Bonnie and Clyde (1967)

Extolling the greatness of Bonnie and Clyde is a little like remarking on how wet rain is. Oceans of ink have been spilled on the significance of this masterpiece nominally about the real-life, Depression-era bank robbers, among the more recent treatises being Mark Harris‘ excellent Pictures at a Revolution: Five Movies and the Birth of the New Hollywood. There is little about the picture that hasn’t been said already. Bonnie and Clyde has been analyzed, examined and dissected more than a frog in biology class. Nevertheless, in revisiting the 1967 film, what struck me most is how its profound influence on cinema hasn’t diminished its emotional resonance.

You know the story. Clyde Barrow (Warren Beatty) and Bonnie Parker (Faye Dunaway) are lovers whose shared longing for excitement, money and fame spurs a deadly crime spree through Texas and Oklahoma until law enforcement finally stopped them within a hail of bullets. As a gangster picture, Bonnie and Clyde certainly works when viewed in the narrow prism of the venerable Warner Brothers mold, but director Arthur Penn and screenwriters David Newman and Robert Benton use the crime genre as a canvas to explore several themes.

To be sure, the movie fudges some aspects of the bank-robbing pair, particularly in playing down the Barrow gang’s viciousness, but this is not a historical document. 

It is, however, a historic and artistic milestone. Bonnie and Clyde‘s antihero protagonists, seriocomic tone and unforgettably violent ending sent aftershocks through mainstream Hollywood and set the stage for more cutting-edge fare in the 1970s.

Not surprisingly, critics were polarized in their initial assessments. The New York Times‘ Bosley Crowther dismissed it as a “cheap piece of bald-faced slapstick comedy,” while a young film critic for the Chicago Sun-Times, Roger Ebert, gushed that “years from now it is quite possible that Bonnie and Clyde will be seen as the definitive film of the 1960s.” Some critics even split the difference. In an unusual move, Newsweek reviewer Joe Morgenstern bashed Bonnie and Clyde, only to do an about-face a few weeks later by labeling it one of the most important motion pictures of the decade.

More than 55 years after its initial release, Bonnie and Clyde’s blend of sensibilities remains a thrilling fusion of classic Hollywood storytelling, drive-in exploitation and French New Wave (Francois Truffaut, whose Shoot the Piano Player and Jules and Jim influenced Newman and Benton’s script, came close to directing the film). It brims with dazzling moments. Penn was eager to take chances. Bonnie and Clyde‘s juxtaposition of broad comedy and bloody violence was revolutionary. In one justly celebrated scene, the couple is bewildered when they rob a bank only to discover that their getaway driver, C.W. Moss (Michael J. Pollard), is having trouble pulling out of a tight parking space. The comic tone shifts abruptly when Clyde shoots a bank employee in the face.

The level of violence is tame by today’s standards, but still wields considerable impact. “The trouble with the violence in most films is that it is not violent enough,” Penn told The New York Times back in 1968, when Bonnie and Clyde garnered 10 Academy Award nominations. “A war film that doesn’t show the real horrors of war – bodies being torn apart and arms being shot off – really glorifies war.”

With that mindset, Penn ultimately pulls the rug out from under movie audiences after inviting viewers to identify with the bank robbers. The climactic bloodbath is based on historical fact. Lawmen emptied more than 100 rounds into Barrow and Parker in a 1934 ambush. But Penn’s rejection of any sentimentality is remarkable. All he allows is a fleeting look of recognition between the two before they are riddled with bullets. Penn shot the scene with four cameras, each running at a different speed.

And yet Bonnie and Clyde would not be considered a classic if its only claim to fame had been its radical style. Unlike many an antihero propped up by hipper-than-thou filmmakers, Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow possess a raw power and desperate neediness that connected with audiences in 1967 as much as they do today. 

The film’s introduction to Bonnie sharply conveys her desire for something beyond her dreary, working-class existence in West Dallas, Texas. An opening shot shows a close-up of Dunaway’s parted cherry-red lips. She then sullenly slides down on a bed, her naked body obscured by the bed’s horizontal brass railing. At once, the camera reveals her yearning for sensuality and adventure. 

Bonnie’s prayers are seemingly answered when she looks out the window and sees a good-looking stranger, Clyde Barrow, getting ready to steal her mother’s car. She throws on some clothes and scurries outside for one of the more sexually charged meet-cutes in movie history. Clyde flashes Bonnie his gun. She strokes the gleaming barrel before taunting him that he “wouldn’t have the gumption to use it.” 

As it turns out, she is partially right. While Clyde is a committed crook and expert marksman, he is impotent as a lover. “Your advertisin’s dandy!” Bonnie snaps after he spurns her advances. “Folks would never think you don’t got a thing to sell!” The frustrated pair periodically tries to act on their mutual attraction, with predictably disappointing results. Much has been made of the film’s connection between violence and sexual longing, but what often gets lost in the shuffle is the surprising level of tenderness and heartbreak of Bonnie and Clyde’s relationship.

The chemistry between Dunaway and Beatty is palpable, and Penn heightens that tension throughout with intimate close-ups. In Clyde, Bonnie senses an opportunity to help her cast off the shackles of boredom and loneliness. Clyde, for his part, correctly sizes up Bonnie as sharing his thirst for something beyond their hardscrabble existence.

Neither really achieves what they set out for, but they both share a desire that is universal. At the time of the movie’s release, its defenders made tortured arguments that Bonnie and Clyde did not paint a sympathetic portrait of its outlaws. I don’t buy it. Part of the film’s brilliance is its seemingly effortless ability to humanize its gangsters.

The cast is tremendous. Beatty, who also produced Bonnie and Clyde, silenced doubters who had written him off as a pretty boy. He captures Clyde’s mix of cockiness and childlike innocence. When a store robbery is cut short by a grocer with a meat cleaver, Clyde sounds like a hurt child who didn’t get what he wanted for Christmas. “I’m not against him,” he whines to Bonnie afterwards.

Dunaway is even better. In the role that made her a superstar, she would never be more electrifying or sexy than she was here. Her Bonnie Parker is a powder keg: ferocious, vulnerable, callous, sensitive. She is also the intuitive one in the relationship, the one who realizes they are doomed. Dunaway is riveting. 

The leads were hardly alone. The stellar supporting cast included Gene Hackman as Clyde’s brother Buck and Estelle Parsons (who won the Best Supporting Actress Oscar) as Buck’s frantic wife, Blanche. And lest anyone forget, Bonnie and Clyde marked the movie debut of a young Gene Wilder, who displayed his frazzled genius as a schlub whose car is stolen by the Barrow gang.