Bonnie and Clyde (1967)

It might sound strange for me to say that Bonnie and Clyde reminded me a lot of Gone with the Wind but it's true nonetheless. I can fully understand why each film is important and innovative but I just couldn't find anything in either of them to care about or identify with. This means that while I might enjoy or appreciate parts of each of them as I watch, my only lasting impression once they're over is to wonder why they have remained so well regarded down the years.

I realise that the real Bonnie and Clyde worked their violent trade during the depression when banks were real bad guys, and I further realise that the movie version of their exploits was released just as the counterculture of the '60s was at its peak. As raging against the machine was almost required behaviour in 1967, Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow thus became great anti-heroes and ripe subject matter for a movie. The catch is that I don't live in either of those eras and as much as I can happily despise banks today, I can't identify in the slightest with Bonnie or Clyde or any of their gang.

Many of the parts of the film work well. The visuals are wonderful and it isn't surprising that the cinematography picked up the Oscar that year. The script won a New York Film Critics Award for writers David Newman and Robert Benton and I can understand that too, especially given the timing. This was the first mainstream film to include the sort of violence and mayhem that exploitation cinema had been working with for some time, and it changed the face of movies for ever. For my part, though, I think the whole plot could be summed up by one of Clyde Barrow's lines: "We rob banks." That's it.

The Barrow gang don't have any reason for what they do beyond the fact that they do it and so there's not a lot of depth to the film beyond the irony of the great womaniser Warren Beatty playing someone who is more or less impotent. There are other nihilistic films of the era, albeit made on much lower budgets, that succeed in finding that depth. Russ Meyer's cult classic Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! came two years earlier than this, though the violence wasn't quite as explicit. To my mind it's a much better film, even with actors way below the calibre of Beatty or newcomer Faye Dunaway. Love him or hate him, Meyer is a true auteur and his films remain unique and highly distinctive to this day. You can't say that about Arthur Penn, regardless how great some of his movies are.

Exploitation master Roger Corman made a few of the sort of films Bonnie and Clyde took its cue from, and his minor league actors cut their teeth on these movies before going on to greatness elsewhere. In the same year that Penn made Bonnie and Clyde, Corman made The St Valentine's Day Massacre with a stunning performance by Jason Robards as Al Capone. Probably the closest film Corman made to Bonnie and Clyde is 1970's Bloody Mama, the true story of Ma Barker with such future heavyweight actors as Shelley Winters, Bruce Dern, Don Stroud and Robert de Niro. It's just as nihilistic as Bonnie and Clyde and even more brutal and violent, but Corman succeeds where Penn fails. He makes us care about the Barker gang even as he makes us despise them.

The only role in Bonnie and Clyde that carries any depth for me is Faye Dunaway's starmaking turn as Bonnie Parker. She gets immediately hooked on the whole danger kick which makes her horny as hell, yet she gets no satisfaction from Clyde because he isn't a lover boy and doesn't care about that sort of thing. All she gets to do with him is pose for photos now and then, and that's nowhere near enough for her. Moreover she soon gets to have to put up with Clyde's brother Buck and his pain of a wife. Buck Barrow is a perfect opportunity for Gene Hackman to strut his stuff and he doesn't disappoint, but Estelle Parsons was the one who picked up the best supporting Oscar as his wife Blanche.

As her role was limited to a bit of running around being a pain in everyone's ass, I really have no clue what warranted her win. She did nothing but annoy the heck out of me. Possibly it was a sympathy gift from the Academy who felt that Bonnie and Clyde should win something for acting and competition was slightest in the Best Supporting Actress category that year. The violence of Bonnie and Clyde wasn't the only big change that the Academy had to deal with in 1967. Two of the other four films up for Best Picture were racially driven films, In the Heat of the Night and Guess Who's Coming to Dinner?, and yet another, The Graduate, dealt with changing attitudes to youth and sex.

Bonnie and Clyde ended up with no less than ten nominations, including all the major awards, but only won two. Even Michael J Pollard was nominated for his supporting role as young and impressionable C W Moss. I understand his nomination about as much as I understand why Estelle Parsons won. Pollard does his job well enough but his character is simply there like a prop in the background. He never seems to do anything and he could have been cut out of the film entirely without my even noticing.

Maybe I don't get all this because I'm not watching the film with a 1967 viewpoint. I may prefer Bloody Mama but Bonnie and Clyde came first. It set the stage for everything that followed, and because I've seen many films far more extreme in every way, I can't pick up on the impact that it must have had back on initial release. Maybe the counterculture of the late sixties loved the fact that Bonnie and Clyde basically stood for nothing whatsoever and so just did whatever came to mind at any point in time. Maybe they appreciated the characters of Blanche Barrow and C W Moss for precisely the same reasons that I don't.

I did enjoy a few of the smaller parts, even though they had little impact on the film as a whole. There's Dub Taylor as C W's dad, and he is refreshing as one of the few to not appreciate his son's actions; but mostly there's Denver Pyle as the Texas ranger who chases Bonnie and Clyde over a whole slew of states. Yes, that's the same Denver Pyle that we all knew and loved as Uncle Jesse in The Dukes of Hazzard, and I also saw recently in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, made five years earlier. Once I got over his playing someone other than Uncle Jesse, which is admittedly rather difficult, I really got into his acting. He was almost unrecognisable in a short part in Liberty Valance, but he showed some real subtlety here in a movie that really didn't have a lot of it.

It's sad to say it but I'd have loved the film a lot more if there had been more Denver Pyle and less Bonnie and Clyde. I'm sure that the film's name will live on for its role in changing cinematic history but I can't see it surviving for long as a film. Less than forty years on its impact and its relevance have entirely disappeared.

Home - Writing - Hal and Dee at the Movies - The IMDb Project

Mail Hal C F Astell - Site Map