Owen Gleiberman on the revolutionary gangster film that now looks like the last work of Hollywood classicism.<\/b>
\nFifty years ago today, American movies were born again. That was the day \u201c Bonnie and Clyde, \u201d the lethally disruptive and exciting gangster saga that brought on the implosion of Hollywood \u2014 and the reinvention of Hollywood \u2014 was first shown in theaters. The gun-on-the-run magnetism of Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway; the\u2019 30s desolation set to a jaunty bluegrass vibe; the bursts of violence and quick stinging death; the burnished colors; the screwball neurotic players (Gene Hackman, Michael J. Pollard, Estelle Parsons, Gene Wilder) ; the fantastic doomed recklessness of it all.
It took a while for \u201cBonnie and Clyde\u201d to catch on. The picture stumbled out of the gate, and its studio, Warner Bros., had to reboot its opening. But once that happened, \u201cBonnie and Clyde\u201d dunked the cinema in a baptism of style and blood and glamour and adulthood. It was a revolution both holy and unholy. From that moment on, American films would reach higher than they ever had \u2014 and lower. They would turn into a more towering art form and, in a number of cases, a more sensational and debased one. They would evolve into shoot-for-the-skies art, grindhouse pulp, and everything in between.
There were other revolutionary movies, of course, that paved the way. In 1959, Jean-Luc Godard\u2019s \u201c Breathless \u201d demonstrated that you could take a camera out into the streets and call it the world\u2019s most perfect movie set, or allow scenes to play out in a room as if two ordinary people were simply being observed, and all of that could become enthralling cinema. A year later, in the orgy of murder that was \u201c Psycho, \u201d Alfred Hitchcock plunged a knife through the heart of every expectation that 20th-century moviegoers had ever had, and the result sent shock waves through the entire culture.
\u201cBonnie and Clyde, \u201d directed by the studio veteran Arthur Penn from a script by the New York media upstarts David Newman and Robert Benton, with Beatty serving as producer, drew on the spirit of insurgency unleashed by both those films. Godard, at one point, was even approached to be its director (a situation chronicled with definitive fascination in Mark Harris\u2019s \u201c Pictures at a Revolution \u201d) , and the blood-spattering violence of \u201cBonnie and Clyde\u201d was as chewed over and debated, in editorials and on talk shows and at cocktail parties, as the savagery of \u201cPsycho.\u201d
What \u201cBonnie and Clyde\u201d did, though, was to fuse all those impulses into a bold new classicism, one that heralded a new age of freedom. The movie looked forward and back at the same time. I first saw it at a drive-in theater with my parents, where I experienced it as a burningly romantic saga that I viewed, almost entirely, through the lens of the film\u2019s ad campaign, which went like this: \u201cThey\u2019 re young. They\u2019 re in love. And they kill people.\u201d Those lines exquisitely caught the film\u2019s spirit.
To be young, of course, was a good thing, especially in 1967, and especially if you looked like Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway, who in their\u2019 30s gangster duds (notably the berets worn by Dunaway) were as beautiful \u2014 and as iconic in their beauty \u2014 as the Beatles or Bogart and Bergman. To be in love was most definitely a good thing. And to kill people? According to the poetic logic of advertising, that was a good thing, too, though the movie was, in fact, supremely ambivalent about the criminal violence it showed you.
Bonnie and Clyde didn\u2019 t want to kill people. They were desperate, stuck in the doldrums of the Depression, trapped in their own sensual hunger. Robbing banks was their ticket, their salvation, their high. Yet from the moment during their first crack at robbery when an innocent teller gets shot through the eye, the film forced the audience to confront the collateral damage of its heroes\u2019 actions. The astonishing audacity of \u201cBonnie and Clyde\u201d is that it revels in the forbidden sexiness of living beyond the law, of doing whatever you want from moment to moment, yet it never lets Bonnie and Clyde off the hook. Hitched to the jostling thrill of its getaway-ride sequences, which raced along to the antic bluegrass joy of \u201cFoggy Mountain Breakdown, \u201d the movie is a tragicomedy about what it looks and feels like to want to live too fast.
