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What's the Big Deal?: Bonnie and Clyde (1967)

Bonnie and Clyde wasn't the first movie to romanticize killers. It wasn't even the first movie about Bonnie and Clyde. But clearly it did something to establish itself as a Big Deal. Get out your gun and hold it in a suggestive manner, because we're going to investigate.

The praise: It was nominated for 10 Academy Awards, including best picture, director, and screenplay. It won two Oscars, for supporting actress (Estelle Parsons) and cinematography. It also earned seven Golden Globe nominations, a Grammy nomination (for its musical score), and awards from the National Society of Film Critics, New York Film Critics Circle, and the Writers Guild of America. It came in at No. 27 on the American Film Institute's 1998 list of best American movies ever made, and at No. 42 on the 2007 revised list. (It ranked No. 5 on the AFI's list of best gangster films.)

The context: The early 1930s were a heyday for gangster pictures. Not coincidentally, they were also a heyday for gangsters. But once Dillinger, Capone, Bonnie and Clyde, Pretty Boy Floyd, and the rest were eliminated -- and once the Production Code started cracking down on depictions of crime in Hollywood movies -- the trend of making films based on their exploits subsided, slinking to the background as the studios moved on to other genres.

In 1967, Bonnie and Clyde brought the "true crime" movie back into vogue, modernized with graphic violence and frank sexual discussions. ("Graphic" and "frank" for the '60s, that is. By 2010 standards, the violence would barely warrant an R rating, and the sex is comfortably PG-13.) There hadn't been a rise in real-life gangster-style bank robberies. Instead, the film was the byproduct of four big things happening all at once in America:

1. The Vietnam War was happening. OK, it wasn't happening "in America," but images from it were being broadcast on the TV news every night. It's often pointed out that Vietnam was the first American war to enter people's living rooms, the first one we were able to watch as it happened. It can hardly be overstated how profound an effect this had. Where previous conflicts had occurred thousands of miles away and were conveyed to us primarily in newsreels or still photos, Vietnam was all up in America's grill.

2. America was getting more violent in general. The war had something to do with this, but so did the Civil Rights movement, the disillusionment of the Baby Boomer generation, and other factors. Roger Ebert, who'd been a film critic for only six months when he reviewed Bonnie and Clyde, saw its graphic violence as a sobering and necessary reminder: "We are living in a period when newscasts refer casually to 'waves' of mass murders, [serial killer] Richard Speck's photograph is sold on posters in Old Town and snipers in Newark pose for Life magazine.... Violence takes on an unreal quality." There'd been riots in Philadelphia in 1964, Los Angeles in 1965, Cleveland in 1966. When Ebert reviewed Bonnie and Clyde, he'd just seen riots in Detroit, Tampa, Buffalo, and Newark, to name only a few. There were more to come. It was the "summer of love." Things were crazy, man.

3. The Hollywood Production Code was falling apart. Before we had the goofy rating system we have now (G, PG, R, etc.), there was the Production Code. Begun as a way for Hollywood to police itself and avoid government intervention, the Code didn't have degrees of acceptability: either your movie was approved, or it wasn't. And if it wasn't, you couldn't get most theaters to play it. Not having the Motion Picture Association of America's "certificate of approval" was akin to being rated NC-17 today. But by the 1960s, that was beginning to change. Films like Some Like It Hot (1959) were being released without Code approval and becoming box-office hits anyway, weakening the Code's power. The MPAA's occasional exceptions to the Code further undermined its authority. (Look, are we sticking to this Code, or aren't we?) Filmmakers started getting bolder. Bonnie and Clyde was "approved" despite its sex and violence, perhaps signifying that the Code had lost all meaning. It was scrapped shortly thereafter, replaced in November 1968 with a rating system close to the one we have now.

Warren Beatty's movie career had gotten off to a great start with Splendor in the Grass, in 1961, but had subsequently stalled. Frustrated and eager to take control, he became a producer, with Bonnie and Clyde as his first project. To direct it, Beatty hired Arthur Penn (The Miracle Worker), whom he'd worked with on Mickey One in 1965. Though Penn was 45, he had a feel for what America's youth culture was into. Mickey One was heavily influenced by New Wave; 1966's The Chase addressed racism and violence; and he would later make Alice's Restaurant (1969), about the counter-culture hippie movement.

