Editing Gun Crazy (section)

===Critical response===

The [[New York Times]] wrote: “Even with some adroit camouflaging, the Palace’s new picture...is pretty cheap stuff. ‘Gun Crazy’ just about covers it....this spurious concoction is basically on par with the most humdrum pulp fiction....In all fairness to Mr. Kantor’s idea, the actual script, which he wrote with Millard Kuafman, is a fairly literature business. 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. The dialogue is quite good and the photography is first-rate....The main drawbacks are the stars themselves, who look more like fugitives from a 4-H Club than from the law. Just why two such clean-cut youngsters...should be so cast is something for the Sphinx, but they certainly give it the works. Looking as fragile as a Dresden doll, Miss Cummins bites into her assignment like a shark. 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.”<ref>H.H.T. “The Screen: Episodic and Familiar.” NewYork Times, 25 August 1950, 17.</ref>

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."<ref>Muller, Eddie. ''Dark City: The Lost World of Film Noir'', St. Martin's Griffin, 208 pages, 1998.</ref>

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 (film)|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."<ref>[http://www.citypaper.net/articles/2004-07-29/screen.shtml Adams, Sam] {{webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20080522071020/http://www.citypaper.net/articles/2004-07-29/screen.shtml |date=2008-05-22 }}. ''Philadelphia City Paper'', film review, July 29-August 4, 2004. Accessed: August 1, 2013.</ref>

The review-aggregation website [[Rotten Tomatoes]] reports that 91% of film critics gave the production a positive rating, one based on 64 reviews.<ref>[http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/1031278-gun_crazy/ ''Gun Crazy''] at [[Rotten Tomatoes]]. Accessed: September 14, 2021.</ref>