...still carries a punch, skillfully combining violence and humor in equal measure.
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HD DVD may be breathing its last gasps, but it ain't dead yet. Not when we get superdeluxe, special-edition packages like this one from Warner Bros. But let's take first things first:
"We rob banks."
To say that director Arthur Penn's "Bonnie and Clyde" was a landmark film in 1967 would be something of an understatement. It set a new tone for violence in movies, it deftly combined action and humor, and it predated "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid" by several years as a kind of "buddy" picture. In these regards, I can't think of many other releases that have equaled "Bonnie and Clyde" in the past four decades.
The prologue tells us that Clyde Barrow (played by Warren Beatty) was born to sharecroppers, became a petty thief early on, and as the story begins in 1931 had just served two years in a Texas state penitentiary for armed robbery. He got out early for good behavior. Bonnie Parker (Faye Dunaway) was born in 1910 in Rowena, Texas, and by 1931 was working as a waitress in a West Dallas cafe. The pair meet when Clyde tries to steal Bonnie's momma's car. Unsuccessfully.
But it's love at first sight. Or infatuation. Or mutual need. She wants to escape her dismal life, and he wants somebody to impress with his guns and daring. Two minutes later, they are robbing a grocery store and making their getaway together as though they had known each other all their lives.
The pair enlist a witless gas-station attendant, C.W. Moss (Michael J. Pollard), as their getaway driver and mechanic as well as persuade Clyde's hell-raising brother, Buck (Gene Hackman), and Buck's wife, Blanche (Estelle Parsons), a preacher's daughter, to join up with them. Together they form the Barrow gang, robbing banks and running from the police for two-and-a-half years.
The setting is the time of the Great Depression, when bank foreclosures, unemployment, and widespread poverty made outlaws like Bonnie and Clyde, John Dillinger, Al Capone, Pretty Boy Floyd, and the rest of their ilk popular celebrities to the common folk, who admired their sticking it to the bosses and banks and people of "authority." Bonnie and Clyde played to the masses by having their pictures taken in various dramatic and outlandish poses, like Bonnie with a cigar in her mouth and a Tommy gun in her hands, pictures that appeared on the front pages of newspapers all over the country and helped turn them into folk heroes.
The movie never shirks from violence or the sight of blood, and, indeed, it is the story's bloody ending that continues to elicit shock even today. This was trendsetting business in 1967, when up until that time most actors died in movies by simply falling over, not being splattered with gore. Yet, it is not just the new outlook on brutal reality that helped make "Bonnie and Clyde" a classic. It's the combining of humor and humanity with the brutal action we see in the picture.
Turning two murderous criminals into likeable characters, however, also earned the movie a few demerits from critics of the time. Bosley Crowther of the New York Times wrote, "It is a cheap piece of bald-faced slapstick comedy that treats the hideous depredations of that sleazy, moronic pair as though they were as full of fun and frolic as the jazz-age cutups in 'Thoroughly Modern Millie.'" Well, to each his own. Surely, no one is going to take this movie for a genuine piece of documented history. It is a movie, pure and simple. You accept it as such. A couple of years later, George Roy Hill would use the same techniques to fashion "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid," only Hill would add even more humor. The gimmick worked again.
Beatty plays Clyde as a charming rogue, a movie-star handsome drifter with a penchant for earning money the easiest way possible--by stealing it. Was the real Clyde Barrow as captivating and happy-go-lucky as he's portrayed here? Probably not. Does it matter? Certainly not. Besides, Beatty shows us Clyde's tempestuous side, too, his anger and his frustration. What's more, the movie raises the question of whether Clyde's fascination with guns had anything to do with his sexual inadequacies. Not that the film comes right and tells us that Clyde was sexually impotent, but it comes close, hinting later that it had more to do with psychological matters. The movie leaves the subject rather vague.
Dunaway plays Bonnie in a less colorful manner than Beatty handles Clyde. Perhaps it's the nature of the character. We don't get to know her mood swings as much as we get to know Clyde's. Bonnie isn't as temperamental as Clyde is, except when she longs to go home and realizes she can't. Still, Dunaway has some emotional range to play around with, and Bonnie comes off as a real human being, rather than a stock gangster's moll.
The others in the cast perform well, with Estelle Parsons winning an Oscar for Best Supporting Actress. However, while she does a fine job, she didn't entirely convince me the performance was Oscar-worthy. Her character's sole purpose seems to be to panic and scream as much as possible. Hackman is more persuasive as the boisterous brother, Pollard is quietly disarming, and in various supporting parts there are Denver Pyle as a determined Texas Ranger; Dub Taylor as C.W.'s father; and, surprisingly perhaps, Gene Wilder--in his first big-screen movie role--as a bewildered innocent caught up in the outlaws' trail.
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