Barker’s Classic Movies #7: BONNIE AND CLYDE *****
Had to take a month off while I moved across country, but I’m back extolling the true classics with a still-controversial favorite:
“Some day they’ll go down together; / They’ll bury them side-by-side; /
To few it’ll be grief - / To the law a relief -
But it’s death for Bonnie and Clyde.”
– Bonnie Parker, 1934
Bonnie and Clyde (1967)
running time: 1 hr., 51 m. / original studio: Warner Brothers / original rating: M
produced by Warren Beatty; directed by Arthur Penn; screenplay by David Newman & Robert Benton; director of photography, Burnett Guffey; edited by Dede Allen; music by Charles Strouse
with: Warren Beatty (Clyde Barrow), Faye Dunaway (Bonnie Parker), Michael J. Pollard (C.W. Moss), Gene Hackman (Buck Barrow), Estelle Parsons (Blanche)
One of the most important and influential films ever made, Bonnie and Clyde forms a locus in modern film history: it was intimately tied to the mid-sixties zeitgeist, by both caprice and design, and it was the decade’s most significant harbinger of a new era in American filmmaking, launching numerous great careers on both sides of the camera and transforming the visual language of Hollywood cinema.
In its day, Bonnie and Clyde was a shocking entertainment experience for everyone, but for many critics and older audience members it seemed to go too far in its graphic depiction of death and dying, a depiction that now seems genteel at times. But as with most classic, innovative films from the past, Bonnie and Clyde merely seems to have lost some of its punch, because we live with a movie culture that has benefited immeasurably from its audacity and vision.
* * *
The original screenplay was one of the few “spec” scripts in history to actually complete the grueling journey from the slush pile to the big screen. Its writers, David Newman and Robert Benton, had met while working as associate editors for Esquire magazine, two foreign film buffs with a yearning to make movies of their own who just happened to be well-connected in the publishing world because of their day job.
Neither man had much interest in Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow as historical figures; these guys were film geeks. So, they based their initial treatment of the story on the many legends surrounding the outlaw couple, which Benton had grown up hearing as a boy in East Texas, and then peppered the text with references to the films and techniques of directors like Ingmar Bergman and French New Wave iconoclasts Jean-Luc Godard and François Truffaut.
Through Newman/Benton’s mutual publishing contacts, the treatment found its way into the hands of Truffaut, who just happened to be the duo’s favorite filmmaker. The principal architect of much New Wave theory, Truffaut had always filled his own scripts and films with allusions to Hollywood genres, often turning their conventions upside down, but more importantly, he had transcended the imperfections of low-budget filmmaking by incorporating his natural mistakes and accidents into a freewheeling new cinematic style, which was all the rage among young cineastes of the day. Truffaut was very pleased by the treatment and agreed, at the very least, to help Newman/Benton shape their treatment into a real screenplay, which could then be sold to a studio. The writers fully expected their hero to add a few anarchic touches of his own, but he amazed them by moving the script toward a more conventional narrative structure. Just a little, here and there. Truffaut eventually backed out of the project, but not before he made his most brilliant contribution to Bonnie and Clyde: he told Warren Beatty about the script.
A restless, unfairly handsome actor who had been struggling against typecasting ever since his much-lauded film debut, Beatty had yet to make a movie that fully tapped into his unique talents, but he was determined to control his own destiny by hunting down roles that suited his temperament and producing the films himself. Beatty loved the Newman/Benton script so much he was optioning the rights before he had finished reading it.
He then struck a remarkable deal for a novice producer. Already under contract to Warner Brothers as an actor, he convinced the studio to finance Bonnie and Clyde for just $1.8 million, about one-third the typical Hollywood budget of the time. They also agreed to let him shoot the film entirely on location in Texas — far from executive interference — but they did this mostly because they were relieved to get rid of him for awhile, convinced that Bonnie and Clyde was destined to be a loser, a tax write-off. The studio did make him settle for a pay cut, reducing his usual fee in exchange for allowing him to produce by himself, and ignoring a clause which assigned forty percent of the gross to their young star. They thought he’d have a good time making his little movie, get a taste of being broke and then settle down to be a nice little movie star.
Meanwhile, the newly energized Beatty wasted no time. He hired director Arthur Penn, a veteran of live television and the theatre who had given him an early career break, and together they assembled an extraordinary cast and crew of unknowns, most of whom came from the talent pool in New York, and went off to get as much film in the can before someone changed their mind.
* * *
Bonnie and Clyde opens with a textbook meet-cute scene, two young and beautiful performers (Beatty and Faye Dunaway) strolling casually down the sidewalk of a rural village, framed by languorous tracking shots as they banter suggestively in appealing period costume. The repartee is tart and funny in a way that movies rarely manage, but before we become comfortable with it or even get to know the characters, Clyde is robbing a grocery store at gunpoint, the warning shots from his pistol shattering the calm of the scene.
