TV Wiz Arthur Penn's Remarkable Cinematic Career Began and Ended on Two VERY Different Films in Left Handed Gun and Penn & Teller Get Killed

The Left Handed Gun is left handed FUN!

Arthur Penn worked in television before breaking into movies and continued to work in television after his film career ended, both as a director of TV movies and an Executive Producer on Law & Order. Like contemporaries Sidney Lumet and John Frankenheimer, Penn was a giant of the Golden Age of television before making the leap to the big screen, but it was as a filmmaker, particularly in the late 1960s and 1970s, that Penn made his biggest mark.

Penn’s 1967 film Bonnie and Clyde was a game-changing, zeitgeist-capturing milestone that forever changed the direction of American film. Along with Dennis Hopper and Peter Fonda’s shaggy existential biker film Easy Rider, Bonnie and Clyde is credited with kicking off a golden age of experimentation and boundary-pushing within American studio film. It was the Big Bang that helped unleash a world of gritty, socially engaged character studies about grubby loners living on the fringes of American society, outlaws, criminals, dopers and dreamers.

Penn himself benefitted greatly from the freedom of the era. A slew of masterpieces followed Bonnie and Clyde: the melancholy hippie social satire Alice’s Restaurant, the revisionist 1970 western Little Big Man and the terrific 1975 neo-noir Night Moves. Penn’s creative winning streak ended a year later with The Missouri Breaks and his career never really recovered. In the decades ahead he’d alternate between film, television and the stage, but further cinematic success escaped him.

Then again, Penn’s 1958 directorial debut, The Left Handed Gun, was also a commercial failure, despite a modest budget and a shooting schedule of just over three weeks. The film was originally intended as a vehicle for James Dean, portraying Billy the Kid as the ultimate James Dean type, a brooding, intense young men too pure for a corrupt world and positively vibrating with both tenderness and incoherent rage.

The list of people who could be called upon to play a James Dean role with the same level of charisma and intensity as the late icon was small. There were pretty much just two names on it: Marlon Brando and Paul Newman.

Penn would go on to direct Brando in both 1966’s The Chase and 1976’s The Missouri Breaks. Apparently Penn and Brando made a curious pact to reunite every ten years to make a much-hyped flop. More pertinent to this article, however, Penn secured handsome newcomer Newman to play the lead in The Left Handed Gun. Incidentally, three years earlier Newman played the same role on television in 1955’s Gore Vidal-written The Death of Billy the Kid, the source material for Penn’s cinematic debut.

Before changing cinema with Bonnie and Clyde, Penn debuted with another dark, revisionist portrayal of a real-life American outlaw, in this case William Bonney, a.k.a. Billy the Kid, gunslinger, outlaw, murderer and sensitive young man.

Bonney was twenty-one years old when he died. Newman was thirty-three when he played the icon for the second time. On both television and film, Newman was too old to be convincing as a teenager but he nevertheless retained the beauty, vulnerability and trembling intensity of adolescence into his thirties. In The Left Handed Gun, Newman beautifully and convincingly realizes youth as a state of mind and all-consuming fever as much as it is a matter of chronological age.

The anti-hero of The Left Handed Gun is a Kid but he’s also a man with a haunted, corpse-strewn past he cannot escape and an aching need for tenderness and understanding doomed to go forever unmet.

So when a cultured, moneyed Englishman named John Tunstall (Colin Keith-Johnston) is kind to Bonney, and shows him compassion in addition to giving him work, he earns the young man’s eternal loyalty. When Turnstall is killed by crooked law enforcement, Billy’s life becomes an all-out, all-consuming quest for vengeance as Billy and his sidekicks set out to kill the men they hold responsible for Turnsrall’s death.

The central conflict in The Left Handed Gun is internal as much as it is external. Billy is torn apart, like James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause and Johnny in The Room, by a ferocious inner battle between love and hate, tenderness and violent rage, an eternal quest for inner peace and a compulsive need to destroy, both in terms of lives and relationships.

