BONNIE AND CLYDE
Directed by Arthur Penn
Written by David Newman, Robert Benton and Robert Towne
Starring Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway
Released 1967
Directed by Arthur Penn
Written by David Newman, Robert Benton and Robert Towne
Starring Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway
Released 1967
I
This is where it all began.
But first, this commercial.
More than one million Americans marched on Washington D.C. on January 21, 2017, in response to the ascension of the illegitimate existence of Vladimir Trump. Those people could have spent their Saturday out watching horrible movies or listening to mindless pop music. Instead they properly allowed their outrage to channel into action and made their way to the city of lies to somewhat politely thumb their noses at the administration of insanity. A similar number, albeit, in smaller groups, marched on their cities and state houses to let the rulers know that the presumed popularity of extremism in this country is not so popular after all and that we are not going to put up with it.
These ongoing protests have had their value: Vladimir Trump goes crazier every day, a condition which does not necessarily make the world safer but which at least tells our friends that they should not judge us by the actions of a handful of lunatics who may have voted for the "scumbag," as the beautiful Maxine Waters calls him.
Only one thing would have made me happier. I would have been delighted if all those millions of pissed off people had taken one extra step forward and marched right into the White House, dragged that crazy bastard out of the Oval Office and done to him what the Italians did to Mussolini.
Do you have any idea how easy that would have been to accomplish--even metaphorically? The people were already there. All that was necessary was to move their feet one step closer. The Secret Service, the National Guard, the Armed Forces of the United States could not--and probably would not--have harmed anyone, much less everyone. I don't know how many people can fit into the Oval Office, but I imagine the room is durable for up to one or two hundred. Just walk in--don't even knock--find Il Duce hiding beneath his desk with his unsecured cell phone and his hyperactive thumbs plumbing out some moronic tweet, call the loser up top and explain that it is time for him to leave voluntarily. "Vlad, man, the joke is over. You proved to our satisfaction that a foreign power can indeed do a coup d'etat on us, and we thank you for that lesson. But now you have to go. Go back to south Florida where the idiots still love you. Go copulate with that dimwit Rick Perry and vacation in El Paso, if you like. Go do a golden shower on Stalin's tomb. But you have to leave. There are millions of us outside. Your money can't save you from an ass-whooping, if that's the way you want it. But you are going out that door, one way or another. We don't want to have to get mean."
That is what they do in real countries. In 1968 the communist party of Czechoslovakia replaced the USSR's puppet with Alexander Dubcek. Dubcek pushed practical reforms, which would, as he put it, place “a human face” on socialism. He established “a humanistic socialist democracy which would guarantee, among other things, freedom of religion, press, assembly, speech, and travel.” Granted, the stinking Soviets crushed the rebellion, but that did not come as a surprise to the Czechs. Yet they fought anyway. They had courage.
In 1989 Chinese students marched on Tienanmen Square in Beijing, knowing full well they would be destroyed. They did it anyway. They did it because they did not want to die as cowards.
But Americans, militarily, are a bunch of pathetic cowards and always have been.
Watching the march on Washington, I was hoping we might have evolved from the days of dropping bombs on unarmed civilians and actually mutate into passionate and reasonable humanoids. Committing genocide against indigenous natives, dragging across the ocean slaves from whom we built our economy, dropping nuclear weapons on a country that had already surrendered, massacring people in Indochina, Latin America, the Middle East--we are the punks of the world, a pack of gangland hoodlums taking over neighborhoods owned and operated by crippled old ladies.
So it should not have surprised me much that we didn't have the courage to throw that rancid real estate king back out into the vomit-encrusted gutter where his parents no doubt conceived him.
Please do not take it that I am calling for the violent overthrown of the United States Government. Such a call to action would be highly illegal. I would never suggest such a thing and neither should you.
I am, however, very much suggesting that people are a lot more powerful than they may believe. The realization of that real power scares us sometimes, especially when we learn how incredibly easy it is to cultivate it. When we grow disgusted by the leadership of the major political parties in this country pretending to look after our interests, it may occur to us that we are the only real caretakers of our own interests. Expecting billionaires to care about the sick and the poor is ridiculous. They don't even care about one another. Why would they care about you and me?
