Le Cinema Dreams Film Essay: Bonnie and Clyde - 1967

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BONNIE & CLYDE 1967

Bonnie & Clyde is one of my “staple films.” A staple film being any movie that tops my acquisition list whenevertechnological advancements make it necessary for me to restock my film library. Back in the dark ages, when I gotmy first VCR machine, Bonnie & Clyde, Rosemary’s Baby, and Midnight Cowboy were the first VHS movies I everpurchased. These same films also became the first DVDs I ever owned when video cassettes became obsolete. Itwasn’t particularly planned that way, they were just the three films I was most excited about owning in disc format.As of yet I haven’t jumped on the Blu-ray bandwagon, but if and when I ultimately make that leap, it’s a sure betwhich three films will be essential to have...again.

Arthur Penn’s Bonnie & Clyde is a film that has become as legendary and folkloric as its real-life subjects. Releasedat the height of the hippie movement (ironically enough, in August of the Summer of Love); Bonnie & Clyde, in itsmyth-making depiction of two small-time Depression-era outlaws, managed to hit America right between the eyes.

What captured our imaginations about Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow in 1967 is most likely what captured thenation’s imagination in the 1930s. They were young (he was 21, she 19); women in crime were rare; as opposed tobeing a “gang,” Bonnie and Clyde were perceived as a “couple” and as such, suitable for romantic projection; andlastly, but perhaps most significantly, they were famous. Indeed, they are among the earliest American “celebrity”criminals: self-aware and image-conscious; knowledgeable of and taking delight in the notoriety and fame theircriminal activity brought them.

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Had Arthur Penn’s film been less artful, say, a Roger Corman exploitationer or an American-International cheapielike1958s The Bonnie Parker Story (an absolutely must-see howler starring Dorothy Provine), no one would likelyhave batted an eye on its release. But Penn’s Bonnie & Clyde comingled French New Wave arthouse stylizationwith America’s romanticism of rebellion, preoccupation with violence, and attraction to mythmaking, and in doing socaptured the absolute essence of a particular moment in time. Not America in the 1930s, but America in the late1960s.

Warren Beatty as Clyde Barrow

Faye Dunaway as Bonnie Parker

Michael J. Pollard as C.W. Moss

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Gene Hackman as Buck Barrow

Estelle Parsons as Blanche Barrow

I saw Bonnie & Clyde in 1968 at the Castro Theater in San Francisco, and it absolutely blew me away. I was elevenat the time and I still recall the impact it had on me and the audience. As I headed for my seat, I vividly rememberencountering this huge, literally life-size lobby display that totally freaked me out. It was the iconic poster art*featuring the eerily unsettling image of Dunaway and Beatty laughing behind a bullet-hole riddled windshield. Underthis was written: They’re young…they’re in love…and they kill people. Yikes! I almost peed myself.(I literally had no business being in the theater at that age, but precocious kids who make it their business to seemovies too mature for their age can’t really complain about the subsequent nightmares and kindertrauma.) *I nowown a framed Bonnie & Clyde poster which hangs where I can see it as I write. No longer a terrifying image, itinspires me and reminds me of the time when I thought movies were art and magic combined.

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I had seen lots of crime dramas before this, but they were all pretty cut-and-dried, morally speaking. Crime didn’t pay, the good guys won, andthe bad guys deserved what they got. I was not at all prepared forBonnie & Clyde’s alternating tones of comedy, romance, lyricism,drama, and in-your-face violence used in telling the story of a duomany believed to have been little more than a couple of hayseedsociopaths.

Following Clyde's murder of an unarmed man, Bonnie, Clyde and C.W. lay low in a movie theater. Clyde is visibly upset, C.W. is nearly in tears,but Bonnie is absorbed in watching a musical number from "Golddiggers of 1933" (We're in the Money). My sister and I were just preteens when

we saw Bonnie & Clyde and at this point in the film she leaned over and asked, "Is Bonnie supposed to be mentally ill?"

Years later, I read a review of the film by critic John Simon wherein he alludes to the scene as indicative of Bonnie being somewhat infantile andchildlike. The seriousness of death and crime hadn't really sunk in for Bonnie. Like the kids today who wield guns in the playground and think of

death and gunplay as nothing more serious than a 3D video game.

