Eddie Muller's Gun Crazy: The Origin of American Outlaw Cinema

No doubt we need more books like Eddie Muller's Gun Crazy, that follow the details of the making of a film.  We are probably not likely to get them, though, as there seems to be a diminishing interest in classical cinema, at least in this country.  In fact Muller's book was first published in France, in French, before being published in English in 2014 by Eddie Muller's own Black Pool Productions.  Muller's book follows the movie from its beginning as a MacKinlay Kantor story in 1940 in "The Saturday Evening Post" through its purchase by the producing King Brothers, the Kantor screenplay, the script doctoring by Dalton Trumbo, the battles with the Production Code Administration, the hiring of stars Peggy Cummins and John Dall and director Joseph H. Lewis and the actual filming and release of the film in 1949 and 1950.

I have only a few minor quibbles with the book, especially its rather gratuitous attack on the so-called auteur theory:  "I now argue regularly against the absurdity of auteurism."  What he is arguing about, apparently, is the idea that the director is the true and only author of a film, which is a distortion of the auteur theory, originally an attempt to assert the importance of the director at a time when the director's name was usually not even mentioned in relationship to a particular film. Later in the book Muller (head of The Film Noir Foundation, which does excellent work with that particular genre) says "hiring Joe Lewis was Frank King's masterstroke" and goes on about all that Lewis did to make the film intense and vivid. The auteur theory does not intend to disregard the contributions of everyone who worked on the film, though even writer Muller puts most of his emphasis on the screenplay and gives little attention to Victor Young, who provided the score, cinematographer Russell Harlan and production designer Gordon Wiles. Just because Gun Crazy may be the best film Joseph H. Lewis made does not mean his contribution was not the most significant, any more than the fact that Casablanca (1942) is better than most of Michael Curtiz's films does not diminish Curtiz's importance for the film. Muller also does an excellent job showing how influential Lewis's film was on films that came after it but does not discuss the similar films that came before it, including Fritz Lang's You Only Live Once (1937) and Nicholas Ray's They Live By Night (1948)