But don't take my word for it. Just think back on those fiery words of days gone by:
When in the Course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.
Such a plea to return to the days of Jeffersonian democracy sounds quaint, no doubt--sincere, perhaps, yet quaint. I should know. I am the king of quaint.
As such, I am also here to convince you to watch the movie Bonnie and Clyde (1967).
As this review is written, the United States is only one of several global entities hellbent on blurring the distinctions between global criminality and business as usual. Today federal and international laws exist to further that blurring so that no one is accountable for the subjugation of the poor except--legally--the poor themselves. Keep the masses doped on heroin, Scientology and the latest technology and they won't have the presence of mind to deviate. They will go along with the same tired line of nonsense that declares "Every man a king." Horatio Alger's potential lies within us all? Well, at any rate, it certainly lies.
Such was not always the case.
Bonnie Parker's mother was a seamstress. Her father was a bricklayer. Clyde Barrow's parents were sharecroppers. By the time the Great Depression officially hit in 1929, neither had the slightest prospects for survival.
In director Arthur Penn's version of the lives of these two (using a script by David Newman and Robert Benton, doctored by Robert Towne), there is an early scene where Clyde is downing a cola with Bonnie. He tries to impress her with his toughness by admitting that he has been in the State Penitentiary for armed robbery.
"What's it like?" she asks.
"What? The penitentiary?"
"No. Armed robbery."
At this point the audience has been quite properly assured that Bonnie and Clyde is a different kind of film. Bonnie's face flashes the delight of hybristophilia.
When the movie was first released, audiences expressed confusion. Was it a comedy? Was it a celebration of the counterculture? Was it seditious?
The movie had those elements. But this film shot across the seats of the cinema theater and the echo of its ricochet still resonates. The fate of these two young people (the movie legend was "They're young. They're in love. They kill people.") came ordained from the instant they met. This was not some (comparatively) silly James Cagney or Edward G. Robinson picture with an artificial morality attached to appease the public. This was real life through a camera lens and nobody gave much of a damn whether the public approved of it or not. This was a successful attempt at art. The public be damned.
I think of Bonnie and Clyde as the movie Parker and Barrow would have made of themselves. As such it is a third person narrative where the "warts and all" attitude uses the skin flaws to show the beauty beneath. During one scene where the Barrow Gang have pulled off the side of the road for a family argument with the police in pursuit, Bonnie insults Clyde about his sexual impotence. No sooner do the words leave her mouth than she knows she has gone too far, that she has wounded him unfairly. As Bonnie, Faye Dunaway's instant facial expression conveys that realization with as much honesty as Clyde's (Warren Beatty) ultimate reaction: he just stands there, immobilized not by the truth of the statement but by the fact that his partner would actually say it. The violence to which some people took exception was simply sprinkled around such life details the director, writers and Beatty himself gently crammed into this film.
Bonnie and Clyde, unlike various global industrial concerns, do not claim that their crimes are on the whole good for society. These two were not the couple version of Pretty Boy Floyd, who actually was something of a Depression-era Robin Hood. They committed their crimes for the excitement, the bonding, the spoils. And if their limited class consciousness reminds them that they are "just folks" (as they assure the Gene Wilder character in the process of stealing his automobile) like everybody else, they are long in ambition and just smart enough to know that they have no other way out of the West Dallas slums that spawned them.
Some talk was popular at the time of this movie's release that the writers played loose with the facts. The C. W. Moss character, for instance, did not exist. He was a composite of several gang sidekicks, most notably one named Deacon Jones, who traveled with the gang for less than a year. Texas Ranger Frank Hamer was real, the only falsities in his presentation being that he was a sexist who retired from the Texas Rangers rather than work for a woman.
