Bonnie and Clyde (1967) - film review

In the early 1930s, America is in the grip of the Great Depression.  Life is hard, but Clyde Barrow, a young man who has recently been released from prison, manages to scrape along by holding up the odd store and gas station.  He is about to steal a car when its owner’s daughter, Bonnie Parker, appears and makes a marked impression on him.  A waitress in a dull town, Bonnie has an appetite for adventure and decides to tag along with the fanciable Clyde.  After a few amateurish hold-ups, the couple team up with Clyde’s brother, Buck, and a young gas station attendant, Moss, to make a formidable gang.  In the course of a bank robbery, Clyde shoots a bank employee dead and the gang immediately become public enemy number one.   Relentlessly pursued by Texas Ranger Frank Hamer, the outlaws go on the run, leaving a trail of mayhem and murder wherever they go.  Although she knows full well where this mad adventure will end, Bonnie remains devotedly attached to Clyde and refuses to leave him.  Brief though their real-life coupling was, the names Bonnie and Clyde will be tied together forever...

No film captures the mood of America in the late 1960s better, nor shows the emergence of a vociferous counter-culture more vividly, than this stylish revisionist gangster film.  This was the film which redefined American cinema at a momentous time in the country’s history and heralded the start of a brief but glorious period in Hollywood when art took precedence over profit.  With its strident anti-authoritarian, anti-establishment tone, Bonnie and Clyde provided a rallying cry for all those who had grown disillusioned with the failings of the country’s institutions, in particular the government, and helped to galvanise opposition to the Vietnam War.

At the time of its release, Bonnie and Clyde was a hugely controversial film, partly because it was seen to glamorise gangsterism in a way that many thought was immoral, but also because of its extreme portrayal of violence.  No previous gangster film had ever been this bloody nor shown the consequences of gangsterism with as much visceral realism.  The film’s shock ending – the slow motion slaughter of the principal protagonists – was one of the most horrific sequences in film history, although its impact today is diminished by the fact that it has been endlessly copied ever since.  

Yet, whilst Bonnie and Clyde courted considerable controversy, it was a major commercial success.  Taking 23 million dollars at the box office, this was to be Warner Brothers’ second biggest success at the time, after My Fair Lady.  Critical reaction was generally positive and the film was nominated for nine Oscars, although it secured wins in just two categories: Best Supporting Actress (Estelle Parsons) and Best Cinematography.  The film provided a welcome boost to the acting career of Warren Beatty (who was originally reluctant to play the lead role in a film that he was producing) and made the then-unknown Faye Dunaway into an overnight star.  Gene Wilder made his screen debut in this film.

The history of Bonnie and Clyde is almost as interesting and improbable as the story it tells.  At the outset, the producers were determined that the film would be directed by one of the directors of the French New Wave, in an attempt to breathe new life into American cinema and presumably unleash an equivalent nouvelle vague in Hollywood.  François Truffaut was originally considered for the job, but he had already committed himself to making an adaptation of the Ray Bradbury novel Fahrenheit 451.  Jean-Luc Godard was then approached to direct the film, but some of the ideas he came up with frightened the film’s backers so much that he was quickly dropped.  In the end, the directing job went to an American, Arthur Penn, on the strength of his earlier work, notably The Miracle Worker (1962).

Thanks to the sterling efforts of Arthur Penn and his talented team of writers, actors and technicians, Bonnie and Clyde achieved what it set out to do, which was to reinvigorate American cinema and provide audiences with a whole new viewing experience.  The romanticised account of the exploits of a notorious gang is less important than the artistry that went into the film.  Jumping frenetically between wildly different genre types - one minute gritty gangster film, the next a Keystone Kops style farce, then a brief romantic interlude, etc. – was something that was copied successfully from the work of the French New Wave directors, along with their editing and cinematographic techniques.

It is the wild switches in mood and style that make the drama feel more real, more three-dimensional, and prevent the spectator from anticipating just where the film is going.  The reason why Bonnie and Clyde is so enjoyable to watch, and why it still has so much impact, is because it constantly takes us by surprise.  There is as much comedy and poetry in this film as there is gory violence, as much humanity as vicious gun-blazing thuggery.  But what is most fascinating about this film is how well it reflects America in the late 1960s – you can almost smell the spirit of rebellion that was in the air when the film was first seen.

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