Movie #: 135 Title: Bonnie and Clyde 1967

Rating: 8.40

Director (last): PENN (first): ARTHUR

Writer (last): (first):

One of the most important films of the 1960's for it's explicit violence and, more importantly, it's utterly subversive take on a couple of the most notorious criminals in U.S. history. Faye Dunaway plays Bonnie as a sensual, sex-starved, bored adventurist, who spots Clyde, fresh out of prison, trying to steal her mother's car, and impulsively decides to go with him. They set out on a crime spree, robbing banks, stealing cars, and shooting their way out of tight scrapes with the law. They are joined by Clyde's brother, Buck, and his wife Maye, and C.W., a mechanic. The banks are pathetically low on cash (this is during the Depression), and the gang makes a point of not stealing from the customers. They become folk heroes in the eyes of the dispossed, the farmers evicted from their land and the jobless migrants. As the film would have it, they kill reluctantly, only when it's "either him or me". They humiliate a Texas Ranger, who then makes it his life's work to apprehend them. What made this film so revolutionary, was the uninhibited admiration displayed for Bonnie and Clyde, who were, after all, bank robbers and killers. Clyde is suave and witty; Bonnie is sensitive and compassionate. We want them to succeed, to escape from the police, to get enough loot to go off somewhere and live in peace. Penn is careful to present society as fundamentally unjust. The farmer evicted from his land is presented as a paragon of hard-working virtue. Clyde offers him his gun to shoot out the eviction notice. The farmer asks if it's all right if his black hired hand takes a shot or two-- presenting an anachronism on race relations. These incidents make a subtle case for Bonnie and Clyde as social revolutionaries rather than criminals, but Penn deftly lets the reader know that there is some pointlessness to the bank robberies as well. Bonnie and Clyde see themselves as just folks. The government and the law are incomprehensible to them. Clyde claims to have cut off his own toes so he could get out of work detail (in real life, he had a fellow inmate do it) but he is parolled days afterwards. Bonnie leads a boring life as a small-town waitress until she meets Clyde (in real life, she was married). The truth is, conventional life bores them and they only feel alive when robbing banks or being chased. How much of this attitude is a reflection of the 1960's counter-culture? Isn't this the brother-in-arms of Dustin Hoffman's graduate staring incomprehensibly as his father's middle-aged business associate recommends he take the word "plastic" to heart? In this sense, the ending of the movie was prophetic: this mad impulse to live, to escape tedium and conformity, to challenge everything most people believe about law and order and good sense, is snuffed out with a hail of bullets fired by anonymous lawmen from behind a bush.

Is this movie a "gem"? No

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Added: 1968-01-01 [yyyy-mm-dd]