Date Seen: 6/20/17
Score: 4.5/5
DIRECTOR: Arthur Penn
PRODUCER: Warren Beatty
STUDIO: Warner Bros.
SCREENPLAY: David Newman & Robert Benton
CINEMATOGRAPHY: Burnett Guffey
Faye Dunaway |
Faye Dunaway and Warren Beatty |
The phallic imagery of violence used by the filmmakers- interesting and important considering Clyde's impotence |
"We rob banks!" |
Victims of the Great Depression |
A violence that pulls the film away from its goofiness- a moment of shifting perspective |
Viewers watching celebrities watching celebrities of a different sort- an inversion of spectacle |
Gene Hackman and Warren Beatty |
Warren Beatty |
The Barrow Gang- from left, Estelle Parsons (in an Oscar-Winning performance), Gene Hackman, Michael J. Pollard, Faye Dunaway, and Warren Beatty |
Faye Dunaway, Michael J. Pollard, and Estelle Parsons |
Texas Ranger Frank Hamer (Denver Pyle) |
Gene Wilder and Evans Evans |
Michael J. Pollard |
Estelle Parsons |
Perhaps one of the most controversial films of its time (which is saying something considering its year of release, 1967, is widely considered a groundbreaking year in film history), Arthur Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde retains the mythical quality that it created and cultured fifty years ago, while also giving the opportunity for reevaluation in light of its matured stature as a film giant. What I mean by this is that it’s able to watch and enjoy Bonnie and Clyde, and to recognize its entertainment value and its stifling rebellious tension, while also stepping back and examining its value and implications in the canon of western cinema, particularly its work in defining the New Hollywood era of American filmmaking, born out of the ashes of the studio system.
It seems as though Bonnie and Clyde is a completely polarizing film- it can be either hated or loved. While critics contemporary to the late 1960s famously argued for and against the film, with Pauline Kael making a name for herself as a film critic with her positive review and Bosley Crowther putting the final nail in the coffin of his career with his scathing review. In preparation for this piece I read several essays written in the years surrounding the film’s release, good and bad, in an attempt to gather the general consensus of just what about Penn’s film was so revolutionary- in a good or bad way- at the time. From what I gathered, the main conclusion seems far too cliché to be true, but alas, isn’t that just how it is sometimes?
One harsh negative review I read of the film, published in 1968 by Charles Thomas Samuels, begins with this opening line: “A bunch of decayed cabbage leaves smeared with catsup, Bonnie and Clyde has been judged an artistic bouquet.” Throughout his take on the film, Samuels laments at the film’s confusing mixed-messages, its implausibility, its “primitiveness,” even claiming that the film “slanders society.” In this he’s not wrong, but his understanding of the film’s allegorical critique of the late 1960s is obviously, and embarrassingly, skewed toward the conservative older generation’s perspective. Perfectly enough, it’s this failure to understand the importance of perspective that taints his interpretation. He argues that the film does wrong to depict Bonnie and Clyde as heroes, when in actuality one of the film’s strong suits is the way in which it juxtaposes Bonnie and Clyde’s vision of themselves with the vision of those around them. It’s this fog of misguided delusion- that they are vigilante heroes rebelling against the oppressive regime of the Great Depression- that calls to mind the terrible deeds of the Manson Family, or the Hell’s Angels, hippies who lost the call to peace somewhere in the madness of the midcentury’s violence.
The supreme division between the perspective of its characters and its audience is what makes Bonnie and Clyde a fantastic film in my mind. Arthur Penn sets up the opposing forces of the Barrow Gang, the “innocent” people around them, and the viewer, a menage à trois that pushes the viewer to take turns identifying with each set. This is a very Hitchcockian technique; at turns the viewer feels the gust of wind carry them through the madcap adventures of the film’s young and beautiful criminals, and then harshly pulls them back down to earth with scenes of the violent reality behind a life of crime, and the law enforcement that must take down folk heroes. While it doesn’t do too much to make the police force look very sympathetic- again, very Hitchcockian- the film does portray the law in the manner of a stern parent. With each act of illicit rebellion, Bonnie and Clyde move further away from God’s light, and it takes the harshness of a paternal figure (embodied by the quiet, threatening Texas Ranger Frank Hamer) to punish them. Of course, it’s much more intense than a mere spanking, but then again, children don’t usually run around with guns, do they? While it seems difficult to fathom now, Bonnie and Clyde was made during a time when, as Penn himself put it, “every night on the news we saw kids in Vietnam being airlifted out in body bags, with blood all over the place.” Perhaps, then, there was something else going on.
The truth of the matter, and what I think Bonnie and Clyde is getting at, is that the late 1960s were a time in which kids were forced to use violence by the hand of the government, but discouraged from using action, militant or nonviolent, to further their own social agendas. Bonnie and Clyde think of themselves as vigilantes, following in the footsteps of Robin Hood by attempting to redistribute wealth to the needy during the Great Depression, but they lose sight of this mission when the attractiveness of fame engulfs them. The viewer understands that the protagonists are misguided in their attempts to fight back against a system that has wronged them, but at the same time feels a distaste for the methods employed by the gang. The perspective shifts and the viewer, like the film’s dim-witted gang member C.W. Moss, hopes that Bonnie and Clyde will be okay but also kind of wants to escape from the whole situation, knowing how bad it is. The viewer takes a trip through the mixed emotions of an era in which a teenager was faced with hundreds of questions and many answers being supplied by people with their own intense beliefs- a time in which a person might attempt to escape from society’s ills by running away, but instead ends up corrupted and under the thumb of the Man once again.
