The Left Handed Gun (1958)

It’s impossible to see Arthur Penn’s The Left Handed Gun nowadays and not consider Bonnie and Clyde, the ironically, morally gray outlaw picture that Penn would direct nine years later. The films are startling in their similarities, particularly in their ahead of their time insistence that violence amount to something more than men merrily, mindlessly blowing one other away in the service of some self-justifying, hypocritical, appease the manly man coda. The Left Handed Gun isn’t nearly as violent as Bonnie and Clyde, there’s no way it could have been in the U.S. in 1958, but you may find it, in its own way, even more uncomfortable than Clyde. There’s a disconnection of style and artistic temperament in Gun that’s unexpected and frightening.

Younger viewers can slip Bonnie and Clyde into their DVD players and prepare themselves for one of the first of the new wave of violent, rebellious American pictures of the 1960s-1970s: Bonnie and Clyde undeniably belongs in that era. The Left Handed Gun, on the other hand, shot in stunning, stately, black and white, looks just like another breezy, authority reaffirming American western of the 1950s, perhaps directed by Howard Hawks in the second or third act of his career, and that expectation comes to bite you in the ass. The Left Handed Gun behaves according to the standards of the day, at first, complete with instantly dated opening song, but it gradually becomes something darker and more ambitious. Bonnie and Clyde, like Psycho or any other classic that’s at least partially legendary for its bloodshed and anarchic sensibilities, unavoidably braces you through cultural osmosis. The Left Handed Gun has the benefit of relative obscurity; it’s a vicious little animal that doesn’t announce itself with a BEWARE sign.

I tend to forget how dangerous Paul Newman can be in the right role, as his wonderful elder statesman performances have a habit of coming to my mind first. Newman’s charm, at times, particularly in his youth, could trump whatever the character may have actually been about (the traditional trap of the movie star) but he was also, and would continue to be, an astute, instinctual actor; a man very much aware of his presence and charisma. Occasionally, Newman would turn that heat right back on the audience (Hud, Cool Hand Luke) and do something risky and uncomfortable, or at least more risky and uncomfortable than you expect. Billy the Kid is cut from the same cloth: good looking, commanding, likeable, but also a flake; a live-wire who reaches for his gun at the slightest provocation with no consideration as to how the gunfight will affect his friends or himself the day, or even moments, after. Armistices, apologies, secret alliances, back door hand shakes, these are the dealings of corrupt higher-ups; Billy’s gun is, in his eyes, the great equalizer.

The Left Handed Gun may have an even fuller, more complicated understanding of its troubled hero than the (still greater) Bonnie and Clyde. Billy the Kid is glamorized, revered (largely by townspeople unaware of how casually he screws people caught in the cross-fire) but the picture never dilutes his self-absorption or near insanity. That refusal comes into focus in what is possibly the best scene in the picture: Billy and his de facto gang are at a party hosted by destined pursuer Pat Garrett (John Dehner), and a gentleman, resenting Billy’s fame as well as the subsequent, by the skin of his teeth pardon afforded by an armistice, tries to start something. Billy initially resists, and Newman handles his push and pull towards and away from violence and agitation with understatement, slowly boiling to an intense, unchecked fever. It’s a testament to Penn, Newman and John Dehner’s work that the almost murders of The Left Handed Gun are more disturbing than the actual murders of most pictures. This picture, at its best, has that same liquid violence to comedy to violent comedy to slapstick volatility that marks Bonnie and Clyde as an undeniable masterpiece.

The true bloodshed of The Left Handed Gun is also a triumph, memorable in its strangeness and near abstraction. Billy and his boys, as they must, ultimately disregard the armistice and plug one of the men they’ve vowed to punish for their former boss’s murder, and the shooting is ghastly and cold-blooded: the man’s terrified, twisted face framed in a triangle as he collapses to his death. Another murder, committed out of indifference to a promise Billy made to Garrett, is a bit more justified but even more perverse in its violation: the partygoers cry and stand shocked and aghast, the weight of what’s just transpired acknowledged with remarkable (even for today) honesty.

Penn, again foreshadowing Bonnie and Clyde, doesn’t let us off the hook with a lazy, convenient ending either: the right person dies and the right person lives, but the final act is denied any riding off into the sunset closure: the final killing is as much a suicide as anything else, a loss brought about from imperceptible damage, bitterness and twisted authority. The ending is even more of a lump in the throat than Clyde’s, that picture, reminiscent of Easy Rider, at least allows us a certain self-glamorizing, self-pitying, the little guy can’t ever win fantasy. The Left Handed Gun pitilessly reveals Billy the Kid to be every bit as self-motivated as the big man he opposes, he’s just not as adept at playing the game, which is, unfortunately, our country in a nutshell.

Posted on May 12th, 2008 in Reviews, Classics, 1958 |

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