Joseph H. Lewis's Gun Crazy is the story of two young lovers who embark on a crime spree. For this book, Kitses researched widely into the film production's history and explored its connection to the crime film tradition and the dark underside of American society. Gun Crazy is the very essence of film noir, a low-budget, high-octane thriller whose reputation has grown with every passing year since its first appearance in 1950. While its story of two doomed lovers, crashing through the small towns of the mid-West, running the gauntlet of hold-ups and shoot-outs to a bloody nemesis, owes much to the true-life tale of Bonnie and Clyde, the film achieves an intense poetry eloquently expressive of the dark side of the American Dream. The film's origins in the skid-row operation of the King Brothers are expertly described by Jim Kitses. He traces "Gun Crazy"'s roots in the rain-slicked, night-time world of noir, and in the postwar American society that gave birth to it. He teases out the effects of the Production Code, and the distinctive contributions of director Joseph H. Lewis, writers MacKinlay Kantor and the blacklisted Dalton Trumbo, and stars, Peggy Cummins and John Dall. Above all, Kitses provides a wonderfully alert and informative reading of a small masterpiece, a film that rises triumphantly above the modesty of its means. Jim Kitses is Emeritus Professor in the School of Cinema at San Francisco State University, USA. An expanded edition of Horizons West , his pioneering text in Western and genre studies, was published by BFI in 2004. He has also co-edited The Western Reader (1998), contributed a study of the film noir classic Gun Crazy (BFI, 1996) and authored the commentary for the DVD of 7 Men From Now, the first acclaimed cycle of Budd Boetticher-directed Westerns. Used Book in Good Condition