Gangster Story

'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 catalyst of poverty without opportunity, combined with rage and a rejection of society, resulting in chaos, murder, mayhem, with a background of depression era America. Two of the greatest performances of the time capture the menace deployed by the Barrow Gang as they carve, shoot and slaughter their way into cult stardom, both on and off screen - the super antiheroes of their day.

It can be a challenge accepting interpretation over fact but if fact is a cornerstone of your experience then perhaps documentaries are more to your taste. Once you take the lives of others and throw them on the big screen it's done for entertainment not education, so you have to be prepared to take things with varying sized pinches of salt. You can always follow up the facts later if the fancy takes you. Cult heroes to some, raging psychopaths to others - either way, characters that appear in various guises over the course of cinematic history and more likely will continue to do so for some time to come - always a fiction but occasionally grounded in fact.

I agree with most folks who have reviewed this film. It has everything a well rounded motion picture can have. Two very charismatic leads, several supporting roles of great depth, brilliant cinematography, and a good story. Even the most minor roles sparkle. This is a story about a sociopath (Bonnie), meeting up with a low self esteem wanderer who is pretty spineless until she shows up (Clyde) and what happens when you set into motion a series of events that can only lead to destruction. Of course, the final scene is one of the most famous in all of movie history and opened the door for future films. It also glamorizes the two anti-heroes and puts them out there. Personally, I don't see them as glamorous at all; they are low life killers with no real respect for human life. That said, their portrayal is extremely well done. When Bonnie sees her mother for the last time, there is that element that you can't go home again. They have cut a path through the film. They have become the stuff of fiction. They are even blamed for crimes they didn't commit. Children read dime novels about them.

I just wanted ot mention Gene Hackman and Estelle Parsons. They don't have the savvy and the bravado that the title characters have, but they fill the screen. Fantastic performances. When I was a child, my parents ran a restaurant. I got to know a drifter who washed dishes for us. He left and a couple weeks later, we found out he had been shot and killed when he and his partner tried to commit a robbery. I remember the police talking to may parents as part of a routine investigation. When I see the people who surround the main characters in this film, I think back to this guy, especially when I watch the Hackman role.

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 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.