In the shooting version of the script, Clyde is impotent, although, in the only truly corny scene in the movie, he manages to pull through to fulfill his obligations and finds that he did just fine. The reality is that the original script had Clyde as inviting the C. W. Moss character to a menage with Bonnie and himself. The real world reality was that while in the state pen, Barrow was repeatedly raped by another convict. Clyde killed that man rather than suffer continued abuse.
But worrying over such details is as silly as arguing over which CIA operatives murdered John Kennedy or whether the real Richard III was very much like the one Shakespeare wrote about. Bonnie and Clyde, the movie, has its bona fides in place and needs to offer no apologies for inaccuracies. It is indeed the story the way the two of them would have wanted it told. That, of course, is exactly why the movie, to this day, can make us uncomfortable.
Unease after fifty years is remarkable. What else is remarkable is that all the people involved in the movie--except possibly Morgan Fairchild, the body double for Dunaway--came together with such integral perfection. The writers wanted Truffaut to direct. He turned them down, as did Jean-Luc Godard. Even Arthur Penn himself tried to bail out, having worked earlier with Warren on the under-appreciated Mickey One. Even the studio, Warner Bros., lacked faith in the film, possibly due to some early critical pans. Beatty threatened to sue the studio and rather than be sued, head Jack Warner demanded the movie receive a proper release. Pauline Kael wrote a lengthy and brilliant review of the movie. The film is now more of a legend than the people who made it happen.
The artistic and commercial success of the movie is one of those rare things, like the discovery of radium or the development of the internet. It seems so obvious now that we have it.
II
Everybody's a dreamer
Everybody's a star
And everybody's in movies
It doesn't matter who you are.
There are stars in every city
In every house and on every street
And as you walk down Hollywood Boulevard
Their names are written in concrete.
--Ray Davies
"If all you want is entertainment, get two hookers and an eight ball."
--Sean Penn
Rather than ask that time-honored question of when did the 1960s end, a better query would be when did the 1970s begin? I place it in 1967, with the release of the film Bonnie and Clyde. The rock albumSgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band had been out for only two months, signaling its own kind of musical reinvention, so it came as an anticipated surprise that director Arthur Penn would weave wonders upon the visual dimensions at a time when the general public vacillated between exuberance and exhaustion.
The film told a great story and without that none of the rest would have mattered. But great stories had been told for a long time, many of them involving nasty gangsters and the like. But the days of James Cagney and Edward G. Robinson struck the new filmmakers as stale and irrelevant to the lives of the moviegoers they themselves had been. Why couldn't two criminals have a real connection to the society in which they lived, a connection that was more significant than the specific facts of their existence? It hardly mattered whether the real Clyde Barrow was sexually impotent or whether the photos of Bonnie Parker smoking a cigar were staged or accurate. What mattered was that these scenes were more than mere cinematic playfulness. These scenes humanized the characters in ways that characters--especially bad characters--had never been humanized before. From this personalization, it was a short leap to concluding that the filmmakers somehow approved of certain aspects of the bad guys' lives or, if not abject approval, then perhaps a tactile acceptance that evil exists in our world and that the good guys are often not much different when sitting around the dinner table.
Violence shot across the screen in Bonnie and Clyde in ways that Americans had seldom if ever experienced. And it wasn't gratuitous violence, or at least not merely gratuitous. When Warren Beatty as Clyde Barrow shoots the banker in the face while the latter is crawling up the robber's escape vehicle, we are shocked by the gruesome image of the death, but we also get a shot of Clyde's reaction. In one instant he is stunned, horrified and accepting of his own behavior, just as a man on the run from a hold-up might well be, a response which again humanizes the villain, thereby threatening to flip over the notion of good and bad guys in a way that a few people misunderstood as glorification and which smarter people interpreted as magic realism, the truth of an event coming across by virtue of invention. After all, no one alive at the time of the film's creation knows for certain what Clyde Barrow felt when he committed his first murder. What people do know is what they themselves might feel if in similar circumstances.