As embodied by the impossibly (implausibly?) beautiful and stylish duo of Beatty and Dunaway, Bonnie and Clydeare a pair of unsophisticated social misfits dreaming of a better life beyond the dustbowl Texas poverty thatsurrounds them. Warren Beatty’s Clyde is a kind of guileless, career-criminal with malice towards none (the filmcasts the Great Depression as the ultimate villain) who sees in Bonnie a yearning soul not unlike his own. The filmseems to allude that, possibly with education or opportunity, this pair might have made something useful of theirlives. But lacking either and left with nothing but a nagging sense of the pent-up hopelessness of their lives, theymade the choice of antisocial rebellion.A pretty nice name for a murderous crime spree. And therein lay the cornerstone of the controversy surrounding Bonnie & Clyde when it was first released. Critics

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and audiences alike didn’t know what to make of a film that not only intentionally altered (some might saymanipulated) historical fact for the purpose of dramatic effect, but cast its anti-heroes in a decidedly heroic, romanticlight that to some negated the very real pain and suffering this real-life couple brought to others.

Director Arthur Penn has always maintained that he had bigger fish to fry in Bonnie & Clyde and had no interest inoffering a documentary with a moral. In the wonderful but out-of-print volume, The Bonnie & Clyde Book by SandraWake and Nicola Hayden, Penn is quoted as saying: “I don’t think the original Bonnie and Clyde are very importantexcept insofar as they motivated the writing of a script and our making of a movie. This is not a case study of Bonnieand Clyde; we don’t go into them in any kind of depth.”

Instead, Penn asserts that he intended Bonnie & Clyde as a kind of post - Kennedy assassination / Vietnam war –era take on the death of the American Dream as manifest in the nation’s fascination with violence and mythmaking,and the resultant anti-authority/anti-social rebellion.

The communal "Hoovervilles", "Hobo Jungles" and "Shanty Towns" of the Great Depression evokedthe hippie communes that were springing up all over the country in 1967. The nomadic, anti-establishment rebel lives of Bonnie & Clyde struck

a chord with young audiences of the 60s

So if turning a couple of remorseless murderers into a pair of sympathetic, glamorous, near-mythic tragic lovers wasseen by some as amoral, young 60s audiences didn’t seem to care. While critics like The New York Times’ BosleyCrowther pilloried Bonnie & Clyde as “…a cheap piece of bald-faced slapstick comedy that treats the hideousdepredations of that sleazy, moronic pair as though they were as full of fun and frolic as the jazz-age cut-ups inThoroughly Modern Millie,” young people across the country responded (as they would two years later to EasyRider’s motorcycle-riding drug dealers) to the rebellious, anti-establishment spirit at the film’s core.

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Disenfranchised 60s youth - targeted for the draft, denied the vote, lacking a social presence - identified with the Barrow Gang's attempt tocreate for themselves a non-traditional family

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILMPutting aside arguments of amorality, I really admire how Bonnie & Clyde captures something I find to be very trueabout human nature: that the villains and monsters of the world don’t necessarily perceive themselves to besuch. Movies and pulp literature have taught us that bad guys are well aware of how evil they are; literally reveling intheir wickedness and lack of conscience (to believe so is reassuring when you find yourself rooting for their demise).Yet life experience and election-year observations have led me to conclude that some of the most heinous people inour culture actually seem to maintain a perception of themselves as being basically good and “just folks.” So called "respectable" and educated people today engage in all matter of pernicious behavior...preaching andlegislating hate and ill-will...yet feel, deep within their hearts, that they are good, decent people. The news is full ofindividuals who have killed, bombed, or marched about carrying signs spewing venomous hate; but in their ownminds they are good Christians, or defenders of family values, pro-lifers, or lovers of America and the American wayof life. The conveyance of this sad-but-true cultural fact is where Bonnie & Clyde achieves a kind of brilliance anddoes something really remarkable with the gangster genre.

It makes perfect sense to me that neither Bonnie nor Clyde would ever see themselves as bad guys. Dunaway andBeatty’s scenes together depict the two as marginalized loners—zeroes in the eyes of the world—whose dead-endlives converge and create a kind of pitiful, doomed hope. They are a sadsack Romeo & Juliet made stronger andmore significant in their union than they could ever be on their own.

Their world may be narrow and their thinking delusional, but they long for the same things we all do. We identify with

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their taking offense at the injustice of poor people being put out of their homes by banks, and we maybe evenapplaud their standing up for the “little people” in the small criminal ways they flout authority. Yet at the same time weare repulsed by their callous disregard for life. Or rather, a certain kind of life. In their world, the death of a lawmandoes not hold the same weight as the death of a loved one or average citizen. A trenchant twist on the way death ismilitarized by our “civilized society” (The death of an officer in battle does not hold the same weight as the death of asoldier; the death of a lawman in the line of duty does not hold the same weight as that of the average citizen,etc.) Small wonder that 60s youths - their lives valuable in terms of the draft, valueless when it came to the right tovote - found in Bonnie & Clyde a relevant parable for the times. Depicted as a pair of countercounter outlaws, atleast Bonnie and Clyde were choosing to die on their own terms.

