Cast: Warren Beatty, Faye Dunaway, Gene Hackman

Director: Arthur Penn

Screenplay: David Newman

Running time: 1 hr 54 mins

Genre: Western/Crime/Drama



CRITIQUE:


Upon its release, Bonnie and Clyde drew a massive divide amongst its critics. One Bosley Crowther of New York Times slated it as a “cheap piece of bald-faced slapstick comedy” trailblazing the film’s many detractors. Such commentary was only expected at a time when there were still those that confronted new radical ideas. But change was at course in the face of American society. Nevertheless subversive, Bonnie and Clyde shocked American audiences of its sheer bloody violence that it welcomed a new dawn of filmmaking. It’s bye-bye traditional studio pictures. Hello, New Hollywood. To put it succinctly, it kickstarted the new era dominated by magnificent portraits of the death of the American dream: The Graduate, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, Taxi Driver and The Godfather.


Owing much to the French New Wave, thanks to this piece of film that reinvented Hollywood perception, elevating it alongside European art cinema, it could stand proudly beside Jean-Luc Godard’s A Bout De Souffle as a gun-and-gangster picture (this screenplay was offered first to Godard, but went on to make Fahrenheit 451 instead). Freewheeling in form and light-hearted in approach, it somehow drew an image of ‘cool’ of the criminals or outlaws, humanising them but never sentimentalise their personas. Based on real account of a pair of bankrobbers who embarked on a robbing-cum-killing spree during American Depression and caused a sensational rampage in good ‘ol Texas, the titular couple were also odd lovers who kept their passions behind their guns. The awkwardness in the only bed scene was absolutely palpable, spectacularly handled with prolonged silences and Beatty’s utterance: ‘I told you I’m not a loverboy.’ Of course, he was impotent and Dunaway met this with a twitch on her lips.


Death hangs on this picture as naturally as tragedy is like a second skin to outlaw movies. But it never hurries to get there, Penn making sure the film is rollicking from comedy to drama, sexual innuendos to shootouts. Most of all, perhaps what really astonished audiences at the time was its characters’ controversy: here are criminals who are glamorised, with a pretty-boy but impotent hero and a heroine that spawned a new gangster fashion chic out of berets and maxiskirts – paramount to Jean Seberg’s posh haircut in Breathless. These were Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway going down to history as screen legends. And come the death scene, it’s horrifyingly brutal yet strangely lyrical – influencing from Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid to The Godfather.


VERDICT:

The epitome of exhilarating filmmaking, uninhibited and celebratory – Bonnie and Clyde paved the way for the American New Wave circa late 1960s and 70s. It’s brilliant, bold, bolshy and beautiful.



RATING: A+