Gun Crazy (also known as Deadly Is the Female)[1] is a 1950 American crime film noir starring Peggy Cummins and John Dall in a story about the crime-spree of a gun-toting husband and wife.

[3] In 1998, Gun Crazy was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant.

Flashbacks provide a portrait of Bart who, after killing a young chick with a BB gun at age seven, is hesitant to shoot at anything, even a mountain lion with a bounty on its head.

When the money runs out, she gives Bart a stark choice: she wants to obtain the good things in life, so he must join her in a career of crime or she will leave him.

[8] This one-take shot includes the sequence of driving into town to the bank, distracting and then knocking out a patrolman, and making the get-away.

This was done by simulating the interior of a sedan with a stretch Cadillac with room enough to mount the camera and a jockey's saddle for the cameraman on a greased two-by-twelve board in the back.

Even if the young desperadoes aren’t motivated, apparently beyond Miss Cummins’ grim appreciation of money and her partner’s general restlessness, neither are they sentimentalized or offered as luckless tools of society.

Mr. Dall’s pluck is just as admirable, even when he’s nervously begging his soulmate to make their next robbery ‘the lahst one’....we must say that it takes more than crime and the King Brothers to make sows’ ears out of silk purses.”[9] In his 1998 book Dark City: The Lost World of Film Noir, critic and film historian Eddie Muller commends the production.

"Joseph H. Lewis's direction", he notes, "is propulsive, possessed of a confident, vigorous simplicity that all the frantic editing and visual pyrotechnics of the filmmaking progeny never quite surpassed.

"[10] Sam Adams, media critic for the Philadelphia City Paper, wrote in 2008: "The codes of the time prevented Lewis from being explicit about the extent to which their fast-blooming romance is fueled by their mutual love of weaponry (Arthur Penn would rip off the covers in Bonnie and Clyde, which owes Gun Crazy a substantial debt), but when Cummins' six-gun dangles provocatively as she gasses up their jalopy, it's clear what really fills their collective tank.

"[11] The review-aggregation website Rotten Tomatoes reports that 91% of film critics gave the production a positive rating, one based on 64 reviews.

[12] In 1998, Gun Crazy was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant."