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| Images courtesy of Warner Brothers |
The story of gunslinging Texas American outlaws Bonnie
Elizabeth Parker and Clyde Chestnut “Champion” Barrow began in the 1930s amid
the Great Depression. With their crimes
amassing everything from burglary to kidnappings, bank robberies and even
murders of civilians and/or police officers on their trail, they captured the
imagination of American press readership at the height of the ‘public enemy’
era involving a list of criminals wanted by the FBI. Among them were John Dillinger, George ‘Baby
Face’ Nelson, Bonne and Clyde, ‘Pretty Boy’ Floyd, ‘Machine Gun’ Kelly and
Alvin Karpis. With the notion of the ‘notorious
fugitive gangster’ coined by the FBI and used throughout the 1930s by J. Edgar
Hoover, the crime sprees committed by America’s #1 public enemies no doubt
inspired a whole wave of crime cinema throughout the 1940s and 1950s including
but not limited to Gun Crazy and The Honeymoon Killers.
Between those movies began the emergence of what would later
called the New Hollywood movement and among their first successes came in the
form of The Miracle Worker director Arthur Penn’s biographical crime
saga Bonnie and Clyde. A biographical
period piece chronicling the meeting and exploits of Clyde Barrow (Warren Beatty)
and Bonnie Parker (Faye Dunaway), the true crime epic was one of the first to
kick the countercultural door wide open for openly blasting away at numerous
screen taboos including but not limited to sex and graphic violence. Unleashed on unsuspecting moviegoers right
before Sam Peckinpah’s carnage infested The Wild Bunch sprayed crimson
across the screen, the film had a shaky start to the screen with mixed critical
reception before word of mouth turned it into a major success in 1967. Garnering ten Academy Award nominations
including two wins for Best Supporting Actress Estelle Parsons and Best Cinematography
Burnett Guffey, it eventually moved into the ranks of the Library of Congress
as well as coming in at number 27 on the American Film Institute’s list of the
100 Greatest American Films of All Time.
Though featuring composite characters like C.W. Moss
(Michael J. Pollard, a mashup of W.D. Jones and Henry Methvin from the Barrow
gang) and some embellishments of the events for dramatic effect, Bonnie and
Clyde starts off small with the two Texan based future criminals chance
meeting at a restaurant as a half-bored waitress Bonnie decides to shack up
with Clyde for their eventual crime spree.
Meeting up with C.W. Moss, his older brother Buck (Gene Hackman) and his
wife Blanche (Estelle Parsons) who harbors deep seated contempt for the Barrow gang,
the group sets out on a cross-country crime spree that catches up with them in Missouri
when they attempt a bank heist and getaway from the ongoing pursuits of Texas
Ranger Frank Hamer (Denver Pyle). From
here, it becomes something of a crime road movie following the pit stops the
Barrow gang makes trying to evade capture and fend off unexpected police
ambushes. Oh and there’s an aside
featuring a then-unknown Gene Wilder as a kidnapping victim.
Intended to be a modern transposition of the idealized
version of the gangster film of the 1930s replete with the expectations of the
genre while using updated cinematographic techniques and more realistic
violence, Bonnie and Clyde came very close to becoming a film by
Jean-Luc Godard who initially balked at the project but after its success
remarked they needed to immediately remake it.
Anyway, Warren Beatty caught wind of the project and rerouted its French
New Wave origins towards American filmmakers though many including the eventual
director Arthur Penn repeatedly turned it down.
With Beatty on board as producer before bumping up to the lead acting
role as well, soon Faye Dunaway joined the cast.
Among the first movies to use squibs onscreen, the lyrical
crime film featuring music by Annie composer Charles Strouse gained
notoriety for its use of graphic bloodletting violence whereas before
characters that got shot would fall over without evidence of bullets hitting
the body. With its road-movie episodic structure
and countercultural heroizing of the antagonists or so-called ‘Public Enemies’
and artistic license, the film in its way paved the way less for crime cinema
despite the many subsequent iterations that would follow and more for character
driven microbudget dramas like Five Easy Pieces, Easy Rider and
even The Last Picture Show. While
John Milius’ Dillinger very clearly wouldn’t exist without Arthur Penn’s
Bonnie and Clyde, the film’s overarching influences can be felt in the
talkier smaller movies that followed suit after.
With Warner Brothers initially uncertain of how to promote a
film that seemed to glorify violence and champion murderers, it was given a
limited theatrical release though the small venues it opened in did huge numbers. Speaking to Beatty’s power as a producer,
actor and eventual filmmaking titan that would later give us Reds and Dick
Tracy, the actor threatened to sue Warner Brothers given the amount of
money the studio was dumping into another project that was proving to be a
pit. Not long after, Warner granted Bonnie
and Clyde a wide release where it blew up into a major commercial
success. While immediately openly
controversial with some critics lambasting the then-extreme violence and
sexuality onscreen, others like Roger Ebert championed the film as a ‘milestone
in the history of American movies’.
Against expectations, the film went on to become the second highest
grossing film in Warner Brothers’ library.
Though some detractors still decry this for bursting the
door to bloodshed on the screen and paving the way for other like-minded crime
dramas also by Warner Brothers including Terrence Malick’s Badlands and
decades later Tony Scott’s True Romance and Oliver Stone’s Natural
Born Killers, it was also exemplar of the changing times with respect to
what audiences were willing to digest on the silver screen. The film’s impact was such that The New
York Times chief critic Bosley Crowther actually lost his job after a
negative review of the film and a then-unknown Pauline Kael took his
place. Despite the back-and-forth
behind-the-scenes battles with Warner Brothers over the project and its defiant
leading man Warren Beatty who dodged another film PT 109 in favor of
this, Bonnie and Clyde has cemented itself into the annals of American
cinema history with its forceful ushering in of a level of realistic violence
and sexuality that had never been seen onscreen before. Featuring numerous great performances, acute
period detail and just enough real history mixed with artistic license in it be
a cutting-edge entertainment, it ushered in three of Hollywood’s top players in
their prime of their screen youth into mainstream pop cultural
consciousness.
--Andrew Kotwicki