Magic realism may scare the devil out of grown-ups, but kids just love the hell out of it. And the biggest part of the decade that came to be known as the 1970s was a time when young filmmakers (not quite kids, but hardly the old guard) changed the future in ways the future had never been changed before.
This is where it all began.
But first, this commercial.
More than one million Americans marched on Washington D.C. on January 21, 2017, in response to the ascension of the illegitimate existence of Vladimir Trump. Those people could have spent their Saturday out watching horrible movies or listening to mindless pop music. Instead they properly allowed their outrage to channel into action and made their way to the city of lies to somewhat politely thumb their noses at the administration of insanity. A similar number, albeit, in smaller groups, marched on their cities and state houses to let the rulers know that the presumed popularity of extremism in this country is not so popular after all and that we are not going to put up with it.
These ongoing protests have had their value: Vladimir Trump goes crazier every day, a condition which does not necessarily make the world safer but which at least tells our friends that they should not judge us by the actions of a handful of lunatics who may have voted for the "scumbag," as the beautiful Maxine Waters calls him.
Only one thing would have made me happier. I would have been delighted if all those millions of pissed off people had taken one extra step forward and marched right into the White House, dragged that crazy bastard out of the Oval Office and done to him what the Italians did to Mussolini.
Do you have any idea how easy that would have been to accomplish--even metaphorically? The people were already there. All that was necessary was to move their feet one step closer. The Secret Service, the National Guard, the Armed Forces of the United States could not--and probably would not--have harmed anyone, much less everyone. I don't know how many people can fit into the Oval Office, but I imagine the room is durable for up to one or two hundred. Just walk in--don't even knock--find Il Duce hiding beneath his desk with his unsecured cell phone and his hyperactive thumbs plumbing out some moronic tweet, call the loser up top and explain that it is time for him to leave voluntarily. "Vlad, man, the joke is over. You proved to our satisfaction that a foreign power can indeed do a coup d'etat on us, and we thank you for that lesson. But now you have to go. Go back to south Florida where the idiots still love you. Go copulate with that dimwit Rick Perry and vacation in El Paso, if you like. Go do a golden shower on Stalin's tomb. But you have to leave. There are millions of us outside. Your money can't save you from an ass-whooping, if that's the way you want it. But you are going out that door, one way or another. We don't want to have to get mean."
That is what they do in real countries. In 1968 the communist party of Czechoslovakia replaced the USSR's puppet with Alexander Dubcek. Dubcek pushed practical reforms, which would, as he put it, place “a human face” on socialism. He established “a humanistic socialist democracy which would guarantee, among other things, freedom of religion, press, assembly, speech, and travel.” Granted, the stinking Soviets crushed the rebellion, but that did not come as a surprise to the Czechs. Yet they fought anyway. They had courage.
In 1989 Chinese students marched on Tienanmen Square in Beijing, knowing full well they would be destroyed. They did it anyway. They did it because they did not want to die as cowards.
But Americans, militarily, are a bunch of pathetic cowards and always have been.
Watching the march on Washington, I was hoping we might have evolved from the days of dropping bombs on unarmed civilians and actually mutate into passionate and reasonable humanoids. Committing genocide against indigenous natives, dragging across the ocean slaves from whom we built our economy, dropping nuclear weapons on a country that had already surrendered, massacring people in Indochina, Latin America, the Middle East--we are the punks of the world, a pack of gangland hoodlums taking over neighborhoods owned and operated by crippled old ladies.
So it should not have surprised me much that we didn't have the courage to throw that rancid real estate king back out into the vomit-encrusted gutter where his parents no doubt conceived him.
Please do not take it that I am calling for the violent overthrown of the United States Government. Such a call to action would be highly illegal. I would never suggest such a thing and neither should you.
I am, however, very much suggesting that people are a lot more powerful than they may believe. The realization of that real power scares us sometimes, especially when we learn how incredibly easy it is to cultivate it. When we grow disgusted by the leadership of the major political parties in this country pretending to look after our interests, it may occur to us that we are the only real caretakers of our own interests. Expecting billionaires to care about the sick and the poor is ridiculous. They don't even care about one another. Why would they care about you and me?
