Bonnie and Clyde

"Bonnie and Clyde" is a real innovative film in the fact that it does contain some extremely violent content. 1967 was a different time in the cinema. This film was one of the first, if not the first, that really showed violence the way it would be in real life. People bleed when they get shot and they die in gruesome fashions. The film itself is the somewhat true story of the infamous bank robbers who terrorized parts of Texas and Oklahoma in the early-1930s before they were finally terminated by the authorities. Warren Beatty, Faye Dunaway, Gene Hackman, and Michael J. Pollard all received Oscar nominations. Estelle Parsons won one in the Supporting Actress category. Dunaway and Hackman proved to be the finds of the decade and Beatty became the first real star to be an instrumental part in the actual production of the film. Watch for Gene Wilder in a somewhat funny sequence during the course of the action. Unrelenting and overall exceptional, "Bonnie and Clyde" is easily one of the top 10 films of the 1960s and one of the greatest films of all time. 5 stars out of 5.

'Bonnie and Clyde' is not a film about two real people famous for so many bank robberies and murders across the big country... It shows a new kind of fury in which people could be harm by weapons... The film, however, manages to carry the impression that these two youngsters took great pleasure in robbing banks and stores... It also suggests that it was very easy for them to fool the law—as certainly occurred in real life... Though merited punishment caught up with them, audiences laughed at their remarkable deeds and wanted them to get away...

In 'Bonnie and Clyde,' Penn created an emotional state, an image of the 1930s filtered through his 1960s sensibility... The sense of this period reflects Penn's vision of how the 1930s Depression-era truly was, and for all the crazy style and banjo score, this vision is greatly private...

What is also personal about 'Bonnie and Clyde' and constitutes its incomparable quality, is its unusual mixture of humor and fear, its poetry of violation of the law as something that is gaiety and playfulness...

'Bonnie and Clyde' is both true and abstract... It is a gangster movie and a comedy-romance... It is an amusing film that turns bloody, a love affair that ends with tragedy...

A modification between pleasure and catastrophic events is important to the essential aim of the film... In their second bank robbery, a daring and joyful action goes morosely embittered when Clyde is forced to kill an executive in the bank, and real blood pours out from his body...

Bonnie and Clyde take self-gratification posing for photographs with their prisoners… But when surrounded by detectives in a motel, they turn into vindictive bandits struggling for their lives... C. W. Moss, specially, brings to mind Baby Face Nelson, when he murders policemen with a blazing machine gun...

One of the stimulating moments in the film happens when Clyde chases Bonnie through a yellow corn field, while a cloud transverses the sun and slowly shadows the landscape... Here the characteristic quality of the Texas countryside and the vague aspect of the story are beautifully communicated......

Penn's masterpiece nominated for ten Academy Awards, including Best Picture, won two Oscars, one for Best Actress in a Supporting Role and another for Best Cinematography...

The picture tells the lurid criminal story of a famous couple of delinquents, detailing a mythologized biography. In the time of the Great Depression , Clyde Barrow (top-notch Warren Beatty) recently out of jail meets Bonnie Parker(gorgeous Faye Dunaway). She was stark naked, yelling at him out the window while he tried to steal her mother's car. In a matter of minutes they stole a store , fired a few shots and then stole somebody else's car. At that point they had not yet been introduced , subsequently both of whom become usual bank robbers. The antiheroes go across the American Midwest and South robbing banks and stores during the 30s , embarking in a criminal rampage . They form a criminal gang , along with accomplices as Cyde's brother named Buck (incomparable Gene Hackman) and his spouse (Estelle Parsons was Oscar winner), besides an unexperienced young (unforgettable Michael J Pollard). But they're mercilessly pursued by a revenger sheriff (Denver Pyle). "The strangest damned gang you ever heard of. They're young. They're in love. They rob banks." There has never been... You have never seen... a motion picture like this one! They're young... they're in love... and they kill people !.

This classic movie displays drama , a peculiar love story , noisy action, violence and being quite entertaining . A brilliantly directed movie , a groundbreaking film that chronicles the short lives of America's most infamous criminals. In spite of thirty years from film-making still hold well and remains interesting . In the wake of the recently released Sam Peckinpah's Wild Bunch, the flick is plenty of grisly violence including a really violent ending that was extremely polemic. Colorful and glittering cinematography by cameraman Burnett Guffey was Oscar winner, and atmospheric musical score by Charles Strouse . Excellent art direction by Dean Tavoularis and evocative costumes by Theodora Van Runkle. The motion picture was magnificently directed by Arthur Penn . The picture spawned pretty imitators, and created a sub-genre about Great Depression outlaws, such as : Dillinger , Pretty Boy Floyd, Machine Gun Kelly, among others. And other updatings about Clyde Borrow and Charlie Parker life are the following ones : ¨Bonnie Parker story¨(1958) by William Witney with Dorothy Provine and a rendition for TV (1992) by Gary Hoffman with Tracy Needham and Dana Ashbrook.

