is guiding the interpretation rather than the empirical evidence.
Recommended.
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