Their subsequent getaway in a stolen car is slapstick straight out of a Keystone Cops comedy, Clyde struggling to maintain control of the vehicle while Bonnie smothers him with excited kisses, underscored by Flatt and Scruggs’ now-legendary “Foggy Mountain Breakdown.” Once the car stops, Clyde unpacks a dazzling little monologue, blending good ol’ boy phrasing with shrewd psychology, to cut straight to the heart of Bonnie’s character while he’s explaining why he is, sad to say, uh, sexually impotent. The film has been running eleven minutes and it has already shifted through four different changes of tone and pace (five, if you count those strange opening credits).
To twenty-first century eyes and ears, these shifts from bald comedy to dangerous violence, then a mixing of the two, then something else, may not even register. They’ve become standard practice. But for Bonnie and Clyde’s original audience they were disturbing and revelatory, violating a long standing contract with American audiences that a movie should either be escapist entertainment or thoughtful drama, but never both; that it will establish a unified aesthetic at the outset and maintain that unity throughout; that it will never mention sexual dysfunction by name. Above all, a movie must never remind us that it is a movie, or make us aware of our own responses to it, by always maintaining the storytelling spell.
But like Beatty himself, Bonnie and Clyde is a strutting peacock of a movie, continually jolting viewer responses with a mix of white-knuckle gun battles and incongruous homespun giggles: one minute it’s a subjective romp about a naïve couple rebelling against poverty and authority during the Depression, the next minute it pulls back and becomes a sharp commentary on the excesses of celebrity in America, refracting those excesses through a lens of 1930s fashion and ideology. Bonnie and Clyde doesn’t just say to an audience, “Look what I can do,” it shouts “Look what movies can do!”
The film sticks close to Newman and Benton’s original script, though Penn and Beatty argued constantly over the director’s tendency toward sentimentality. Beatty won that battle in the end and Bonnie and Clyde never descends to apologizing for its protagonists. On the other hand, Penn brought a tremendous skill with actors to the hurried shoot, delivering a film that showcases some of the best performances of the decade, while his images have a frantic urgency, turning the screws on an increasingly desperate situation, creating the feeling that an invisible shroud is lowering over the characters.
All movie outlaws end badly (or at least they used to), but Bonnie and Clyde marks the first time that an American filmmaker made his bank robbers so appealing before killing them off. It was one of the primary complaints against the film, a criticism that revealed the deep denial plaguing the sixties’ “Establishment”: we all have a little of Bonnie and Clyde in us, it’s not so hard to admit — the impulsiveness, the desire to break free, to buck authority, even to kill those who threaten or anger us. It’s the essential appeal of stories about outlaws, which go back to the beginnings of American culture.
The disquieting irony that the film brings to the foreground is that movies are a cathartic substitute for these impulses; to sanitize them in any way is the real “glorification” of violence, the real invitation to anarchy. Bonnie and Clyde’s revolutionary approach to violence was something Beatty and Penn had agreed upon from the beginning, and it became the film’s most talked about feature, usually in the negative.
The tidy violence of nearly every previous film — people wounded by bullets crumpling forward as if they had bad indigestion, perhaps an artful trickle of blood from the temple — was just a tasteful given of the contract. But here for the first time, a moviemaker told the truth about what bullets do to the human body, and he portrayed it indiscriminately, regardless of a character’s standing in the story. The effect this had on viewers, somewhat tempered now by time and thousands of blood-drenched movies, was an electrifying sense of dread more akin to a cult horror film than a mainstream entertainment.
Bonnie and Clyde die suddenly and horribly in the film’s famous finale, a sequence Penn himself described as a “spastic-ballet,” riddled to pieces in a hail of bullets that goes on and on and on. It actually lasts a mere twenty-four seconds, but as any moviegoer knows, even five seconds can be an eternity in the hands of the right director. There follows a brief, deadly silence without comment or musical elaboration, Penn leaving us to sort for ourselves the paradoxical emotions and ideas that Bonnie and Clyde has brought to the surface, and then…blackout.
The top brass at Warner Brothers hated Bonnie and Clyde and did their best to bury the film, dumping it into a few theatres and southern drive-ins during August 1967, the last of the summer season. At the same time, several mainstream critics of the day, following the lead of the terminally middlebrow Bosley Crowther in the New York Times, dismissed the film as factory-made hackwork, offended by its youthful energy and generally misreading everything it was doing.
The film appeared to be going under completely, vanishing from some theatres after a couple of weeks, but Warren Beatty never gave up. He arranged two important screenings in late fall, one at the Directors Guild in L.A. and another at the Montreal Film Festival, both of which provoked thunderous standing ovations, while audiences in major cities began pestering exhibitors to bring the film back, intrigued by an eloquent defense of the film that Pauline Kael published in The New Yorker. By January, Bonnie and Clyde had become a cause célèbre without even being seen by most of the paying audience.
