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| Faye Dunaway and Warren Beatty in their iconographic postures and clothes, posing for Arthur Penn's Bonnie and Clyde |
QUICK REVIEW:
Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker are young and aimless in Texas in the doldrums of 1931's Depression-era US, but they find each other and a new kind of freedom, based on robbing banks.
Bonnie and Clyde is a heist-road movie-drama-romance based on historical figures. It is a very entertaining, albeit perhaps a bit overrated, classic, first and foremost because it is also very funny, which it seems to be with a charming ease. One example from the film would be Clyde's brother Buck's cow-joke. Often the film blends comedy and crass violence for the audience to digest with some ambiguity. Gene Hackman (The French Connection (1971)) was Oscar-nominated in the part as Buck, and Gene Wilder gets his film-debut in the film in a supporting role.
Warren Beatty (Reds (1981)) produced the film, budding heads with then studio boss Jack Warner again and again in the process, but ultimately Beatty was the biggest winner; his contract gave him 40 % of the profits of the film, which made him a rich man. He also happens to be great in the film.
Faye Dunaway (Chinatown (1974)) is beautiful and lost as Bonnie, and was also Oscar-nominated, as was Beatty - twice, - both as producer and actor. Bonnie and Clyde was nominated 4 times more, and additionally won for cinematography (Burnett Guffey (Birdman of Alcatraz (1962))) and Best Supporting Actress, Estelle Parsons (Don't Drink the Water (1969)).
Beatty and Dunaway's scenes together are wonderful. The language and the images of Bonnie and Clyde contribute to its distinguished magic. It is a good, oft cited and distinctive film.
Still, in the outlaw-couple genre, I find that both Terrence Malick's Badlands (1973) and David Lynch's Wild at Heart (1990) are greater films.
The film was very trend-setting, and an indicator for the arrival of the New Hollywood-era with directors like Steven Spielberg, Brian De Palma, Francis Ford Coppola, George Lucas, William Friedkin and Martin Scorsese. It also marked a change in the depiction of violence in American cinema; a change for the more realistic and explicit.
Bonnie and Clyde is heavily influenced by the French New Wave, and the direction of the film was, in fact, offered to both François Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard, the two most famous directors of the French New Wave. They both turned the job down, for different reasons, (Godard being over-all too suspicious and sour at Hollywood, and Truffaut opting for his Fahrenheit 451 (1966) instead.)
Eventual director of the film, Arthur Penn was also nominated for his job, as he was for his The Miracle Worker (1962) and Alice's Restaurant (1969). He never won the statuette.
The film and story of Bonnie and Clyde continues to draw fascination and new creative blood: Bonnie and Clyde: Dead and Alive (2013) a two-part A&E TV movie with Emile Hirsch and Holliday Grainger has just aired on three US networks simultaneously to a successful 9.8 mil. audiences.
SPOILER To those who have seen Bonnie and Clyde and wondered at Clyde's sexual problem in the film, it was originally the idea for the character to be bisexual, but for reasons of censorship and possibly Beatty being against the idea, Clyde, in the film, is instead thought to be impotent.
Watch the original trailer here
Budget: 2.5 mil. $
Box office: 70 mil. $
= Enormous hit
What do you think of Bonnie and Clyde?
If you saw the new TV-movie, how was it?
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