Although numerous chapters in film manuals have been dedicated to Arthur Penn's violent, jagged, cynical "Bonnie and Clyde"--and, indeed, it kick-started a new permissiveness in American movies which then generated many imitations--the first 20 or so minutes of the picture are pretty awful. Depression-era waitress, bored and thrill-seeking, finds herself drawn to a smooth-talking, reckless hood, an ex-con who, when playfully dared to, robs a general store right in front of her. He's sexually impotent but does have a sympathetic heart for the unfortunates and the working class; she's a high-wire act, strictly amoral and greedy. Their initial meeting outside her house has all the conventions of a standard 1930s drama--and just because the movie's look is generally correct doesn't mean what's happening on the screen is original. Producer Warren Beatty and screenwriters Robert Benton and David Newman were inspired by the French New Wave in regards to the film's approach and style, and their efforts to duplicate the amoral feel of European films paid off (this is a good-looking picture shot by Burnett Guffey, who won an Oscar). However, Arthur Penn's direction isn't visionary, and the multiple car-riding shots with back projection don't seem to break new ground. The film's greatest achievement--aside from its textured look--is the casting: Beatty and Faye Dunaway do marvelous work in the leads; Gene Hackman and Estelle Parsons are also fine as Clyde's brother and sister-in-law (Parsons won the film's second of two Oscars as Best Supporting Actress); Michael J. Pollard is an amiable curiosity as partner C.W.; and there are dandy smaller bits by Denver Pyle, Dub Taylor and Gene Wilder. The violence grows increasingly, steadily, as the film inches toward its queasy conclusion, while Penn juggles (successfully at times) ribald character moments with deadly serious--and bloody--scenes (which also became fashionable). The sweat and the flies, the downtrodden and the righteous, they all get a work-out in this scenario, which, in its best moments, has a prickly-comic and dangerous edge. Nominated for 10 Oscars in all, including Warren Beatty as Best Actor and producer of the Best Picture, Dunaway as Best Actress, Hackman and Pollard in the Supporting Actor category, Penn for his direction, Benton and Newman for their original screenplay and Theodora Van Runkle for her costumes (which started a brief fashion trend). *** from ****

This is one of the greatest cops 'n robbers films of all time. Loosely based upon the real-life escapades of Bonnie Parker and her lover, Clyde Barrow, along with Clyde's brother, Buck, Buck's wife, Blanche, and C. W. Moss, the film details the gang's escapades throughout the American Southwest during the early years of the Great Depression. Action-packed from beginning to end, this film is total dynamite as well as flying lead. Beatty gives a dynamite performance as the vicious Clyde Barrow, who will stop at nothing to escape capture by the law...literally. Dunaway gives a stellar performance as Bonnie, an amateur poetess who allegedly entertained her fellow gang members with long poems. Gene Hackman is superb as Buck Barrow, the joke-cracking gang-member, and Michael J. Pollard is equally adept as C. W. Moss, the sissy-killer of the bunch, who cries after each killing he is involved in. Denver Pyle is great as Texas Ranger Frank Hamer who doggedly tracked he gang and ultimately engineered the ambush of Bonnie and Clyde, after the gang kidnapped him and send pictured of him "bein' just as friendly as pie," with the gang, as Bonnie Parker is alleged to have said. One bizarre note: Buck Barrow was actually shot in the head and after the gang had camped out following his shooting, they left him when "the laws," had surrounded them. Buck lived for several days in a hospital after his capture by the law and actually was pretty coherent several times, giving statements to the police, and even asking for a minister to whom he could give his "final confession," and hopefully receive Divine Absolution. Gene Wilder gives a fine performance as the hapless, would-be, funeral director (or "Undertaker," as they are referred to down south) Eugene Grizzard, and Evans Evans is equally fine as his harried girlfriend, who apparently lied to Grizzard about her age. (When she told Bonnie her true age, she had a very sheepish look on her face while Grizzard gave her an amazed look as if to say: "I didn't know you were THAT old!) Anyway, this is a great film and loads of fun to watch on a rainy Sunday afternoon when there's nothing else to do. It's great to watch with "The Untouchables," 1959, starring Robert Stack and "The St. Valentine's Day Massacre," 1967 starring Jason Robards. I rate this film 10 stars out of a possible 10.