When I was around 10 years old, I happened to be flipping through the channels on our family TV set, a 20-inch Magnavox color set. It was a hot South Florida summer Saturday afternoon, and with most of my friends either in summer school or on vacation, I had nothing better to do than to read a book or watch television.
In 1973, we didn’t have cable or satellite television, and even Fox, UPN, and the WB hadn’t even been dreamed of yet. We had the Big Three networks (ABC, CBS, and NBC), a Spanish language channel, and a couple of independent channels on the VHF and UHF bands; usually I watched WCIX because it ran movies quite frequently – the 8 o’clock movie on weekday nights, and two afternoon flicks on weekends.
I’m not sure whether it was the one or three o’clock movie that I happened to catch that day, but the image that I saw never quite left me – it was the climactic ambush that comes at the end of director Arthur Penn’s 1967 Depression-era crime drama, Bonnie and Clyde.
Compared to, say, the first 20 minutes of Saving Private Ryan or some of the shootout scenes from the Die Hard movies, the sequence where Clyde Barrow (Warren Beatty) and Bonnie Parker (Faye Dunaway) are turned into bits of human Swiss cheese by a small army of state troopers and G-men in a Louisiana meadow is almost tame, but for a movie from the 1960s the level of violence was unprecedented.
To see the youthful and dashing features of Clyde and the vixenish Bonnie’s face and body be disfigured and bloodied so vividly and in color still stirs feelings of both retribution and regret. Retribution because in both the film and real life Bonnie, Clyde, and their small gang of bank robbers had no compunction about robbing and killing people. Regret because Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker were a product of their era, when millions of Americans were unemployed and financially unsound.
It was a desperate time, and so, after a chance meeting, Bonnie and Clyde, dragging his brother Buck Barrow (Gene Hackman) and sister-in-law Blanche (Estelle Parsons in her film debut), and acolyte C.W. Moss (Michael J. Pollard) along in a rapidly escalating crime wave that starts with bank robberies across several Southern and Dust Bowl states and culminates with murder, putting them in the crosshairs of Texas Rangers, Oklahoma cops, Louisiana sheriffs, and federal G-men.
In the context of the Depression, Bonnie and Clyde – and other outlaws such as John Dillinger and Al Capone – inspired mixed reactions in the public, being reviled, on the one hand, for their violent and anti-social behavior while, on the other hand, being held up as modern day equivalents of Robin Hood and his merry gang of thieves.
Pretty seductive stuff, and it’s even more so when you consider the undeniable chemistry between Beatty’s Clyde, a charming rogue with a lack of moral scruples and an itchy trigger finger, and Dunaway’s Bonnie, whose raw sexuality is palpable even at the first chance meeting between the killer Romeo and Juliet. Their liaison and criminal career is a noxious mix of self-centered narcissism, amorality, and a total lack of empathy toward their fellow human beings, yet we can’t tear ourselves from their tale, bloody, violent, and nearly mythical in an All-American way.
As with most Hollywood films based on real events, the screenplay takes liberties with reality, particularly when dealing with the touchy subject of Clyde Barrow’s sexuality. Beatty (who not only starred in Bonnie and Clyde but produced it) plays Barrow as a man suffering from impotence; in real life, the notorious criminal was bisexual. To be sure, for audiences in 1967 to not only be confronted with the picture’s violence but also with Clyde’s alternative lifestyle it would have been a bit too much to ask.
Nevertheless, even if Bonnie and Clyde mixes fact, myth, and a bit of sexual revisionism, it is still one of the best films in American film history, inspiring directors such as Sam Peckinpah to push the envelope in their depiction of graphic violence. Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch, for one, took Bonnie and Clyde’s gory dances of bullets and death as a starting point then took them a bit further. Soon, most American gangster, Western, and war movies were less shy about spilling fake blood and gore as audiences became accustomed to realism and came to expect it.
It’s also a no-holds barred look at the Great Depression, one of the defining periods in American history in which nearly one out of three Americans was out of work and the socio-economic fabric was fraying.
With gangsters already making money hand over fist peddling illegal booze during Prohibition and with millions of Americans already flouting the law by drinking in speakeasies or carrying hip flasks of bathtub gin, it’s no wonder that bank robbers and gunmen such as Bonnie and Clyde became semi-legends in their short and violent career.
The acting, of course, is top notch, with Beatty and Dunaway leading a cast of great character actors. Gene Hackman, playing Clyde’s luckless brother Buck so well that he melts into the part, does his usually fine performance, while Michael J. Pollard steals almost every scene as hanger-on C.W. Moss. (Star Trek fans will recognize Pollard from the Original Series episode “Miri,” where he played a 300-year old child on an Earth-like planet devastated by biological warfare.)
Trivia fans: Bonnie and Clyde, oddly enough, was not only Estelle Parson’s film debut, but it was also Gene Wilder’s first appearance in any movie.
Main Cast:
Warren Beatty … Clyde Barrow
Faye Dunaway … Bonnie Parker
Michael J. Pollard … C.W. Moss
Gene Hackman … Buck Barrow
Estelle Parsons … Blanche