Just about everyone untouched by Billy’s unfortunate predilection for killing people seems to like, if not love the outlaw, to see the good in him instead of focusing on the many crimes and killings that would make him a legend. Even Pat Garrett (John Dehner), whose legend is inextricably intertwined with Billy’s — indeed, they would share the title of a Sam Peckinpah masterpiece from an era of American film a lot more receptive to iconoclastic, personal visions than the late 50s — and who is eventually called upon to hunt down the outlaw, adores Billy, and just wishes he’d be able to keep his homicidal instincts in check enough to have at least a shot at a normal life, and with it, the possibility, however faint, of a normal, non-violent death.

An air of fatalism hangs heavy over The Left Handed Gun. A trembling, almost comically over-the-top opening ballad posits our anti-hero as both a “left-handed boy who never meant wrong” and “death’s child.” Bonney wants to do good, to be good, to live by the dictates of the Bible but a sick, corrupt and violent world won’t let him escape the violence and bloodshed that are his destiny.

Looking good!

As death nears for Billy he discovers to his initial amusement and ultimate mortification and horror that he has unknowingly become a legend, an outlaw, a hero of the Wild, Wild West whose mythology is spread through paperback novels and lurid articles and other bits of wildly hyperbolic storytelling. Of course, it’s all a goddamn lie, a way of transforming an ugly, complicated truth into a sexy, sellable fiction. There are elements of the Saul Rubinek subplot in Unforgiven in the way The Left Handed Gun explores how the grim, brutal reality of the West became fanciful mythology at the hands of people who stood to benefit financially from transforming troubled young men like William Bonney into icons, depriving them of their humanity in the process.

When Newman made The Left Handed Gun he was still a Marlon Brando/James Dean type, an androgynously beautiful, brooding young man overflowing with emotion, rage and raw sensuality. But performances like this ensured that this troubled young man archetype would, in the decades that followed, be amended as a James Dean/Marlon Brando/Paul Newman type.

Penn would spend the most fruitful phase of his career investing genres like the period crime film (Bonnie and Clyde), counterculture comedy (Alice’s Restaurant), revisionist western (Little Big Man) and the neo-noir (Night Moves) with a new level of realism, intensity and social commentary. That process began with The Left Handed Gun, which, like Penn’s French New Wave-style 1965 crime movie Mickey One, an artsy black and white dry run for Bonnie and Clyde, was cursed to be ahead of its time.

Penn’s film career began much stronger than it ended, in no small part because Paul Newman ultimately proved to be a more compelling and charismatic leading man than Penn Jillette. The Left Handed Gun captured Newman at the very beginning of an incredible, lengthy career as a cinematic leading man and salad dressing mogul. Penn & Teller Get Killed marked the beginning and the end of Penn Jillette’s unlikely, unearned career as a matinee idol.

Penn began his film career with Billy the Kid but in his 1989 cinematic swan song Penn & Teller Get Killed, the veteran director turned his attention to a truly loathsome, objectionable real-life figure: Comedy magic superstar and insufferable know-it-all Penn Jillette and, to a much lesser extent, his silent partner Teller.

1989’s Penn & Teller Get Killed, a low-budget, pitch-black vehicle for Penn & Teller released at the height of their fame, is not the kind of movie you’d expect a legend like Penn to end his film career with, particularly since he’s not related to the Penn in the film’s title.

In another sense, Penn & Teller Get Killed is exactly the kind of challenging project Arthur Penn gravitated towards over the course of his career, an oddball, borderline experimental, bloody dark comedy with corpses as punchlines and weird-looking acting newcomers as his unlikely leading men.

At its best, Penn & Teller’s uncompromising darkness and unrelenting cynicism recalls such apogees of cinematic dark comedy as King of Comedy, Little Murders and Network. Penn & Teller had an unmistakable vision, and, in the man behind Bonnie and Clyde and Little Big Man, the auteur to help them realize that vision.

