Cross-posting from the film noir board The Blackboard, on the
theory that some of you might be able to provide
illumination:
I was watching the Warner Video DVD of Gun Crazy tonight, a
film I'd never seen before but which of course I've been
reading about for years. Very impressive! I was listening
among other things for a line of dialogue (starred below)
mentioned by Danny Peary in one of his Cult Movies books, and
also mentioned in this passage of a New York Times piece on B
movies written by Wallace Markfield in 1975:
"There's no message, really, or if there is one it's
delivered by Cummins in a jolting line spoken while she's
wandering around a treeless sun-drenched shopping center:
"Hey, it hurts me here!
**Everything in these forty-eight states hurts me!**" Yet the
line is nearly lost under the blasting of horns, the idiot
yells from a nearby fun house."
Now, I totally missed this line in the DVD (which clocks in
at the standard stated running time of 87 minutes), and do
not recall any scene approximating what the Times describes.
Can any expert on the film tell me what gives here? I am
wondering about the accuracy of the Markfield piece in
general and whether it was a source for Peary, who repeated
the error. Markfield goes to write:
"Scene after scene abounds in similar tiny, tossed-away
triumphs that are never underscored or overworked. Among
these triumphs: a pump-jockey deliberately and with utmost
delicacy cutting through the fan-belt of an out-of-state
Cadillac; an expensively-dressed matron unloading the
contents of a supermarket shopping cart, then the shopping
cart, into her car; a pair of object-hungry young marrieds
fondling pressure cookers in a department store and shivering
orgiastically while a hold-up goes on."
I don't remember any of that either (and I went through the
DVD again in fast-forward mode to look for these bits). Am I
unobservant? Was Markfield, a novelist, making it all up, or
mis- remembering, or conflating Gun Crazy with some other
film? 1975 was not only pre-DVD, it was pre-VHS (which was
introduced in 1976), and writers on film had nothing to refer
to in the study: I'm sure mis- descriptions were very common.
But this whole passage is a doozy. The "forty-eight states"
line is not listed under "memorable quotes" in the film's
IMDB entry, where one would surely expect to find it; I'm
guessing it must be apocryphal.
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : 18 Feb 2008 EST