Posted on 08/13/2007 6:31:22 AM PDT by ParsifalCA
As New York Times critic A.O. Scott wrote recently, forty years ago this summer the movie that changed the movies premiered. Anybody old enough to remember films before Bonnie and Clyde can testify to the jolting power of Arthur Penn’s kinetic blend of blue-grass slapstick, Depression-era nostalgia, and gruesome, stylized violence. But something else was revealed then, something that I, 14 at the time, was too callow and ignorant to notice behind the cinematic innovations––the moral idiocy that has since come to define pretty much most of American popular culture.
Bonnie and Clyde staked a claim to a moral seriousness that supposedly validated the stylistic innovations and elevated the film beyond mere flashy entertainment. Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker, played with fashion-magazine glamour by Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway, are “just folks,” as Dunaway says in the movie, salt-of-the-earth Americans driven to crime by the machinations of the evil banks they rob for some justified payback, Texan Robin Hoods admired by the common-man victims of American capitalism. Yet the “man,” embodied in the sadistic Texas Ranger Frank Hamer, wouldn’t let them be, hunting them down and slaughtering them in the movie’s famous bloody climax, just after Bonnie and Clyde had finally found the soft-focus sexual fulfillment of a typical Hollywood romance.
The Marxiste folk-tale underlying the movie’s otherwise conventional star-crossed-lovers plot was obvious, and as much as the cinematic innovations accounted for the film’s popularity with many critics [more]
(Excerpt) Read more at exilestreet.com ...
Agreed. Bonnie appears to have had quite the rack.
B & C were so glorified even before the movie came out to the point that my mom thought they hadn't killed anybody. I, as a kid, had to educate her about that.
Bonnie and Clyde were a pair of psychos... I enjoyed the part at the end where they were machine-gunned.
My wife and I went to the Texas Rangers Museum in Waco a few years ago. Frank Hammer’s guns that he used against Bonnie & Clyde are on display.
A great museum to visit.
Also, when LBJ stole his first Senate election near Kingsville, Tx in 1948, Hammer was sent alone to break up a riot . He must have been one tough son-of-a-gun.
Bonnie and Clyde killed innocent people. Those deaths get minimized and devalued in the glamorization of evil. I thought Jesse James was a folk hero until I read about his cold blooded execution during a bank robbery of a man James thought was a Union adversary in the war. The problem was Jesse had the wrong man. At least Bob Ford knew who he was murdering.
To me, the movie really isn't about the the historical Bonnie and Clyde at all -- it's about how people create their own inexorable destinies.
Bonnie: What would you do if some miracle happened and we could walk out of here tomorrow morning and start all over again clean? No record and nobody after us, huh?Clyde: Well, uh, I guess I'd do it all different. First off, I wouldn't live in the same state where we pull our jobs. We'd live in another state. We'd stay clean there and then when we'd take a bank, we'd go into the other state ...
I love Hamer’s words after he dealth with Bonnie and Clyde. He stated “I hate to bust a cap on a woman especially when she was sitting down but if it hadn’t of been them it would have been us”.
He was real old style lawman.
Hammer ambushed B & C near Vidalia, Louisiana. The father who supposedly told Hammer where B & C would be, was played by one of the best character actors ever: Dub Taylor. His boy, Buck Taylor was a regular on “Gunsmoke”.
***As New York Times critic A.O. Scott wrote recently, forty years ago this summer the movie that changed the movies premiered.***
Actually there were several films that caused quite a stir at that time.
Bonnie and Clyde.
Villa Rides! (Before Bobby Kennedy’s murder critics said it was good western. After the murder, a movie that glorifed violence.)
A Fist full of Dollars.
For a Few dollars More.
Good the Bad and the Ugly.
The Wild Bunch (My favorite)
And who can remember the uproar over those “sadistic” JAMES BOND films.
Must not forget ROSMARY’S BABY.
2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)
You don’t have to go to the movies to see historical inaccuracies and leftist propaganda. I was watching the History Channel a few months ago, and they had a program about the most notorious outlaws of the Great Depression like Dillinger and Pretty Boy Floyd. The program actually depicted the hoodlums as being victims of society and portrayed Hoover and the F.B.I as monstrous villains who mercilessly gunned down those heroic outlaws. I couldn’t believe what I was viewing. So the propaganda and indoctrination proceeds on other media venues. You don’t have to go to the flicks to get your anti-American dose.
That movie and Sam Peckinpah brought graphic violence to mainstream movies. Not something to celebrate.
This is a very true analysis about what Bonnie & Clyde did to transform the movie culture. I would state, however, that if it hadn’t been this one, someone else would have done it.
The scene you quoted is one of the best in the movie; it shows the fundamental difference between the romance Bonnie imagines, and the reality of the man she has fallen in love with.
I had the same reaction.
“Dead Man Walking” with Sean Penn getting the needle was also an enjoyable ending.
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