Bonnie and Clyde

Front Row at the Movies by Shirrel Rhoades

[mr_rating_result]

Several years ago, my friend Matthew arranged for me to meet his father – the famous director Arthur Penn – when the old man was being honored at the Savannah Film Festival. His dad had directed such classics as “The Miracle Worker” with Patty Duke, “The Left Handed Gun” with Paul Newman, “Alice’s Restaurant” with Arlo Guthrie, “Little Big Man” with Dustin Hoffman, “Dead of Winter” with Mary Steenburgen, “The Missouri Breaks” with Marlon Brando, and “Night Moves” with Gene Hackman.

However, his masterpiece was “Bonnie and Clyde.” Released in 1967, it signaled a New Wave in American cinema. It has been hailed as a watershed in film history.

This was one of the first films to feature the use of squibs – small explosive charges, mounted with bags of stage blood that detonate inside an actor’s clothes to simulate bullet hits. “Released in an era when film shootings were generally depicted as bloodless and painless, the Bonnie and Clyde death scene was one of the first in mainstream American cinema to be depicted with graphic realism.”

Unfortunately, at that time, New York Times Film Critic Bosley Crowther was on an anti-violence in cinema campaign. He trashed the movie by writing: “It is 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.’”

“It was not a film about violence,” Arthur Penn told me. “It was a metaphorical film. Violence had so little to do with it that it didn’t even occur to me, particularly, that it was a violent film. Not given the times in which we were living, because every night on the news we saw kids in Vietnam being airlifted out in body bags, with blood all over the place. Why, suddenly, the cinema had to be immaculate, I’ll never know.”

New Yorker Film Critic Pauline Kael agreed with Penn. She became famous largely through a long and prescient piece she wrote on ‘Bonnie and Clyde’ – recognizing “the revolutionary nature of Penn’s film and contrasting it with the Warner Brother gangster films of the 1930s and earlier adaptations of the Barrow/Parker story by Fritz Lang and Nicholas Ray.

Keel concluded that it was “an entertaining movie that has some feeling in it, upsets people … Maybe it’s because ‘Bonnie and Clyde,’ by making us care about the robber lovers, has put the sting back into death.”

A pair of real-life Depression Era bank robbers, Bonnie Elizabeth Parker and her boyfriend Clyde Chestnut Barrow were killed in an ambush by lawmen in 1934. They were shot more than fifty times by the officers with automatic rifles and shotguns. Their stolen car, preserved in its tragic state, still bears the 112 bullet holes from the fateful shootout. Visitors can still view the Ford V8 on display in Whiskey Pete’s Casino in Primm, Nevada.

Penn took on directing the movie after it had been turned down by French New Wave director François Truffaut, as well as George Stevens, William Wyler, John Schlesinger, and Sydney Pollack, among others.

Warren Beatty had bought the rights to the film, and settled on Penn, who had directed him in “Mickey One.”

With Beatty starring as Clyde Barrow, Faye Dunaway was picked over a plethora of Hollywood leading ladies to play Bonnie. Winning the role “by the skin of my teeth,” she once told me at Sundance Film Festival. “It made my career,” she added.

Gene Hackman, Estelle Parsons, and Michael J. Pollard were cast as Clyde’s gang members. Parsons won a Best Supporting Actress Oscar for her role.

The film also picked up an Oscar for Best Cinematography. Among its ten nominations, Arthur Penn also got a nod as Best Director.

Was “Bonnie and Clyde” historically accurate? “Well, the movie is wonderful entertainment,” says biographer Jeff Guinn, “but it’s less than five percent historically accurate.”

Interviewer: “So historical accuracy was never really a concern of yours?”

Penn: “Never tried, never came near. Of course, they weren’t like that. We were flagrantly inaccurate and said, right off the bat, this is metaphoric.”

Interviewer: “So when critics wrote that the film romanticized ‘Bonnie and Clyde,’ that’s exactly what you were trying to do.”

Penn: “Exactly. Far from trying to do anything accurate.”

“Bonnie and Clyde work so well as a metaphor because their driving impulses are so relatable – they are running from what they fear they really are: boring, ordinary, like their parents, unspecial,” observed critic David Nilson. “Like every teenager and young adult in America, perhaps like America itself in its younger days, eager to prove itself.”

In 1992, “Bonnie and Clyde” was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress. And it was included on American Film Institute’s list of the 100 Greatest American Films of All Time.

Pulitzer Prize-winning film critic Roger Ebert added the film to his list of “The Great Movies,” writing: “The movie opened like a slap in the face. American filmgoers had never seen anything like it.”

And the movie ended with a bigger bang. The BBC has described it as “How Bonnie and Clyde’s final scene changed Hollywood.”

It’s worth seeing again. You can catch the retrospective showing next week at Tropic Cinema.

Arthur Penn admitted to me with a shy smile that “Bonnie and Clyde” was his favorite movie, although “The Miracle Worker” ran a close second.

Email Shirrel: srhoades@aol.com