Penn & Teller Get Killed at least gets off to a promising, appropriately meta start that follows its heroes/anti-heroes/villains as they prepare to wow the live studio audience at Late Night with David Letterman with a sly, audacious bit of misdirection. Penn keeps asking an overjoyed studio audience to loudly affirm that everything is happening live, and consequently immune to post-production trickery and editing shenanigans. The crowd happily plays along and confirms that what’s happening is happening live without mentioning that Penn & Teller also happen to be strapped to a rig that allows them to perform their routine upside down.

Penn & Teller are invited onto the talk show’s couch, where Penn, as part of his overwhelmingly successful crusade to get people to hate him, posits that it would be cool if someone tried to kill him, that it would help him focus his energies and lend a real sense of urgency to everything that he did.

He’s putting that energy out into the cosmos and the cosmos responds by seemingly granting Jillette’s wish when mystery figures begin making attempts on the insufferable blowhard’s life. But are the murder attempts real or are they just another elaborate practical joke between two sociopathic kidders who will stop at nothing to get a laugh or pull off a prank, up to, and including, murder and suicide?

In order for a prank to have any kind of impact, it needs to have a grounding in reality. That’s why Da Ali G Show and Borat were so audacious and essential, while Sacha Baron Cohen’s first attempt to break into movies, the wholly fictional narrative film Ali G Indahouse, was an embarrassing non-entity.

There is no baseline reality in Penn & Teller Get Killed. Its two protagonists are professional liars, men whose professional and personal lives revolve around tricking each other in addition to fooling the world.

The core of Penn & Teller’s act has always been a snide, sneering sense of superiority. That’s endemic to magic, I would imagine. By definition, the magician knows things the audience presumably does not. That’s how magicians are able to deceive audiences. They know what non-magicians do not, the literal tricks of the trade.

Penn & Teller take that sense of superiority much further, to the point of insufferability. In Penn & Teller Get Killed, the titular twosome primarily use the fact that they’re so much smarter and better and less gullible than everybody else to make money, torment each other and torment anyone unfortunate enough to be in the vicinity of their wacky pranks, like starting a “money fight” in a Trump casino as a make-pretend opening volley in a fictional Marxist revolution.

But Penn & Teller also use their intellectual superiority over all the mouth-breathers and dullards in the audience to save stupid, stupid non-magicians from their own incredible stupidity, like when Penn & Teller have to use their powers of fakery and illusion to keep a gullible older relative of Penn’s girlfriend from wasting their time, money and energy on a bogus “psychic surgeon.”

Teller’s act is essentially Harpo Marx as a hipster magician. He’s a natural for the screen, a mute clown adept at physical comedy and silent screen-style shenanigans. Penn Jillette never stops talking, in the movie, as in life, but the movie’s funniest jokes are sight gags or silent, like when Teller attends a “Three Stooges” marathon featuring only Shemp.

The movie gets darker and darker as it proceeds. It begins grim and only grows more despairing until a screamingly nihilistic climax makes good on the title and throws in extra bonus meaningless deaths just for fun. Yet because everything seems like a put-on, a prank and a lark there are never any real stakes.

Jillette consequently deserves credit for intuiting that audiences would be hankering for his violent demise but even a comedy as pitch-black as this might benefit from protagonists who don’t inspire such feverish contempt.

Penn & Teller became rich and famous as funny misanthropes but in Penn & Teller Get Killed the sour misanthropy and smug superiority smother the comedy. In his heyday, Arthur Penn helped smuggle a whole lot of realism and verisimilitude into convention-bound genres and helped change the look and feel of American film. But his muddled, if intermittently compelling and thoroughly audacious final bow as a film auteur is less a “Whodunit?” than a “Who cares?”

Penn deserved better material and better leading men, but if Penn’s film career didn’t exactly go out on a high note, it at least ended in a perverse, surprising and thoroughly unexpected way. Is Penn & Teller Get Killed good? Oh god no. Is it interesting? Of course. That’s gotta be worth something, even coming at the tail end of a Reagan decade that was antithetical, in so many ways, to the countercultural era where Penn did his best, most important work. 

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