Few movies have ever experienced such a rebirth. Warners was forced to reconsider their own fiscal judgment and rushed the film into re-release, it just so happened, on the day Oscar nominations were announced. Bonnie and Clyde received a whopping ten nods, no doubt due to the DGA screening, which had been attended by some of the most powerful voters in the Academy. It became a runaway box-office hit. Critics everywhere began retracting their original dismissals; Bosley Crowther resigned as head critic of the Times, no longer desiring to review movies in a world where this kind of obscenity triumphed.
In 1967-68, with violent clashes between Vietnam protestors and the police reaching fever pitch, it was easy to see Bonnie and Clyde as an allegory for its own troubled times. There is some evidence that the writers intended for people to draw a Youth vs. Authority comparison, but the film itself doesn’t particularly push or sustain the analogy. Nor does Penn’s use of slow motion in the climactic massacre turn violence and/or death into something “beautiful,” as many have interpreted the sequence. There’s nothing beautiful about it. It’s simply one startling editing technique among many, in this case intercutting multiple camera speeds and time frames to extend a horrendous moment and burn its agony into the memory.
To watch Bonnie and Clyde now is to marvel at how exceptionally well it tells a story, for all of its irony and effect, and at how engaged it is with the possibilities of its medium. The allegorical undertones have dissipated and we can marvel, too, at how prescient and lucky Warren Beatty turned out to be, pouring his instincts and passion into a film that spawned legends: the great Faye Dunaway in her first starring role; the great Gene Hackman, in a performance that bumped him from obscurity to A-list; the film debut of Gene Wilder, hilarious from his first moment on a movie screen.
Robert Benton became a fine writer-director of realistic dramas (Kramer Vs. Kramer, 1979; Places in the Heart, 1984), while script doctor Robert Towne, another friend of Beatty’s who had polished scenes and added key dialogue to Bonnie and Clyde on location, wound up writing some of the best movies of the 1970s, including what is now regarded by many as the best of all possible screenplays, Chinatown (1974). And that is only the above-the-line personnel.
Like few films before or since, Bonnie and Clyde exhales modern movie history in ways its makers couldn’t have imagined. They were just making the best film they could and having a good time with it. They couldn’t know that the awful silence at the film’s end — that unnerving emptiness when the machine guns stop, the camera hanging around like a stunned bystander, uncertain of what has just happened or where to focus — was the sound of the old ways dying, and the movies changing forever.
NOTES:
INFLUENCES: cf. Truffaut’s Shoot the Piano Player (1960) and Jules et Jim (1962), Godard’s Breathless (1959; written by Truffaut) and Bande à Part (1964), all New Wave films that exploit the conventions of Hollywood cinema with disruptive narrative techniques. See also Bergman’s The Seventh Seal (1957), a major influence on the writers’ approach to symbolism.
STUFF TO LOOK FOR: Bonnie and Clyde is one of the seminal works of modern film editing and can be enjoyed simply on the merits of its endlessly inventive cutting by Dede Allen (b. 1925). Watch for disorienting, jazzy cross-cuts during dialogue scenes, staccato multiple angles in the action sequences (which nevertheless enhances the drama, rather than obscuring it), and weird skipped frames in the middle of shots, as if the camera blinked and missed something.
The Oscar-winning color photography by veteran DP Burnett Guffey (1905-1983) speaks for itself, but especially in scenes filmed at night.
GOOD FOR THE RESUMÉ:
26-year-old Faye Dunaway had only done two minor film roles when she convinced Beatty to hire her for this film, after he’d been turned down by such established luminaries as Jane Fonda and Tuesday Weld. He was so impressed with Dunaway’s performance, he shared top billing with her above the title in all the film’s advertising.
Gene Hackman (b. 1931) got Beatty’s attention when they worked together briefly in Lilith (1964). Thanks to Buck Barrow, Hackman quickly became the most sought after character actor in the business, averaging three films a year, culminating with his star turn in The French Connection (1971). See also I Never Sang for My Father (1970).
Estelle Parsons (b. 1927), Michael J. Pollard (b. 1939) and Gene Wilder (b. 1933) were all chosen by Arthur Penn from his little black book of New York stage actors. Parsons and Pollard remain fixtures of the American theatre to this day, while Wilder went on to movie stardom in The Producers (1967).
Robert Towne (b. 1936) was refused a co-writing credit on Bonnie and Clyde by the Writers Guild, so Beatty had him billed as “Special Consultant.” A genius with all types of dialogue, Towne subsequently doctored many films without credit, including The Godfather (1972) and Marathon Man (1976).
