Bonnie and Clyde

A great film transcends time, and Bonnie and Clyde is a great film, but it becomes even more fascinating when considering it in the context of the time when it was first seen. The film, directed by Arthur Penn and produced by and starring Warren Beatty, was released forty years ago, and has, over the years, been less remembered as a piece of cinema than it has as a benchmark in the history of film criticism.

In 1967, all over the U.S. and many other countries, there was an Us versus Them mentality. “Don’t trust anyone over 30,” so the saying went, and conservative old world values were taking a beating as almost every element of society protested. Drugs and free love were now in the mainstream. Psychedelia was now prevalent on Madison Avenue, and this can all be seen in Bonnie and Clyde, even though the film is set during the Great Depression in the dust-bowl. The trailer (one of the few extras on the DVD) is clear in this regard. “They’re young, they’re in love, they kill people!” is the tag-line, which is scripted in “groovy,” psychedelic graphics.

The story is well-known among those who follow film criticism. The film was released in late summer and the New York Times venerable critic, Bosley Crowther, panned it, as did Time magazine. Pauline Kael, though, wrote a 9,000 word hosanna in The New Yorker, and the film went on to be nominated for ten Academy Awards. Crowther resigned and was replaced by Renata Adler, who was not yet thirty years old. The times, they were-a changin.’

What was it about Bonnie and Clyde that ignited such a firestorm? Looking at it again last night, I think it was two reasons: the violence, of course, and that it managed to maintain, simultaneously, two different tones. Films had been violent before, consider Psycho, but Bonnie and Clyde did not suggest it, it showed it. For the first half hour, the film is a somewhat lighthearted romance about two spectacularly appealing movie-star types meeting cute (Bonnie catches Clyde trying to steal her mother’s car) and embarking on a rompish life of crime (that Clyde is presented as impotent is a disconcerting harbinger). Flatt and Scruggs “Foggie Mountain Breakdown” plays on the soundtrack, perhaps reminding viewers of wholesome fare like The Beverly Hillbillies, which was contemporary. They adopt the simple-minded C.W. Moss to further reinforce their family unit, and while robbing a bank C.W. comically can’t pass up getting a great parking space, which dramatically slows their getaway. Then a bank employee steps on the running-board of the getaway car, and Clyde shoots him in the face. A page had been turned in the history of cinema.

The mixture of the hillbilly humor and the almost New-Wavish direction by Penn (there are subtle jump cuts, slow motion, and consider the scene where Bonnie visits her family, which is shot with some kind of amber filter) can be unsettling. What is to be made of the existence of the character of Blanche, wife of Buck Barrow, a preacher’s daughter who screams in terror and runs around like a lunatic when the gang is ambushed by police? She is both comic relief and heart-wrenching pathos, the only true victim of the piece. And then there are the scenes that amplify the rebellion of the sixties: the scene in which the Texas Ranger is humiliated, and the scene where Gene Wilder and his girlfriend are kidnapped. The Ranger scene is sort of encapsulation of the anti-authority feeling that was widespread. He was “The Man,” who should be helping poor folks, Clyde says. The Ranger would get his revenge, of course, in the most brutal of fashion, perhaps a reminder of the carnage not only on the streets of the urban centers of America but also Vietnam. And the Wilder scene (it is amusing to see Wilder had his familiar tics even back then) is clearly presented as the hip vs. square. The Barrow Gang are the cutting edge, “with-it,” while Wilder’s button-down undertaker is fuddy-duddy nowheresville.

The most famous scene of the picture is the last, the balletic orgy of bullets that end the ballad of Bonnie and Clyde. The film was released by Warner Brothers, whose stock in trade had been the gangster pictures of Robinson, Bogart and Cagney, but if there remained any doubt that this was your father’s gangster picture, it ended right there. People today who are weaned on Saw and Hostel films would yawn at this scene, but I can imagine how shocking it was back then, and then how unsettled people must have been gathering their coats to leave the theater as the film ends abruptly seconds later.

Film violence would never be the same. Sam Peckinpah picked up the ball and ran with it, and now, forty years later, we are grappling with torture porn. There is no direct cause and effect, I think, because what Bonnie and Clyde was trying to say was that people didn’t just grip their chests and fall over when they got shot–there was blood. Over the course of time that realization became a means for titillation.