But don't take my word for it. Just think back on those fiery words of days gone by:
When in the Course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.
Such a plea to return to the days of Jeffersonian democracy sounds quaint, no doubt--sincere, perhaps, yet quaint. I should know. I am the king of quaint.
As such, I am also here to convince you to watch the movie Bonnie and Clyde (1967).
As this review is written, the United States is only one of several global entities hellbent on blurring the distinctions between global criminality and business as usual. Today federal and international laws exist to further that blurring so that no one is accountable for the subjugation of the poor except--legally--the poor themselves. Keep the masses doped on heroin, Scientology and the latest technology and they won't have the presence of mind to deviate. They will go along with the same tired line of nonsense that declares "Every man a king." Horatio Alger's potential lies within us all? Well, at any rate, it certainly lies.
Such was not always the case.
Bonnie Parker's mother was a seamstress. Her father was a bricklayer. Clyde Barrow's parents were sharecroppers. By the time the Great Depression officially hit in 1929, neither had the slightest prospects for survival.
In director Arthur Penn's version of the lives of these two (using a script by David Newman and Robert Benton, doctored by Robert Towne), there is an early scene where Clyde is downing a cola with Bonnie. He tries to impress her with his toughness by admitting that he has been in the State Penitentiary for armed robbery.
"What's it like?" she asks.
"What? The penitentiary?"
"No. Armed robbery."
At this point the audience has been quite properly assured that Bonnie and Clyde is a different kind of film. Bonnie's face flashes the delight of hybristophilia.
When the movie was first released, audiences expressed confusion. Was it a comedy? Was it a celebration of the counterculture? Was it seditious?
The movie had those elements. But this film shot across the seats of the cinema theater and the echo of its ricochet still resonates. The fate of these two young people (the movie legend was "They're young. They're in love. They kill people.") came ordained from the instant they met. This was not some (comparatively) silly James Cagney or Edward G. Robinson picture with an artificial morality attached to appease the public. This was real life through a camera lens and nobody gave much of a damn whether the public approved of it or not. This was a successful attempt at art. The public be damned.
I think of Bonnie and Clyde as the movie Parker and Barrow would have made of themselves. As such it is a third person narrative where the "warts and all" attitude uses the skin flaws to show the beauty beneath. During one scene where the Barrow Gang have pulled off the side of the road for a family argument with the police in pursuit, Bonnie insults Clyde about his sexual impotence. No sooner do the words leave her mouth than she knows she has gone too far, that she has wounded him unfairly. As Bonnie, Faye Dunaway's instant facial expression conveys that realization with as much honesty as Clyde's (Warren Beatty) ultimate reaction: he just stands there, immobilized not by the truth of the statement but by the fact that his partner would actually say it. The violence to which some people took exception was simply sprinkled around such life details the director, writers and Beatty himself gently crammed into this film.
Bonnie and Clyde, unlike various global industrial concerns, do not claim that their crimes are on the whole good for society. These two were not the couple version of Pretty Boy Floyd, who actually was something of a Depression-era Robin Hood. They committed their crimes for the excitement, the bonding, the spoils. And if their limited class consciousness reminds them that they are "just folks" (as they assure the Gene Wilder character in the process of stealing his automobile) like everybody else, they are long in ambition and just smart enough to know that they have no other way out of the West Dallas slums that spawned them.
Some talk was popular at the time of this movie's release that the writers played loose with the facts. The C. W. Moss character, for instance, did not exist. He was a composite of several gang sidekicks, most notably one named Deacon Jones, who traveled with the gang for less than a year. Texas Ranger Frank Hamer was real, the only falsities in his presentation being that he was a sexist who retired from the Texas Rangers rather than work for a woman.
In the shooting version of the script, Clyde is impotent, although, in the only truly corny scene in the movie, he manages to pull through to fulfill his obligations and finds that he did just fine. The reality is that the original script had Clyde as inviting the C. W. Moss character to a menage with Bonnie and himself. The real world reality was that while in the state pen, Barrow was repeatedly raped by another convict. Clyde killed that man rather than suffer continued abuse.