What it influenced: To hear some people tell it, Bonnie and Clyde influenced just about everything. "It was the first modern American film," wrote critic Patrick Goldstein on the occasion of the movie's 30th anniversary, "a daring, disturbing tragicomedy that ushered in a giddy, golden era of Hollywood movies." More than one commentator has divided Hollywood into two epochs: before Bonnie and Clyde, and after.

This film, along with The Graduate and Easy Rider, made huge money by addressing young people in their own terms. Bonnie and Clyde were young and beautiful, romantically fleeing society's strictures, eventually dying together in a ballet of gunfire. The movie served as a metaphor for whatever angry Americans were angry about. Arthur Penn told the French film magazine Cahiers du Cinema that a group of black audience members ("negroes," in those days) "completely identified" with the movie. "They said: 'This is the way; that's the way to go, baby. Those cats were all right.'... In a certain sense the American negro has the same kind of attitude of 'I have nothing more to lose' that was true during the Depression for Bonnie and Clyde.... He really is at the point of revolution -- it's rebellion, not riot." (Quoted in Arthur Penn's Bonnie and Clyde, ed. Lester Friedman, p. 84.)

The screenwriters later said, "Critics and interviewers have told us that Bonnie and Clyde is really about Vietnam, really about police brutality, really about Lee Harvey Oswald, really about Watts. After a while, we took to shrugging and saying, 'If you think so.'"

The movie clearly struck a chord with audiences. Bonnie and Clyde's fashion choices -- fedoras and double-breasted suits for him, berets and long skirts for her -- became popular. The banjo-hillbilly theme song, "Foggy Mountain Breakdown," by Flatt and Scruggs, became a top 10 hit, 18 years after it was first recorded. (That's right: a film set in the early 1930s uses a song from 1949.) New songs about the doomed duo were recorded by Merle Haggard, Susan Brodie, Mel Torme, and even the real Bonnie's sister, Billie Jean Parker. David A. Cook's A History of Narrative Film notes that "you could even buy transparent decals with which to simulate bullet holes on the windshield of your car in imitation of a famous shot from the film" (p. 848).

Filmmakers also fell under the movie's spell. Numerous low-budget ripoffs appeared, including one called Boxcar Bertha (1972), produced by prolific schlockmeister Roger Corman and directed by a young Martin Scorsese. Francis Ford Coppola said the death of Sonny in The Godfather was directly inspired by the finale of Bonnie and Clyde. Whenever ordinary people, whether they're lovers or friends, get caught up in a cycle of violence and flee the law --

Thelma & LouiseTrue Romance

, for instance -- you can thank Bonnie and Clyde. Quentin Tarantino might not exist at all if it weren't for this movie. You can see the influence in his screenplays for True Romance and Natural Born Killers, not to mention his general fondness for stylized violence. (Like Natural Born Killers, Bonnie and Clyde was derided by many for making heroes out of killers.)

More broadly, Bonnie and Clyde (and, to a lesser extent, Sam Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch, two years later) established a new way to shoot violent scenes: with fast editing and slow-motion. You probably can't count how many movies you've seen that switch to slo-mo when an important character gets gunned down. If Bonnie and Clyde didn't invent that, it certainly popularized it. As for fast editing, the average shot in Bonnie and Clyde is less than 4 seconds long -- close to what's typical now in Hollywood. In 1967, something like 6 to 10 seconds was a common average shot length. Movies have gotten faster, in other words, and Bonnie and Clyde helped nudged them in that direction.

In 1998, Roger Ebert wrote: "Today, the freshness of Bonnie and Clyde has been absorbed in countless other films, and it's hard to see how fresh and original it felt in 1967 -- just as the impact of Citizen Kane, in 1941, may not be obvious to those raised in the shadow of its influence."

The movie's aftereffects are even more astonishing when you realize they almost didn't happen. Warner Bros., thinking it had a turkey on its hands, sent it to drive-ins and second-run theaters in August 1967. Variety gave it a lukewarm review. The New York Times' Bosley Crowther, then the most senior and authoritative film critic in America, HATED it. HATED HATED HATED it. He loathed Bonnie and Clyde with the passion of a thousand suns. He 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."

