Bonnie and Clyde

Screenwriters David Newman and Robert Benton (with an uncredited Robert Towne helping out) say in the disc's accompanying documentary that they were striving to produce a kind of New Wave realism in their story, which accounts for all the bloodshed and personal character interaction. However, I'm not sure the screenwriters expected director Arthur Penn ("Little Big Man," "Alice's Restaurant") to inject as much humor into the story as he did. Bonnie and Clyde's first few bumbling attempts at crime are more comic than serious. Then, as the plot proceeds, the violence becomes more intense and the gun battles become more severe.

The Academy nominated "Bonnie and Clyde" for practically every award they could offer, with the aforementioned Ms. Parsons winning for Best Supporting Actress and Burnett Guffey winning for Best Cinematography. Surely, the look of the film is almost as important as its violence, humor, and characters. Guffey recreates the feel and appearance of Depression Era Texas, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Missouri, and Louisiana in his depiction of the lonely countryside, the hollow desolation, the dispirited society, and the generally broken tenor of the times, helped in no small measure by Flatt and Scruggs's "Foggie Mountain Breakdown" playing in the background.

"Bonnie and Clyde" whizzes by in a compact 111 minutes, while carrying an image of people and places that is hard to forget. If you haven't seen the film, it's worth a look. If you haven't seen it in quite a while, it's worth a revisit.

Video:
Warner Bros. engineers remastered the video from restored original film elements, and the results in this 1080-resolution VC-1 transfer are excellent, especially for a movie some forty years old. In fact, the picture quality is ofttimes downright gorgeous. Colors are vivid, yet never overdone, just realistic. Noise, dirt, halos, artifacts of any kind are absent to my eye. Grain appears limited to that which was undoubtedly inherent to the print, most evident in outdoor location footage. Some shots are a bit soft, true, but unlike the SD edition where I thought facial hues were a touch too dark and glassy on occasion, here the hues seem entirely natural. Black levels are strong, too, without obscuring inner detail, and, as expected, object delineation is reasonably sharp.

Audio:
I wasn't very impressed with the standard-definition disc's Dolby Digital 1.0 processing, which brought out a pinched, nasal quality in the voices, with a touch of background noise thrown in at higher volume. However, that does not appear to be the case with the HD DVDM edition, where the Dolby Digital Plus 1.0 seems smoother and more lifelike. Midrange clarity remains good, and the dialogue is easy to understand. The overall sound has good dynamic impact, too, and a clean delivery, but not a lot of range, and, of course, no surround info.

Extras:
The HD DVD includes all of the extra material contained on WB's 40th-anniversary, two-disc special SD edition. Here, you'll find a History Channel documentary, "Love and Death: The Story of Bonnie and Clyde," forty-three minutes, that provides details on the real-life outlaws. Next, there is the commemorative documentary, "Revolution: The Making of Bonnie and Clyde," sixty-four minutes and divided into several chapters. Warren Beatty hosts it, and it includes segments on just about every aspect of the filmmaking. Interestingly, it tells us that initially the screenwriters wanted French New Wave director Francois Truffaut to helm the project, but he was busy with another commitment, so they brought in Arthur Penn. They had wanted Truffaut because they had attempted a kind of New Wave naturalism in the script, which they figured a French director could appreciate. Then, there is a seven-minute segment on Beatty doing wardrobe tests; and two deleted scenes, minus sound, lasting about five minutes.

The extras wrap up with thirty-five scene selections but no printed chapter index; a teaser and a theatrical trailer; English as the only spoken language; English, French, Spanish, and Korean subtitles; and English captions for the hearing impaired.

As always on one of their HD DVDs, Warners provide pop-up menus, book marking, a zoom-and-pan feature, a meter for elapsed time, and, in this instance, some extremely attractive packaging. Instead of a usual Elite Red HD case, this HD DVD is enclosed in a book--an actual book, which Warners call a "Digibook," thirty-four-pages, hardbound, the size of a common HD DVD case, with a plastic Digipak-style back cover for the disc. The full-color book, with plenty of photographs, highlights the filmmakers and the filmmaking. First-rate.

Parting Thoughts:
"Bonnie and Clyde" may seem a bit tame compared to today's shoot-'em-ups, but it still carries a punch, skillfully combining violence and humor in equal measure. More important, though, you'll get to know these characters and appreciate them, whether they represent the actual, historical figures being another question altogether. The movie weathers the test of time and comes up brilliantly in its high-definition edition.

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