Bonnie and Clyde

I wasn't surprise to find out that Francois Truffaut and Jean Luc Godard had been seriously considered to helm the tragic tale of Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker. Fortunately Arthur Penn took over. I say fortunately, not because I think any less of Truffaut or Godard but I'm sure nobody could have made this glorious American classic but Arthur Penn. Somehow there is an air of Frenchness permeating every frame even if Bonnie and Clyde is profoundly American. For a foreigner, like me, America has always been a Country to admire even if puzzling. Guns and Bibles. Violence with a poetic aura that it's as startling as it is disturbing. Warren Beatty is superb as Clyde - the real life character was homosexual but for the film he is impotent - more acceptable? Amazing to think of it now. Faye Dunaway became an icon, deservedly so. Gene Hackman, the extraordinary Estelle Parsons, Michael J Pollard and even Gene Wilder complete the cast of this extraordinary American film.

Went to search for this movie online so I could review it and almost typed "Bonnie and Tyler" into the search bar. It's been a long day, so this one will be brief.

Bonnie and Clyde is mostly a great movie. I have all the admiration in the world for what it did for cinema. It helped kickstart the idea of having violence actually be messy and impactful in mainstream film, and the fact that it's a sympathetic portrayal of people on the run from the law was probably quite shocking back then.

If anything, however, Bonnie and Clyde feel more like heroes than anti-heroes. They rob banks; faceless organisations that are foreclosing people's houses and making The Depression more depressing. They have few other ways to get by. There are police casualties, but the police response is often excessively violent, and they're tools of a state who seem to be doing little else to help the people who are suffering in the 1930s.

Bonnie and Clyde and their gang aren't perfect people by any means, but they are more likable than those who they're pitted against. Within the last few years, figures like them stray further and further from the anti-hero label, and closer towards the hero one.

There's some really bold editing here, and the lead performances are all good (fantastic Gene Wilder appearance, too). The character of Blanche is a bit annoying, though. I wish the screenplay had toned her down a bit. The music and a couple of jarring editing techniques might not work for everyone, too, and I think the pace gets a little janky here and there.

But for the stuff this movie does well, I feel it's at least deserving of an 8/10 rating. It's not my favourite landmark boundary-pusher of the late 1960s, but it's up there.

I said I'd be brief, but that didn't end up happening. Guess there's a lot to talk about when it comes to a movie like Bonnie and Clyde.

'Bonnie and Clyde' is not a film about two real people famous for so many bank robberies and murders across the big country... It shows a new kind of fury in which people could be harm by weapons... The film, however, manages to carry the impression that these two youngsters took great pleasure in robbing banks and stores... It also suggests that it was very easy for them to fool the law—as certainly occurred in real life... Though merited punishment caught up with them, audiences laughed at their remarkable deeds and wanted them to get away...

In 'Bonnie and Clyde,' Penn created an emotional state, an image of the 1930s filtered through his 1960s sensibility... The sense of this period reflects Penn's vision of how the 1930s Depression-era truly was, and for all the crazy style and banjo score, this vision is greatly private...

What is also personal about 'Bonnie and Clyde' and constitutes its incomparable quality, is its unusual mixture of humor and fear, its poetry of violation of the law as something that is gaiety and playfulness...

'Bonnie and Clyde' is both true and abstract... It is a gangster movie and a comedy-romance... It is an amusing film that turns bloody, a love affair that ends with tragedy...

A modification between pleasure and catastrophic events is important to the essential aim of the film... In their second bank robbery, a daring and joyful action goes morosely embittered when Clyde is forced to kill an executive in the bank, and real blood pours out from his body...

Bonnie and Clyde take self-gratification posing for photographs with their prisoners… But when surrounded by detectives in a motel, they turn into vindictive bandits struggling for their lives... C. W. Moss, specially, brings to mind Baby Face Nelson, when he murders policemen with a blazing machine gun...

One of the stimulating moments in the film happens when Clyde chases Bonnie through a yellow corn field, while a cloud transverses the sun and slowly shadows the landscape... Here the characteristic quality of the Texas countryside and the vague aspect of the story are beautifully communicated......

Penn's masterpiece nominated for ten Academy Awards, including Best Picture, won two Oscars, one for Best Actress in a Supporting Role and another for Best Cinematography...

This is one of the greatest cops 'n robbers films of all time. Loosely based upon the real-life escapades of Bonnie Parker and her lover, Clyde Barrow, along with Clyde's brother, Buck, Buck's wife, Blanche, and C. W. Moss, the film details the gang's escapades throughout the American Southwest during the early years of the Great Depression. Action-packed from beginning to end, this film is total dynamite as well as flying lead. Beatty gives a dynamite performance as the vicious Clyde Barrow, who will stop at nothing to escape capture by the law...literally. Dunaway gives a stellar performance as Bonnie, an amateur poetess who allegedly entertained her fellow gang members with long poems. Gene Hackman is superb as Buck Barrow, the joke-cracking gang-member, and Michael J. Pollard is equally adept as C. W. Moss, the sissy-killer of the bunch, who cries after each killing he is involved in. Denver Pyle is great as Texas Ranger Frank Hamer who doggedly tracked he gang and ultimately engineered the ambush of Bonnie and Clyde, after the gang kidnapped him and send pictured of him "bein' just as friendly as pie," with the gang, as Bonnie Parker is alleged to have said. One bizarre note: Buck Barrow was actually shot in the head and after the gang had camped out following his shooting, they left him when "the laws," had surrounded them. Buck lived for several days in a hospital after his capture by the law and actually was pretty coherent several times, giving statements to the police, and even asking for a minister to whom he could give his "final confession," and hopefully receive Divine Absolution. Gene Wilder gives a fine performance as the hapless, would-be, funeral director (or "Undertaker," as they are referred to down south) Eugene Grizzard, and Evans Evans is equally fine as his harried girlfriend, who apparently lied to Grizzard about her age. (When she told Bonnie her true age, she had a very sheepish look on her face while Grizzard gave her an amazed look as if to say: "I didn't know you were THAT old!) Anyway, this is a great film and loads of fun to watch on a rainy Sunday afternoon when there's nothing else to do. It's great to watch with "The Untouchables," 1959, starring Robert Stack and "The St. Valentine's Day Massacre," 1967 starring Jason Robards. I rate this film 10 stars out of a possible 10.

The catalyst of poverty without opportunity, combined with rage and a rejection of society, resulting in chaos, murder, mayhem, with a background of depression era America. Two of the greatest performances of the time capture the menace deployed by the Barrow Gang as they carve, shoot and slaughter their way into cult stardom, both on and off screen - the super antiheroes of their day.

It can be a challenge accepting interpretation over fact but if fact is a cornerstone of your experience then perhaps documentaries are more to your taste. Once you take the lives of others and throw them on the big screen it's done for entertainment not education, so you have to be prepared to take things with varying sized pinches of salt. You can always follow up the facts later if the fancy takes you. Cult heroes to some, raging psychopaths to others - either way, characters that appear in various guises over the course of cinematic history and more likely will continue to do so for some time to come - always a fiction but occasionally grounded in fact.