“Gun Crazy,” Museum of Modern Art, August 28Joseph H. Lewis’s 1949 nerve-pincher about a firearm-loving couple on a crime spree screens in a restored print (UCLA Film & Television Archive) at MoMA as part of “Scorsese Screens,” a series held in conjunction with the museum’s “Scorsese Collects” gallery exhibition. John Dall stars as Bart Tare, who we see as a little boy stealing a gun, the introduction to his shooting obsession. It’s the only thing he’s good at, he tries to tell the judge, but they won’t listen. His friends, along with his older sister, who has been forced to raise him, vouch for his calm nature. He wouldn’t hurt a fly. There’s no way he would shoot something that wasn’t a tree branch or a tin can.Fast-forward a number of years and Bart returns from the military, where he has been honing his shot. While home, the circus rolls through town and he meets Annie Laurie Starr (played with bug-eyed intensity by Peggy Cummins) during a shooting contest. She gets him a job with the circus, and eventually the two, falling in love, decide to take their talents with guns and branch out, first through random stickups and finally through bank robberies. The script is credited to MacKinlay Kantor (who would go on to win the Pulitzer Prize in 1956 for his novel “Andersonville”), based on his own short story, and Millard Kaufman. The latter was a pen name for blacklisted screenwriter Dalton Trumbo, who was unable to openly work in Hollywood during production of the film. According to Lewis in Peter Bogdanoviach’s book “Who the Devil Made It?”, Kantor thought the film was horrible, mostly because they cut his supposedly massive 375-page script down to 140 pages.Lewis said the film was made for roughly $400,000 and shot in 30 days, and its rough-hewn qualities are clearly evident. But what makes “Gun Crazy,” along with most of Lewis’s other poverty-row pictures of the period, so remarkable and so charming is the creative freedom he was afforded and took advantage of. With a larger budget or more demanding producers, Lewis wouldn’t have been able to attempt something as crazy as the long bank robbery at the center of the film, shot in one take from the backseat of a car, a master stroke of building tension through composition and movement. The influence of this scene can be found in many works, most notably, of course, in the long tracking shots of Martin Scorsese’s “Goodfellas.”“Chameleon Street,” Brooklyn Academy of Music, August 27Wendell B. Harris, Jr.’s Sundance prizewinner, which he wrote, directed, and starred in, is based on the true story of William Douglas Street, Jr., a remarkable conman who, without even graduating from high school, managed to get a tryout with the Detroit Tigers baseball team (he convinced them he was a member of the Houston Oilers football team), become a reporter for Time magazine, and even, after finding a discarded lab coat, pose as a doctor and get a job at Illinois Masonic Hospital, where he reportedly helped with surgeries without any experience. (He’s also still out there, and was arrested once again in June, according to the Detroit News, “for allegedly stealing a Defense Department contractor’s persona to pick up women and land a job.”) Harris, who unfortunately has never made another film since “Chameleon Street,” presents his subject as a sly hero and goofball, and uses a variety of formal techniques to confront the racism at the heart of a society that leaves very few options for somebody like Street, who is forced to fake his way into a world that has closed the door on him. “Chameleon Street” screens as part of the “Indie 80s” series at BAM, which runs through August 27.“Patti Rocks,” Brooklyn Academy of Music, August 25Another “Indie 80s” pick at BAM, and another late-in-the-series treasure: “Patti Rocks” begins as a buddy comedy, with two friends — the louche Billy (Chris Mulkey) and the sad-sack Eddie (John Jenkins) — on a road trip to visit a woman the married Billy had an affair with and impregnated, so he can tell her the truth about himself and break things off. The first 45 minutes exist in this mode, two guys arguing in the car, occasionally running into mishaps, each one discovering things about the other. But then they arrive at the titular character’s apartment on a snowy night, and the movie flips into something more engaging — the buffoons have exited their male fantasy narrative and are now squarely in a women’s picture.“Beltracchi: The Art of Forgery,” Film Forum, ongoing“Beltracchi is a personality that the art world hates and a filmmaker loves because he’s so ambivalent,” the documentarian Arne Birkenstock said in a recent interview with ARTINFO about the subject his latest film, the world-famous art forger Wolfgang Beltracchi. Through Beltracchi’s strenuous efforts (which the film goes to great depths to detail), he exposed questions of creativity and originality with all artistic practices, as well as holes in the art market that, for a variety of reasons, people are unwilling to close up.“The Stanford Prison Experiment,” IFC Center, ongoingA fictional film based on Dr. Philip Zimbardo’s controversial 1971 study at the University of Stanford, in which 24 volunteers were randomly assigned roles of “guards” and “prisoners” and left to their own devices while acting out their assigned identities. “Beyond even the actual abuse,” wrote ARTINFO’s Anneliese Cooper, “the real horror lies in watching the subtle, seemingly effortless transition of the guards from boys to monsters, paralleled with Zimbardo’s zeal to continue the experiment well past the point of distress.”
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