A modern classic returns for a contemporary audience.
The movie that prefigured the 1970s renaissance in American cinema gets a new DVD treatment this week, a little late for its fortieth anniversary but welcome nonetheless. Bonnie and Clyde was originally hated by its studio, shunned by critics, yet celebrated by a public ready for something to articulate the 1960′s percolating frustration with authority. But its genius has been hijacked ever since, by decades of filmmakers who either missed the point of its violence and pathos or oversimplified them past the point of meaning. Maybe this new restoration can help correct that.
Directed by Arthur Penn (The Missouri Breaks), the story loosely adapts the true-life adventures of Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow, two East Texas lovers that robbed banks and became media celebrities during the early years of the Great Depression. Their willingness to draw attention to themselves (“We’re the Barrow gang,” Clyde famously remarks to commence a robbery) and their growing public esteem attract increasing acrimony from law enforcement officials, including an errant Texas Ranger they allow to survive with disastrous consequences.
As a narrative, the film is for better or worse a product of its liberated time. Arranged as a loose assembly of set pieces, its episodic structure works except that several key scenes end before the viewer may be done with them. Penn came to movies after a career directing television, and perhaps as a result several indoor moments have a cramped staginess that begs for space; even an important encounter outside a gas station carries the stuffy confines of a studio. The scenes set outdoors, including a melancholy reunion between Parker and her mother, are lovely but vastly unlike each other, so that their very look contributes to an overall disjointed texture.
Fortunately the performances outgrow their surroundings. Warren Beatty depicts Barrow as a hoodlum with a street preacher’s twinkle in his eye. Faye Dunaway smolders but allows the waitress-turned-criminal Parker gleams of childlike but also womanly tenderness that buoy the storyline’s softer moments. In fact the entire cast demonstrates astonishing range, and it’s also exciting to see costars Gene Hackman and Gene Wilder in two of their earliest performances. Each actor’s very screen identity forms as the film unfolds, as if the movie plots the ensuing courses of their careers.
Penn and producer Beatty were wise in emphasizing the outlaws’ moral distinction between “the laws” and “just folks, like us.” Writers David Newman and Robert Benton (with help from Chinatown scribe Robert Townsend) position the Barrow gang as compassionate anarchists, quick to kill police but just as willing to let a black sharecropper shoot up a foreclosure sign. By connecting their protagonists to the rogue heroes of Warner Brothers’ gangster films from the 1930s and 40s, the writers reintroduced much of what made America love movies during the Depression to a generation coming to share that earlier time’s frustration with inhuman and inhumane institutions. Ironically, Warner Brothers released the film only after Jack Warner initially balked at an early version, presumably because of the graphic violence and startlingly sexual subtexts.
And Bonnie and Clyde unreservedly embodies that rebellious spirit. Police are conniving if not outright treacherous, and possessed of a hivelike mentality. Merchants are cowardly and bankers are reckless or incompetent. Even fathers are abusive and devious. By comparison, sharecroppers and other struggling folk are generous and tolerant. It’s electric to watch, yet sometimes reductive: the uncompromising division between those with authority and the powerless is shown with a simplicity that modern audiences might find facile.
But that same dichotomy affords Barrow, Parker, and their cohorts outsider status while making their tragic glory manageable. Penn masterfully strikes a sense of foreboding again and again, often in haunting grace notes: a young boy falling down a hill to rest limp at Parker’s feet; the benediction of a poor farmer allowed to keep his money. Ultimately the characters rise above their fates through a resigned nerve more redemptive than criminal impulse, finding a bitter humanism in their encroaching fate.
A pivotal early scene displays the gang’s spirit: “We’re gonna have ourselves a time, boy!” exclaims Barrow’s brother Buck (Hackman), awkwardly trying to prolong a reunion’s good cheer. Moments later, Barrow explains how he mutilated himself to escape a prison work detail but was paroled a week later. “Ain’t life grand?” he remarks with weary nonchalance, as the two go out to confront bleak futures.
- Michael Kabel
DVD Special Features: The newly remastered and remixed version is available in a two-disc Special Edition that also includes additional scenes, several documentaries, and theatrical trailers. The Ultimate Collector’s Edition includes the same features as the Special Edition as well as a reproduction of the 1967 pressbook and a hardcover book of photos.