Gene Wilder (making his film debut) and Evans Evans appear briefly as unwitting provocateurs of the Barrow Gang. It's one of my favoritesequences in the film. There was a time when I would collapse into paroxysms of laughter if anyone even whispered the phrase, "Step on it,

Velma!"

PERFORMANCESIn some ways, the channeling of a specific, defined persona into role after role is the essence of what being a moviestar (as opposed to an actor) is all about. Diane Keaton trademarked the lovable, semi-inarticulate ditz; RobertRedford the sensitive All-American jock; and Warren Beatty always seemed to play some variation on the not-verybright, overgrown boy with big ideas (McCabe & Mrs. Miller, The Only Game in Town, Shampoo). NotwithstandingBeatty’s appealingly debauched beauty as a man, his screen persona has often left me wanting. Not so in Bonnie &Clyde. Here he mines the mother lode of his star charisma and is marvelously alive and interesting. Especially in thescenes where Clyde explodes into violent rages that erupt into a terrifyingly real physicality. Beatty playing aw-shucks humble has always been a little boring. Beatty as a temperamental nutjob (Bugsy) is a sight to behold.

There’s a kind of wistfulness that comes over me whenever I see Faye Dunaway in Bonnie & Clyde. Part of it’s7/10

Impotent Clyde seduces Bonnie with a phallic substitute

nostalgia because I fell in love with her in this movie; part of it’s due to her being so damned good that I’m forced toadmit that I’ve let it become far too easy over the years to forget what a marvelous actress she is. You see her hereand you know in an instant that there was no way this woman wasn’t going to be a star. Her Bonnie Parker is funnyand tough and oh, so heartbreaking. Hers is a classic, one-of-a-kind performance and Dunaway OWNS the role asfar as I’m concerned. Any planned remakes would do well to distance themselves from the Penn film and save allprospective Bonnies from the inevitable embarrassing comparisons to Dunaway.

THE STUFF OF FANTASYWhile the sympathetic light Bonnie and Clyde are presented inrepresents an insurmountable hurdle for some (personally, Idon’t see it as sympathetic so much as human. A moralimperative overrides everything that happens in the film), I findmyself grateful for being allowed to take in the events of thestory without being forced by the script to adopt an attitudeabout the pair until I’m ready.One good example of this is the scene where Clyde says to apoor farmer whose house has been foreclosed upon, “We robbanks!” And in that split second we see an aimless man givinghis life purpose. A few scenes later Bonnie says these samewords to gas attendant C.W. Moss, and in her delivery we seethat she at last has discovered an identity for herself.

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These two moments of empowerment for Bonnie and Clyde are perhaps pathetic and delusional to us, the viewer,but they are defining moments for the characters. What seems like the film striking an amoral stance is actually, Ibelieve, the film merely establishing its point of view. The film presumes we are adult enough to be shown Bonnieand Clyde’s self-serving view of the world and themselves (misjudged folk heroes like Robin & Maid Marian) withoutinsisting we accept it.

THE STUFF OF DREAMSOr rather, the stuff of nightmares. In this I’m referring to Bonnie & Clyde’s groundbreaking, much-discussed, heavily-debated, then-unprecedented depiction of violence. Modern audiences may find it tame (me, I still have a hard timewatching the final ambush scene) but everything you’ve read about it is true when it comes to how it affectedaudiences on its initial release. I still can remember how ear shatteringly loud the shots sounded in the theater, andhow deadly quiet the theater was when the film was over. People walked out of the film like they were in a daze.Nobody knew quite how to take what they had seen. There were the obvious few, made so nervous that they had tostart saying ANYTHING quick, but I remember my family and I leaving the theater and actually feeling afraid to sayanything. As if in opening our mouths we weren’t sure what would come out…a cry or a scream.Copyright © Ken Anderson

About Ken AndersonLA-based writer and lifelong film enthusiast. You can read more of his essays on films of the ’60s & ‘70s at DreamsAre What Le Cinema Is For.

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Bonnie & Clyde: Laughing and dying"The killing gets less impersonal and, consequently, less funny." Arthur Penn

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