Crowther was not alone in disliking the film, but it's doubtful anyone hated it as passionately and vociferously as he did. When his review in the Times drew ire from readers who felt he'd missed the boat, he responded by savaging the film some more. He would drop scathing references to it in reviews of other movies. It became a crusade for him, decrying what he saw as wanton, senseless violence, holding up Bonnie and Clyde as the poster child for such excess. It got to the point where other critics who panned the film were afraid they'd be lumped in with Crowther simply because some of their opinions overlapped.

In accordance with the no-confidence release pattern and the bad reviews, the film didn't make any money. But the audiences who'd caught it were entranced. It had an ardent defender in the critic Pauline Kael. Joseph Morgenstern, writing for Newsweek, ripped it apart -- and then, a week later, wrote a second review retracting the first. Word began to spread. Warner Bros. re-released it a couple months later, this time to great acclaim and box-office success. By the end of 1967, it was one of the most popular films of the year. Time magazine, which previously had panned it, put it on the cover of a December issue.

Meanwhile, a 25-year-old fellow named Roger Ebert was starting to make a name for himself. He'd been the film critic at the Chicago Sun-Times for just six months when he reviewed Bonnie and Clyde. Here's what he said:

This is pretty clearly the best American film of the year. It is also a landmark. Years from now it is quite possible that Bonnie and Clyde will be seen as the definitive film of the 1960s, showing with sadness, humor and unforgiving detail what one society had come to. The fact that the story is set 35 years ago doesn't mean a thing. It had to be set sometime. But it was made now and it's about us.

That's the sort of tribute you'd expect to see years later, maybe in the booklet for a special-edition DVD, written with the assistance of hindsight. But no: Ebert said it then, in 1967. Maybe he made a lot of bold predictions in those days, and maybe they were all wrong except this one. I don't know. The fact that he nailed this one at the same time Crowther was blowing it makes for an interesting confluence of events, two careers passing each other as they head in opposite directions.

What to look for: The outlaws were popularly known as "Bonnie and Clyde" already, but there's another good reason Bonnie's name comes first: It's really her story. She's the first person we see -- in tight close-up, bored, peering through the slats of her bed frame like prison bars -- and it's her emotions that fuel the action.

She and Clyde are madly in love. Like doomed lovers in other stories, they are frequently the only two characters. The film is 15 minutes old before anyone else has a speaking part. Throughout their crime spree, Bonnie is most exasperated by the presence of other people (Clyde's brother and sister-in-law, a getaway driver, etc.). She wants to be alone with him.

The first half of the film is generally light, often funny. Being an outlaw is fun, it seems to say. Look how jolly this is! It's in the second half that things start to get serious. Notice the cue: When Bonnie says she misses her mother, we hear plaintive strings on the soundtrack. It's the first time the musical score has used anything other than jaunty banjo ditties.

Clyde's first kill involves shooting a man in the eye. Watch how this is referenced at the end, when Clyde's doom is imminent.

For a movie that's "only" about a couple of outlaws, it hits on several larger themes. Gender roles, class struggles, and fractured families are an issue. There's also a populist, anti-bank streak, depicted without much subtlety. (Clyde unloads his gun into a "foreclosed" sign.)

Further reading: Lawrence L. Murray wrote a terrific essay about the film's production, release, and controversy, entitled "Hollywood, Nihilism, and the Youth Culture of the Sixties: Bonnie and Clyde." It was published in a book called American History/American Film (ed. John O'Connor and Martin Jackson), and you can download a PDF of the article here.

Mary Elizabeth Strunk's 2007 essay in American Studies Journal compares the film to the 1968 docudrama The Other Side of Bonnie and Clyde, and offers much insight on both films.

Here is Patrick Goldstein's piece from the Los Angeles Times, which includes interviews with Beatty, Penn, and other principals on the film's 30th anniversary.

Don't forget Roger Ebert's 1967 review and his 1998 retrospective.

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Eric D. Snider (website) believes that if robbing banks is outlawed, then only outlaws will rob banks.

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