Faye Dunaway\u2019s Bonnie, writhing in lonely languor in her bedroom, has a pent-up sensuality so intense that early on, you can just about feel it wanting to erupt. It\u2019s as if she\u2019s singlehandedly carrying around the explosion of the 1960s that was about to go off. \u201cBonnie and Clyde\u201d wasn\u2019 t conceived as a \u201ccounterculture\u201d movie, but it soon became one, because its unique fusion of violence and melancholy and exhilaration expressed, in every frame, the spirit that had been lying there like an unlit fuse since James Dean: the barely verbalized desire for something more .
After \u201cBonnie and Clyde, \u201d the saga of two homicidal lovers on the run would be reconfigured many times, in films from Terrence Malick\u2019s \u201cBadlands\u201d to Robert Altman\u2019s \u201cThieves Like Us\u201d to Oliver Stone\u2019s \u201cNatural Born Killers.\u201d But no movie caught the feral allure of living \u201coutside of society\u201d (to quote Patti Smith from the \u201cNatural Born Killers\u201d soundtrack) the way that \u201cBonnie and Clyde\u201d did. Beatty and Dunaway were playing sociopaths, which the film winkingly acknowledged, but it turned their criminality into a soulful response to a reined-in world.
Nowhere does that come across more powerfully than in the film\u2019s dance-of-death climax, where Bonnie and Clyde, ambushed by a Texas Ranger and his men, are riddled with bullets, their bodies jerking around like rag dolls. It\u2019s the sequence that changed movies, because it blasted away any last vestiges of the Hays Code, opening the floodgates to a fearless movie culture in which anything could be shown.
It also changed movies because it\u2019s one of the greatest sequences in film history. You feel, in every moment of it, the sting of death. Yet the part of it that has always haunted me the most comes just before the bullets fly. Birds rise up out of the bushes, giving Bonnie and Clyde a moment of warning that someone is hiding there. And then, in the space of a split second that lasts forever, the two gaze at each other, the film cutting back and forth between them, and what their eyes say in that endless instant is the most eloquent of visual sonnets: \u201cOh God this is it! Just like we knew it would happen. But we dreamed that it wouldn\u2019 t. And we don\u2019 t even have time to say goodbye. And I love you\u2026.\u201d It\u2019s one of the most stunning feats of direction, acting, and editing (by Dede Allen) ever done, and it seals \u201cBonnie and Clyde\u201d as a romance in which love transcends death.
\u201cBonnie and Clyde\u201d didn\u2019 t kill Hollywood, of course. In 1967, it was the spectacular domino that set off a chain reaction that toppled a studio system that was getting ready to collapse in on itself, sort of like the Soviet Union in 1989. Going forward, the youth audience would be targeted more potently by other movies, notably \u201cEasy Rider.\u201d Filmmaking itself would throw off many more shackles, especially after Robert Altman made \u201cM*A*S*H.\u201d But the thing I\u2019 ve always cherished about \u201cBonnie and Clyde\u201d is that as daring as its attitudes are, it was made during the last days of the studio system, and it has the craft and symmetry and finely angled polish of a studio-system production. It\u2019s a cinematic paradox: a work of high classicism that pulses with the shock of the new.
Maybe that\u2019s why it had the vision to prophesize the end of the 1960s \u2014 a new kind of freedom zone \u2014 even as they were just kicking in. \u201cBonnie and Clyde\u201d caught the revolution but was wise enough to know that living for the moment and doing whatever you want couldn\u2019 t work. That\u2019s why the movie spoke so timelessly. It told the audience that life is precious, crazy, sexy, desperate, fleeting. It said hang on and enjoy the ride.<\/p>\n

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