“THE PRO”: Warren Beatty (b. 1937) is the only person in Oscar history to be nominated in four categories for a single film — Best Picture (given to producers), Actor, Director, and Screenplay — a feat he managed twice: first, for the comic fantasy Heaven Can Wait (1978), then again for the epic drama Reds (1981), perhaps the only movie to ever attempt an understanding of the American Left and its origins.Best friend and next door neighbor Jack Nicholson calls him “The Pro.” Also recommended: superb performances in McCabe & Mrs. Miller (1971) and Bugsy (1991, as Bugsy Siegel); pet project Bulworth (1998), one of the most astute political films ever made in the U.S.
FICTION VS. REALITY: The real Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker, it has been monotonously noted for forty years, were not as attractive as Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway. Neither is anyone else in the film for that matter.
But Bonnie and Clyde were not un-attractive. They were average-looking, poor white trash born into stricken, desperate times, but they were huge celebrities in their day and their lives remain cloaked in legend and contradictory accounts, despite the dozens of books written about them since 1968. Depending on the source, they were wanted for twelve or thirteen murders, all of which were likely perpetrated by Clyde. The majority of victims were police officers, but at least three were unlucky citizens.
The film’s shoot-outs in Joplin and the Platte City motel are reasonably close to what happened, as is the final ambush. The character of C.W. is an obvious composite of two or three Barrow gang members; Blanche Barrow is a complete invention, except in name. The real Frank Hamer (that’s Hay-mer) was a steely-eyed, professional man-hunter hired by the Governor of Texas to track down the duo; it only took him three months.
There was no legal justification for killing Bonnie, which is still a source of some controversy. Her family refused to bury her next to Clyde.
EARLIER EDITIONS: the first fictional treatment of Bonnie and Clyde’s story was Edward Anderson’s pulp novel Thieves Like Us (1937), which was made into a film twice — in 1949 with the title They Live By Night, and again in 1974 with its original title, as one of Robert Altman’s more accessible movies. Other films inspired by the pair: Fritz Lang’s excellent You Only Live Once (1937) with Henry Fonda, and Joseph H. Lewis’ outstanding, low-budget exploitation flick, Gun Crazy (1949).
THE DVD: One of Warner Home Video’s no-frills releases, offering nothing beyond an excellent transfer of the movie, which is all anyone really needs most of the time. The double-sided disc has both widescreen and “full screen” options. It retails for $19.99, but is available many places for less, including DVD Planet
WHAT OTHERS HAVE SAID:
“This blending of farce with brutal killings is as pointless as it is lacking in taste, since it makes no valid commentary upon the already travestied truth. And it leaves an astonished critic wondering just what purpose Mr. Penn and Mr. Beatty think they serve with this strangely antique, sentimental claptrap…” — Bosley Crowther, The New York Times, 1967
“Our experience as we watch (Bonnie and Clyde) has some connection with the way we reacted to movies in childhood: with how we came to love them and to feel they were ours — not an art that we learned over the years to appreciate but simply and immediately ours.” — Pauline Kael, The New Yorker, 1967
“When I saw it, I had been a film critic for less than six months, and it was the first masterpiece I had seen on the job. I felt an exhilaration beyond describing. I did not suspect how long it would be between such experiences, but at least I learned they were possible.” — Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times, 2002
CLASSICS RECENTLY RELEASED ON DVD:
Aficionados of wit, grace and ineffable charm will want all of the five-disc Astaire & Rogers Collection, Vol. 1, a boxed-set guaranteed to cure any cynicism that ails you.
From Criterion: Robert Bresson’s Au hasard Balthazar (1966), a beautiful film tracing the life of a donkey passed from owner to owner; plus…
Jean Renoir’s Boudu Saved From Drowning (1932), the original film upon which Paul Mazursky based his inferior Down and Out in Beverly Hills (1986); and Preston Sturges’ marvelous late comedy Unfaithfully Yours (1948), in which Rex Harrison fantasizes about killing his (possibly) straying wife.
COMING SOON (OR, THIS IS WHAT DVD IS FOR):
August 30: New Yorker Video finally releases Weekend (1967, a.k.a. Week-end). The ultimate Godard blow-out, his 8 ½, an infuriating, hilarious, cruelly misanthropic satire of filmmaking and capitalism on the brink, and the last of his essays to make a modicum of sense;
September: a two-disc To Kill a Mockingbird (1962) from Universal, and a four(!)-disc Ben-Hur (1959) from Warner Home Video, which includes the complete 1925 silent version of Judah Ben-Hur’s quest for meaning through chariot racing;
October: a three-disc The Wizard of Oz (1939), also from Warner HV, with a music-only track and a series of early silent shorts based on L. Frank Baum’s tales;
And last but not least:
November: the looks-to-be-brilliant, two-disc King Kong (1933) from Turner, with a commentary by FX legend Ray Harryhausen and a seven-part making-of documentary by Peter Jackson (yes, that Peter Jackson).
Barker’s Classics #6 was Vertigo
