This is part of a series of articles reviewing the American Film Institute's Top 100 Films, as unveiled in 2007. Why am I doing this? Because the damned cinemas were closed and I had to review something, and now I can't stop until I finish.
(M) ★★★★★
Director: Arthur Penn.
Cast: Warren Beatty, Faye Dunaway, Michael J. Pollard, Gene Hackman, Estelle Parsons, Denver Pyle, Dub Taylor, Gene Wilder, Evans Evans.
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| "Could you please direct us to the nearest Bunnings?" |
There is Hollywood before Bonnie & Clyde, and Hollywood after Bonnie & Clyde.
As Peter Biskind puts it in his salacious yet fascinating book Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, "in 1967, two movies, Bonnie & Clyde and The Graduate, sent tremors through the industry".
These two films helped usher in the New Hollywood movement, which put power in the hands of directors like never before, providing a fertile creative field that yielded everything from The Godfather and Star Wars to Annie Hall and Taxi Driver. Bonnie & Clyde showed that the studios were clueless, audiences were restless, and revolution was necessary. The Swingin' '60s and the Summer Of Love blew the winds of change through politics, society, sex and music, and cinema was not going to escape those breezes unruffled.
Bonnie & Clyde, which mythologised the lives of Depression-era bankrobber Clyde Barrow (Beatty) and Bonnie Parker (Dunaway), was buried on release by Warner Bros in the US. They dumped it onto very few screens, largely in regional areas, and as a result it grossed just US$2.5 million in the five months of 1967 that it was in release. Unlike its protagonists, the movie died a quiet death in America, despite the murmurings of a new wave of critics led by Pauline Kael, calling its French influences, offbeat humour, tonal shifts, sharp editing, and jolting violence a revelation. But the old guard was having nothing of it - The New York Times' Bosley Crowther called it "a cheap piece of bald-faced slapstick" and labelled Bonnie and Clyde a "sleazy, moronic pair".
Meanwhile in the UK, Bonnie & Clyde was killing it with critics and audiences alike. Dunaway's beret-toting Bonnie became a fashion icon, and the UK reviewers, perhaps by virtue of being closer to France and spotting the influence, acclaimed the film. By December, after the film had finished its American cinema run, Time had Dunaway on the front cover and was calling Bonnie & Clyde "film of the year", despite Time's reviewer having scorned the film months earlier.
The buzz grew around the film, leading to a couple of unprecedented things happening. Firstly, some critics recanted their negative reviews upon a repeated viewing and declared it a modern classic. And secondly, under threat of legal action from producer/star Beatty, Warner Bros put the movie back into cinemas - on the very day the film received 10 Oscar nominations coincidentally. In 1968, Bonnie & Clyde took in US$16.5m at the US box office - more than five times what it made in its initial release - and won two Oscars (Best Supporting Actress for Parsons and Best Cinematography for Burnett Guffey).
But more importantly, it was a watershed, stylistically and culturally. Taking advantage of the death of the old Hayes Production Code and inadvertently tapping into the zeitgeist, Bonnie & Clyde succeeded in "reversing the conventional moral polarities", Biskind wrote.
"The bad guys in the film were traditional authority figures: parents, sheriffs," Biskind said. "Bonnie & Clyde legitimised violence against the establishment, the same violence that seethed in the hearts and minds of hundreds of thousands of frustrated opponents of the Vietnam War."
And then there's the "somewhat crude... message of sexual liberation" within the film. "Clyde's gun does what his dick can't, and when his dick can, there's nothing left for his gun to do, so he dies," wrote Biskind, calling it a pretty good example of the motto of the time: Make Love, Not War.
Adding into this was a flip of typical gender ideals - Bonnie wants sex, and the dashingly handsome Clyde can't deliver. This was downright ground-breaking at the time, and would still be considered unusual in a mainstream Hollywood movie now for the way it challenges the dramatic status quo. But further fueling the sexual fires was the fact that when Bonnie and Clyde finally consummate their relationship, they're gunned down by the authority figures. The puritanical society is frowning upon their sexual liberation in the most forceful way possible.
This liberating sex and shocking violence took place against a backdrop of excellent production design and a banjo-driven score that helped root the film in its era. It opens with real photos that eventually transition into pictures of Dunaway and Beatty in character - a neat subliminal trick to plant the audience in the 1930s. While the film would ultimately be criticised for its lack of historical veracity, audiences didn't care because it felt real. It certainly conjured the desperation and insanity of the Great Depression, which is to the credit of Penn and his production team.
It's all there in the script by David Newman and Robert Benton, even the French New Wave influences (they approached François Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard to direct at various stages). While Robert Towne, Beatty and Penn all added their own twists, Newman and Benton's script (which was rejected all over Hollywood) had at its essence the anti-authoritarianism, overt sexuality, distinctive violence, and media sensationalism that made the film such a landmark, as well as the tonal shifts that helped make it so fresh, yet so French.
Penn's direction has also been rightly lauded, particularly for the way he balances the disparate parts. The film is brutal at times, yet oddly funny - Bonnie and Clyde's first attempts at robbing a bank are comedic, right up until Clyde shoots a pursuing bank manager in the face in an explosion of blood. It's desolately bleak in places, yet impossibly sexy in others, and Penn makes it all work.
It's not perfect though. There are awkward edits, moments of poor focus, terrible rear projection, shaky long zooms, and even a bit where a cameraman almost jumps out of the way during a car chase before holding his nerve. Yet elsewhere, Penn conjures up masterpieces - shots of Buck (Hackman), laying bleeding in the headlights, are reminiscent of renaissance paintings, while a final scene with Buck's wife Blanche (Parsons) is composed like Whistler's Mother. You could argue it's all part of the French New Wave's realism bleeding into the classic Americana of the piece.
Similarly contradictory are the characters, who are brought to life by a stellar cast. Parsons won the Oscar, Hackman is amazing, Wilder steals his scene like a true bank robber, but it's Dunaway who is the standout. She's magnetic in the opening scenes, toying with Clyde, comfortable in her own sexiness, yet desperate for his affection and willing to let Clyde control her. She's determined yet fragile. In a later scene when she reconnects with her family, you can see the realisation that she has no future wash over Dunaway's face and it's stunning.
In that same scene, Beatty plays Clyde like a dork, dying to impress. Elsewhere, he's a mixture of perfectly cool and idiotic man-child. Together, Beatty and Dunaway are perfect - a mess of fascinating contradictions, drawn together by some inexplicable magnetism that somehow totally makes sense.
R. Barton Palmer, writing in 1001 Movies You Must See..., describes Bonnie & Clyde as "a powerfully ambiguous statement about the place of violence and the individual in American society". It also has less ambiguous things to say about the media, the public, and their shared love of sensationalism, themes that would be updated and explored more fully in the debt-owing Natural Born Killers three decades later.
Bonnie & Clyde is a rare film, lauded as much for its entertainment value (it's great fun) as its stylistic virtues. Yet it's also something more - its historical importance as a signpost in Hollywood's evolution is just as significant. As Palmer put it, "the film's popular and critical success showed the Hollywood establishment, struggling to reconnect with its national audience, that pictures combining European stylisation and seriousness with traditional American themes could be successful".
It's debatable how much of Biskind's Easy Riders, Raging Bulls is true, but he's not wrong about the significance of Bonnie & Clyde.
"It says 'fuck you' not only to a generation of Americans who were on the wrong side of the generation gap, the wrong side of the war in Vietnam, but also a generation of Motion Picture Academy members that had hoped to go quietly, with dignity. Bonnie & Clyde was a movement movie; like The Graduate, young audiences recognised that it was 'theirs'."
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