ZeitHeist
What do you get when you have a duo of sound-men in the luggage carrier of a Stretch limo, an unobtrusive script girl sandwiched between, a camera man, a head grip and an auteur inside of it? You get the most elaborate hold up scene in cinema history! And in Gun Crazy (1950), you can see other types of madness had to be on call a scheme of this proportion.
And I didn't mention yet, but with this Cadillac congregation , there were the two lead actors Peggy Cummings and John Dall that were the other sardines in the equation. What we are talking here is a camera with an 1000 foot film magazine and a whopping heft length of two 2x12 foot ply board greased together - and that is where the unwieldy rig is seated and slides. It surely reads just as daunting as it actually was - but director Joseph H. Lewis was more hard-boiled than his cast and it was his brainstorm that led to the streamlining this intensely complex 17-page bank heist into a 3 and a half minute continuous shot.
Fortunately, the back projection would facilitate this fantastic feat, the back seat camera busily capturing Bart and Annie's nerve-racking drive from the fringes of the city to Hampton's downtown bank, the sequestered button mikes would spy on their improvised patter. Bart proceeds to enter the bank leaving moll Annie primed and ready for the getaway.
In one fell swoop, the camera lunges forward, panning the exchange of a coquettish Annie with a passing by policeman. Now - the intensity rises to 11, as Bart exits the bank and the two urgently flee. And it is not until now, this very moment that the camera discovers Annie, with her smug, impervious expression ensued from the knowledge that they have escaped their pursuers.
And the ethos once felt for this couple-on-the-run morphs into irreconcilible shock as you try to fathom the reasons of their cavalier cruelty.
They could be heroes, just for one dog day afternoon?
The hold-up scene would actually be filmed in two-takes and in coalition with that, it was unrehearsed and retro-scripted. It was so very believable, that the bystanders at the time exclaimed , shouting "They Held Up the Bank, They Held Up The Bank! " Much contraversy surfaced in the aftermath, and director Lewis would be harangued by calls as to how this formidable sequence could have been mastered as such. His documentary technique would soon be subsumed into Hollywood's film vocabulary , it would serve as a template and muse for upcoming generations of auteurs. Two famous examples of this technique were used in 1967's Bonnie and Clyde and the early Tarantino effort Reservoir Dogs (1992).
And I didn't mention yet, but with this Cadillac congregation , there were the two lead actors Peggy Cummings and John Dall that were the other sardines in the equation. What we are talking here is a camera with an 1000 foot film magazine and a whopping heft length of two 2x12 foot ply board greased together - and that is where the unwieldy rig is seated and slides. It surely reads just as daunting as it actually was - but director Joseph H. Lewis was more hard-boiled than his cast and it was his brainstorm that led to the streamlining this intensely complex 17-page bank heist into a 3 and a half minute continuous shot.
Fortunately, the back projection would facilitate this fantastic feat, the back seat camera busily capturing Bart and Annie's nerve-racking drive from the fringes of the city to Hampton's downtown bank, the sequestered button mikes would spy on their improvised patter. Bart proceeds to enter the bank leaving moll Annie primed and ready for the getaway.
In one fell swoop, the camera lunges forward, panning the exchange of a coquettish Annie with a passing by policeman. Now - the intensity rises to 11, as Bart exits the bank and the two urgently flee. And it is not until now, this very moment that the camera discovers Annie, with her smug, impervious expression ensued from the knowledge that they have escaped their pursuers.
And the ethos once felt for this couple-on-the-run morphs into irreconcilible shock as you try to fathom the reasons of their cavalier cruelty.
They could be heroes, just for one dog day afternoon?
The hold-up scene would actually be filmed in two-takes and in coalition with that, it was unrehearsed and retro-scripted. It was so very believable, that the bystanders at the time exclaimed , shouting "They Held Up the Bank, They Held Up The Bank! " Much contraversy surfaced in the aftermath, and director Lewis would be harangued by calls as to how this formidable sequence could have been mastered as such. His documentary technique would soon be subsumed into Hollywood's film vocabulary , it would serve as a template and muse for upcoming generations of auteurs. Two famous examples of this technique were used in 1967's Bonnie and Clyde and the early Tarantino effort Reservoir Dogs (1992).
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