But worrying over such details is as silly as arguing over which CIA operatives murdered John Kennedy or whether the real Richard III was very much like the one Shakespeare wrote about. Bonnie and Clyde, the movie, has its bona fides in place and needs to offer no apologies for inaccuracies. It is indeed the story the way the two of them would have wanted it told. That, of course, is exactly why the movie, to this day, can make us uncomfortable.
Unease after fifty years is remarkable. What else is remarkable is that all the people involved in the movie--except possibly Morgan Fairchild, the body double for Dunaway--came together with such integral perfection. The writers wanted Truffaut to direct. He turned them down, as did Jean-Luc Godard. Even Arthur Penn himself tried to bail out, having worked earlier with Warren on the under-appreciated Mickey One. Even the studio, Warner Bros., lacked faith in the film, possibly due to some early critical pans. Beatty threatened to sue the studio and rather than be sued, head Jack Warner demanded the movie receive a proper release. Pauline Kael wrote a lengthy and brilliant review of the movie. The film is now more of a legend than the people who made it happen.
The artistic and commercial success of the movie is one of those rare things, like the discovery of radium or the development of the internet. It seems so obvious now that we have it.
II
Everybody's a dreamer
Everybody's a star
And everybody's in movies
It doesn't matter who you are.
There are stars in every city
In every house and on every street
And as you walk down Hollywood Boulevard
Their names are written in concrete.
--Ray Davies
"If all you want is entertainment, get two hookers and an eight ball."
--Sean Penn
Rather than ask that time-honored question of when did the 1960s end, a better query would be when did the 1970s begin? I place it in 1967, with the release of the film Bonnie and Clyde. The rock albumSgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band had been out for only two months, signaling its own kind of musical reinvention, so it came as an anticipated surprise that director Arthur Penn would weave wonders upon the visual dimensions at a time when the general public vacillated between exuberance and exhaustion.
The film told a great story and without that none of the rest would have mattered. But great stories had been told for a long time, many of them involving nasty gangsters and the like. But the days of James Cagney and Edward G. Robinson struck the new filmmakers as stale and irrelevant to the lives of the moviegoers they themselves had been. Why couldn't two criminals have a real connection to the society in which they lived, a connection that was more significant than the specific facts of their existence? It hardly mattered whether the real Clyde Barrow was sexually impotent or whether the photos of Bonnie Parker smoking a cigar were staged or accurate. What mattered was that these scenes were more than mere cinematic playfulness. These scenes humanized the characters in ways that characters--especially bad characters--had never been humanized before. From this personalization, it was a short leap to concluding that the filmmakers somehow approved of certain aspects of the bad guys' lives or, if not abject approval, then perhaps a tactile acceptance that evil exists in our world and that the good guys are often not much different when sitting around the dinner table.
Violence shot across the screen in Bonnie and Clyde in ways that Americans had seldom if ever experienced. And it wasn't gratuitous violence, or at least not merely gratuitous. When Warren Beatty as Clyde Barrow shoots the banker in the face while the latter is crawling up the robber's escape vehicle, we are shocked by the gruesome image of the death, but we also get a shot of Clyde's reaction. In one instant he is stunned, horrified and accepting of his own behavior, just as a man on the run from a hold-up might well be, a response which again humanizes the villain, thereby threatening to flip over the notion of good and bad guys in a way that a few people misunderstood as glorification and which smarter people interpreted as magic realism, the truth of an event coming across by virtue of invention. After all, no one alive at the time of the film's creation knows for certain what Clyde Barrow felt when he committed his first murder. What people do know is what they themselves might feel if in similar circumstances.
Magic realism may scare the devil out of grown-ups, but kids just love the hell out of it. And the biggest part of the decade that came to be known as the 1970s was a time when young filmmakers (not quite kids, but hardly the old guard) changed the future in ways the future had never been changed before.
