Bonnie and Clyde (1967)
Biography | Crime | Drama | Romance

Adrift in the Depression-era Southwest, Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker embark on a life of crime. They mean no harm. They crave adventure - and each other. Soon we start to love them too. But nothing in film history has prepared us for the cascading violence to follow. Bonnie and Clyde turns brutal. We learn they can be hurt-and dread they can be killed.

Storyline: A bored small-town girl and a small-time bank robber leave in their wake a string of violent robberies and newspaper headlines that catch the imagination of the Depression-struck Mid-West in this take on the legendary crime spree of these archetypal lovers on the run. Written by Keith Loh

Reviewer's Note: Reviewed by Casey Broadwater on February 22, 2010 -- Think of Sam Peckinpah's The Getaway, Terrance Malick's Badlands, Oliver Stone's Natural Born Killers, and even David Lynch's Wild at Heart—each has a common antecedent in Bonnie and Clyde, the controversial 1967 crime caper that officially ushered in the era of New Hollywood with its unflinching violence and nonchalant frankness about sexuality. And as the archetypal "two lovers on the lam" story, it has a little bit of everything. It's a game- changing mash-up of slapstick comedy and bullet-riddled corpses, an anti-authoritarian romp and an ode to naiveté, a take-the-money-and-run thriller and a languid Sunday drive through the American South of the Dust Bowl and Depression. Essentially, it's a road movie that presents love as a literal and figurative journey, fraught with abstract emotional obstacles as well as extremely tangible police barricades. It's a bloody farce, an impotent romance with bisexual overtones, a steal-from- the-rich hootenanny. Hollywood would never be the same.

Loosely based on the exploits of Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow—two lovers and outlaws who held up banks and killed at least nine police officers during the "public enemy" era of the early 1930s—the film is more beholden to the essence of the couple's mythic romance than to the actual facts of their guns-a'blazin' escapades. Played by striking beauty Faye Dunaway, Bonnie is a bored waitress who hitches up with Warren Beatty's Clyde when the young gangster tries to steal her mother's car. As Bonnie seductively wraps her lips around the mouth of a cola bottle, Clyde shows her his gun—the ultimate phallic symbol—which she instinctively reaches out to touch. She's clearly excited by the danger, and after Clyde robs a store just to prove he's no faker, Bonnie tries to jump his bones in the car. Clyde has none of it and pushes her away. "I ain't much of a loverboy," he says, masking the fact that his other pistol doesn't seem to function properly. Nevertheless, they fall into a kind of infatuation with one another that only balks when it comes to physical intimacy. This is the source of much of the film's underlying tension, as Bonnie disparages Clyde's "peculiar ideas of lovemaking, which is no lovemaking at all." Eventually, the two recruit mechanic C.W. Moss (Michael J. Pollard) to join their merry band —as well as Clyde's brother Buck (Gene Hackman) and Buck's wife Blanche (Estelle Parsons)—and together they become known as the "Barrow Gang," lauded and feared across four states as ruthless criminals. Inevitably, though, they're smacked down by the long arm of the law.

When Bonnie and Clyde was released, New York Times film critic Bosley Crowther—a stodgy member of the cinematic old guard—called it "a cheap piece of bald-faced slapstick comedy that treats the hideous depredations of that sleazy, moronic pair as though they were as full of fun and frolic as the jazz-age cutups in Thoroughly Modern Millie." Much of the early critical response was equally disparaging, but then the unexpected happened—critics began issuing redactions and writing up second opinions, eager to cast the film as an indicator of Hollywood's rapidly changing aesthetic. Crowther, however, remained antagonistic toward Bonnie and Clyde, and was pushed out of his post at the Times—a bit unfairly, it seems— for being out of touch with the nascent anti-establishment film culture. Soon, the old gave way to the New Hollywood, a kind of bastard cousin to the auteur approach to filmmaking that had gained traction in Europe thanks to French New Wave directors like François Truffaut and Jean- Luc Godard. In fact, Bonnie and Clyde screenwriter Robert Benton was greatly influenced by New Wave cinema, and offered the film to Truffaut, who declined and made Fahrenheit 451 instead. (Godard was also approached, but he reputedly wanted to reset the film in Japan, which was a big no-go for the film's investors.)

Given its notorious reputation, Bonnie and Clyde looks tame—even quaint—in retrospect, but there's no denying the taboo-busting impact it had on the place of sexuality and violence in American filmmaking. Inspired by the casual acceptance of sexual themes in European cinema, Benton initially wrote Clyde as bisexual and included a ménage-a-trois in the script between Bonnie, Clyde, and C.W. Moss. Warren Beatty talked him out of it—it would be perhaps too sophisticated for American audiences—but there are still subtle hints throughout the film that this was the writer's original intent. More bracing, though, is how Bonnie is unabashedly cast as a highly sexual being, a trait that Dunaway—smoldering here with eager eyes and pouting lips—has no trouble conveying. The chemistry between Bonnie and Clyde—and, by extension, Dunaway and Beatty—is complex, both magnetic and reserved. She's like a dog straining against its leash, and he's all bravado, making up for his limp equipment by posing for pictures with his massive machineguns every chance he can get. Those guns go off too, and regularly. Early in the film a banker gets shot in the face at point-blank range, and director Arthur Penn refuses to cut away, showing the man slump against the window of Bonnie and Clyde's getaway car, his face a bloody mess. The film was also one of the first to extensively use squibs—the small, fake blood- filled charges that make it look like actors have been shot—and the literally explosive finale shows a level of carnage that had been heretofore unseen in a mainstream American movie. At the same time, Bonnie and Clyde is tender and funny, silly as the Barrow Gang speeds through an escape in a fast-motion sequence that might as well be set to the Benny Hill theme song, and serene as the camera pans over dusty plains and tracks through fields filled with brittle stalks of corn. It's a contradiction, and that's what makes it a classic.

I really don't understand all the virulent hate for Warner's digibook releases, but if you've been holding out for the studio to release Bonnie and Clyde in the standard Blu-ray keep-case, your wait is over. No changes have been made to the actual disc—though I would've liked to have seen the addition of a lossless audio track—so if you've yet to purchase this influential film, the choice is yours as to whether you want the classy digibook or the run-of-the-mill, fits-on-the-shelf- with-the-rest-of-your-collection standard-issue case. Recommended.

--- JOYA ---

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