Understanding this in retrospect, one can ask why critics who were dense enough to overlook the film’s intelligent perspective manipulation would have such an issue with the film. Its staged violence was certainly shocking at the time, though ironically considering the kind of real violence that people were confronted with daily as mentioned by Penn; nowadays it seems too tame to cause a fuss. What, then, was the issue? Why is it that a movie like Bonnie and Clyde was attacked for reasons running the gamut from being unfaithful to history to glorifying violence, while Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1968) never faced the same barrage of attacks despite having the same faults?
In his 2008 review of the film, David Sterritt praises its importance, calling it “a key achievement of mid-century American cinema and a tough-love portrait of two different eras, the Depression-plagued Thirties when it takes place and the turbulent Sixties when it was made,” yet fails to understand the importance of the film as a period piece. Later in his essay Sterritt writes, “…my college friends and I saw Bonnie and Clyde in the Sixties… and we thought the film was about the Thirties… If anyone had told us the movie was ‘really about’ the here are now, we would have asked why the filmmakers hadn’t set it in the here and now… Why not a present-day drama…?” This, I feel, is an extremely obtuse question to ask from a man published in Cineaste. Why didn’t Arthur Miller set The Crucible in the 1950s? Why didn’t William Golding just make Lord of the Flies about World War II? Sterritt overlooks the power of the parable, the ability of the allegory to expose the timelessness of human error and struggle. One of the brilliances of Bonnie and Clyde- an obvious, superficial one- is its ability to superimpose the chaos and anarchy of the 1960s over the chaos and anarchy of the 1930s.
Here is the issue for reviewers, and what I’m ultimately trying to get at in my quest to find the reason why Bonnie and Clyde is such a controversial film. It’s critical of society, and it has the ability to alienate viewers of an older generation, sometimes without them even knowing. While Samuels most definitely scoffed at the up and coming New Hollywood’s ability to entice young audiences, Sterritt doesn’t even realize that as he’s gotten older he’s lost touch with the young man he once was. Bonnie and Clyde is a movie about divisions and failed connections- on a superficial level, between the two ill-fated protagonists, and analytically, between the perspectives of its characters and the audience, and between young and old spectators. Samuels writes, “…Bonnie and Clyde seems… up-to-date. Not because of its technique… but because of an attitude which persuades the viewer to swallow its violence: the attitude- it is precisely nothing more- that society and normality are frauds.” In this sentence he reveals his own generational bias, his own inability to see that the notion that “society and normality are frauds” was and is much more than an “attitude” and “nothing more.” Lest I begin to lecture on the Surrealist Manifesto and Dadaism, nihilism and existentialism, Marxism and anarchism, I will simply say that the negative reviews of Bonnie and Clyde all seem to gladly rattle off a list of irrelevant “issues” with the movie, while somewhere unconsciously revealing the reviewer’s own personal bias against it for exposing the kind of ridiculous social reality that existed not only in the 1930s, but in the 1960s, and even today.
Despite negative critics of the film pandering to their own sociocultural/generational biases, there have been shining lights who have seen the film for what it is, from Pauline Kael onward throughout the years. In the fifty years since it was released, the movie stands as a classic and groundbreaking New Hollywood drama that opened the floodgates for the kind of violent- and, frankly, amazing- movies that the 1970s would produce (The Godfather was released only five years later, and Taxi Driver only nine years later). It is a movie of its time, for its time, and in many ways about its time. The brilliance of its perspective manipulation allows the viewer to better understand the ways in which misguided criminals- like the Manson Family and the Hells Angels of the 1960s- could see themselves as vigilante heroes while the entire world could see them as crazed villains. It is, as Paul Glushanok said in 1967, “an important step in the development of American film. It is also a beautiful, disturbing… film.” His only criticism is that it could have gone even further. Little did Glushanok know, but the work done by so-called “limited” Bonnie and Clyde would forever change the way movies- particularly rebellious ones- were made, and, along with The Graduate and Easy Rider, usher in a new generation of gritty, spiteful filmmaking.
Sources Used:
"Bonnie and Clyde" by Paul Glushanok, published in Cinéaste, Vol. 1, No. 2 (Fall, 1967)
"Bonnie and Clyde" by Charles Thomas Samuels, published in The Hudson Review, Vol. 21, No. 1 (Spring, 1968)
"Perfecting the New Gangster: Writing 'Bonnie and Clyde'" by Matthew Bernstein, published in Film Quarterly, Vol. 53, No. 4 (Summer 2000)
"Bonnie and Clyde," review by David Sterritt, published in Cinéaste, Vol. 33, No. 4 (Fall, 2008)
All photos and GIFS sourced from FilmGrab.com, Pinterest, and Giphy.
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