
A handsome young couple (John Dall and Peggy Ann Cummins) meet at a carnival, where they engage in a sharp-shooting contest. It’s love at first (gun) sight. And soon they’re off on a crime spree, which ends tragically. Written under a pseudonym by the blacklisted Dalton Trumbo and well-directed by the expert B picture craftsman, Joseph E. Lewis, this is, to be sure, a Bonnie and Clyde precursor. But it is as crisp, no nonsense melodrama, and as a pioneering study of America’s curious passion for the sleek, shiny beauty of death-dealing objects, that it retains its hold on us, 56 years after it slipped on to the bottom of the bills in our long-lost (and sorely missed) neighborhood theaters.