Bonnie and Clyde

I wasn't surprise to find out that Francois Truffaut and Jean Luc Godard had been seriously considered to helm the tragic tale of Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker. Fortunately Arthur Penn took over. I say fortunately, not because I think any less of Truffaut or Godard but I'm sure nobody could have made this glorious American classic but Arthur Penn. Somehow there is an air of Frenchness permeating every frame even if Bonnie and Clyde is profoundly American. For a foreigner, like me, America has always been a Country to admire even if puzzling. Guns and Bibles. Violence with a poetic aura that it's as startling as it is disturbing. Warren Beatty is superb as Clyde - the real life character was homosexual but for the film he is impotent - more acceptable? Amazing to think of it now. Faye Dunaway became an icon, deservedly so. Gene Hackman, the extraordinary Estelle Parsons, Michael J Pollard and even Gene Wilder complete the cast of this extraordinary American film.

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 ****

'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...

Went to search for this movie online so I could review it and almost typed "Bonnie and Tyler" into the search bar. It's been a long day, so this one will be brief.

Bonnie and Clyde is mostly a great movie. I have all the admiration in the world for what it did for cinema. It helped kickstart the idea of having violence actually be messy and impactful in mainstream film, and the fact that it's a sympathetic portrayal of people on the run from the law was probably quite shocking back then.

If anything, however, Bonnie and Clyde feel more like heroes than anti-heroes. They rob banks; faceless organisations that are foreclosing people's houses and making The Depression more depressing. They have few other ways to get by. There are police casualties, but the police response is often excessively violent, and they're tools of a state who seem to be doing little else to help the people who are suffering in the 1930s.

Bonnie and Clyde and their gang aren't perfect people by any means, but they are more likable than those who they're pitted against. Within the last few years, figures like them stray further and further from the anti-hero label, and closer towards the hero one.

There's some really bold editing here, and the lead performances are all good (fantastic Gene Wilder appearance, too). The character of Blanche is a bit annoying, though. I wish the screenplay had toned her down a bit. The music and a couple of jarring editing techniques might not work for everyone, too, and I think the pace gets a little janky here and there.

But for the stuff this movie does well, I feel it's at least deserving of an 8/10 rating. It's not my favourite landmark boundary-pusher of the late 1960s, but it's up there.

I said I'd be brief, but that didn't end up happening. Guess there's a lot to talk about when it comes to a movie like 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.