Gun Crazy is one of several films generally considered to be based on the lives and legends of Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow, the notorious bank-robbing couple of the 1930s who met their death together in a hail of bullets after eluding law enforcement for several years. Certainly, it's a notable addition to a very specialized sub-genre of movies about fugitive young lovers, including You Only Live Once, Persons in Hiding (1939), They Live by Night, The Getaway (1972), Badlands (1973), Thieves Like Us (1974), and Natural Born Killers (1994), as well as the reputed (but in fact extremely loose) remake Guncrazy (1992).

The sweater and beret Peggy Cummins wears in this movie can be seen as an inspiration for Faye Dunaway's look in Bonnie and Clyde, more so than a direct reference to the real Bonnie Parker's similar style. Elizabeth Ward, an editor of The Film Noir Encyclopedia (Overlook, 2010), once interviewed Cummins and persuaded the actress to give her the sweater and beret. According to Glenn Erickson, who does the commentary on the DVD release of Gun Crazy, Ward wore the outfit for her photo on the back cover of her book.

Lewis has been justly praised for capturing the bank robbery scene in one long single take. It was not the first such filmmaking feat. Lewis himself had done a trial scene in Secrets of a Co-Ed in one long take, and Alfred Hitchcock made the long take the entire aesthetic basis for his thriller Rope, which featured Gun Crazy star John Dall. Previous single-take robbery scenes were seen in The Killers (1946) and They Live by Night. Lewis' innovation in this film was keeping the camera entirely inside the car for the sequence shot.

"Gun Crazy" is the title of an essay by Dorothy Allison from her collection Skin (Firebrand, 1994).

Gun Crazy is an EP released in 1993 by the Berkeley, California, punk rock band The Mr. T Experience.

"Gun Crazy" is a song from the White Zombie 1987 EP Psycho-Head Blowout, written by musician-filmmaker Rob Zombie.

by Rob Nixon