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Bonnie and Clyde
Shoot 'em up, bang, bang
1967
Review: April 15, 2008
Director: Arthur Penn
Starring: Warren Beatty, Faye Dunaway, Gene Hackman, Estelle Parsons
If you like.
THE SETUP:
Telling of the notorious crime spree of Bonnie and Clyde.
DISCUSSION:
So it’s one of those nights where I don’t have anything from Netflix and I’m not sure what to watch, although I was distinctly leaning toward something that might feature shark attacks. None of that, sadly, but I was soon able to get excited at the prospect of a young Faye Dunaway and Warren Beatty going for it as notorious criminals Bonnie and Clyde.
We begin with a bunch of still photos telling us that this is the depression and everyone is like, super poor. We see Bonnie lying listlessly on her bed, bored out of her mind. She sees Clyde trying to steal her mother’s car, and runs out to meet him, clearly very excited. As they walk into town together, she chides him that he’s just a two-bit thief, and to show her, he holds up a grocery, and they take off together. This sends Bonnie into a sex frenzy, and she is throwing herself all over Clyde as they make their getaway, so much so that he has to fight her off. He stops the car and insists that he “isn’t much of a lover.”
She says she should go home and to work as a waitress, and he makes a speech about how she should come with him and be more than all that, saying he thinks she’s the “best girl in Texas,” then immediately points at her hair and orders “Change that. I don’t like it.” She rushes to comply.
He then teaches her to shoot. Now, the movie hasn’t stopped for anyone to talk much about their motivations, but by now we’ve started to put together that Clyde is somewhat loose in terms of being aware of the consequences of his actions, and Bonnie is so bored and hopeless in her life that she barely has a second thought about running off and becoming a criminal.
So one of the ways the movie gets across the mindsets of people during the depression is in the way Bonnie just runs off with this total stranger and embarks on a life of crime the way one might decide to stop at Quizno’s on the way home. She’s THAT bored and desperate. We then get a little touch of Clyde’s psychology after they try to rob a grocery store, and a guy comes from behind him with a meat cleaver. “Why’d he try to kill me?” Clyde says, honestly bewildered. “I ain’t against him.” Such is the criminal mind, ladies and gentlemen!
SPOILERS > > >
So next they recruit this elfen little guy CW to be their driver, and during their first bank robbery with him, he parks the getaway car, then has quite a time getting it out of the spot. After Bonnie and Clyde try to get it on and it is revealed that Clyde is impotent, they go off to meet Clyde’s brother Buck, played by Gene Hackman, and his straight uptight wife Blanche, played by Estelle Parsons, who won an Oscar for this role. Soon their house is being raided, and Blanche, who is a good upstanding citizen, FREAKS out and is running around everywhere screaming. It’s amusing afterward how Bonnie and Blanche are sniping at each other through the rest of the movie, Bonnie considering Blanche just the stupidest thing ever.
So more robberies, more escapes. One can see as it goes on how the couple are getting into their own fame, announcing themselves as “The Barrow Gang” when they rob people, sometimes giving money to the poor. This whole Robin Hood-like aspect begins to creep in as the poor people of the area treat them well and welcome them with kindness.
At a certain point they meet up with a Texas Ranger, Frank Hamer, and take pictures of themselves with him for publication in the paper. He is later positioned as the one dedicated to bringing them in. Toward the end, Bonnie publishes a poem about their exploits, causing Clyde to feel all special that she “made him into a somebody.” Bonnie starts to rue her life on the run, realizing it is only going to end in a hail of bullets. She sees her mother once more, and it seems that the old woman is none to pleased about her daughter’s choice of vocation. The cops are becoming more and more determined to kill them, not just capture them, and finally they are stopped on a country road, the car and their bodies riddled with bullets.
< < < SPOILERS END
As a movie, it was fine. It just kind of straightforwardly tells the story, letting little editorial touches creep in: they become folk heroes to the poor, they get beguiled by their own fame, etc., but doesn’t ever stop to delve into any of them fully. Like its heroes, the film just charges ahead until it stops, a point driven home by the way the film simply blacks out at the end, not rounding off the ending with any kind of conclusive tone. The performances are decent but without flourish. In short, I’m not sorry I saw it, but I don’t think I’ll ever need to see it again.
Looking back, it can be difficult to understand that this movie was considered shocking in its violence when it came out in 1967. It is very tame now, but the blood seen on screen, as well as the sometimes humorous tone the film takes while the violence is going on, was all shockingly new at the time, and this film is considered a big influence on films such as The Wild Bunch, Pulp Fiction and Natural Born Killers, among others.
So a short glance at Wikipedia on this reveals that the film does not hew to history very closely. Many believe that Bonnie never actually fired a gun, but loaded them quite efficiently. Texas Ranger Hamer actually never met the duo before he set them up to be slaughtered, and there is still some controversy over whether he acted lawfully. He and his fellow cops apparently took guns from the dead Barrow gang and allowed people to come and steal pieces of the car and even Bonnie’s clothes and hair to sell as souvenirs. If you’re interested, the Wiki page is fairly informative, and even links to a newsreel of the time showing the shot-up car with the bodies still inside.
So yeah, violent for the time, influential, interesting, with some good Faye and Warren. And yet, somehow so inessential. That’s the paradox.
SHOULD YOU WATCH IT?
Yeah, whatever. If you want.
