Gun hater loves Gun Crazy!

Last week, Turner Classic Movies showed Rififi, a superb 1955 French noir film I’d never seen, or even knew about, until I happened to see a tiny snippet of it at 37 seconds into this video I posted a few weeks ago. This evening on TCM I saw a movie I knew by reputation only, as the inspiration for Bonnie and Clyde — a film that I’ve never managed to watch past the first half hour, maybe because I’m not much of a Faye Dunaway fan.

The movie is Gun Crazy, a fast and tight 1950 B-grade flick. Originally released in 1949 as Deadly is the Female, it was written by Dalton Trumbo, and it’s noted for its brisk direction and groundbreaking camera work. But Gun Crazy belongs to stunning Peggy Cummins, in one of the most viscerally exciting performances I have ever seen. Now 85, Cummins was 24 when she made Gun Crazy.

The only other movie I know Peggy Cummins from is Night of the Demon, that I blogged here. Cummins in Gun Crazy is simply thrilling, defining a look and persona that reminds me of later roles by Carroll Baker, Carol Lynley, and Tuesday Weld.

Somebody has gone to the trouble of posting Gun Crazy in its entirety on YouTube, so I may as well take advantage of that and embed it here.

Unregulated freedom isn’t free

How the mighty have fallen. Economist Paul Krugman cuts no slack for Alan Greenspan, the former longtime chairman of the Federal Reserve.

If [Greenspan] wants to redeem himself through hard and serious reflection about how he got it so wrong, fine — and I’d be interested in listening. If he thinks he can still lecture us from his pedestal of wisdom, he’s wasting our time.

As I’ve said before, I’m appalled by Alan Greenspan’s adherence to the naive ideas of romance novelist Ayn Rand. Upon what rigorous academic research did Rand develop her philosophy? None. She was simply a fanatical anti-Communist with obsessive fantasies about her ideal leading man. That’s it. Nothing more complicated than that, except she happened to be a darn good storyteller. Yet Greenspan bought into her idea that capitalism should mean that anything goes. Only after the damage was done, did he acknowledge the failure of unregulated markets to correct themselves, and now he’s even backpedaling on that.

To recap what happened in 2008, Wall Street played fast and loose with money that came from mortgages that hadn’t been properly underwritten. This was possible because the Glass-Steagall Act of 1932 had been repealed, removing the barrier between investment and commercial banks. The bankers took their gigantic bonuses, then the mortgages dried up, the market tanked, and the financial markets collapsed. After the government bailed out the banks, the bankers kept their bonuses.

This cataclysmic worldwide mess started with the deregulation of American investment banking during the Clinton Administration, under the influence of Alan Greenspan, Bob Rubin, and Lawrence Summers.