BONNIE AND CLYDE (WB-Seven Arts 1967) Warner Home Video

There is a school of thought in Hollywood, long-since adopted as a time-honored precept to suggest, when the legend outclasses the truth, rely on the legend to sell your tickets. It certainly worked for director, Arthur Penn.  An over-simplification of truth, to an outright fabrication of the facts, Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde (1967) takes a very loose-tongued and playful crack at one of America’s most notorious husband and wife teams – Bonnie Parker and Cyde Barrow, transforming these public enemies into a modern-day ‘robbin’ Hood with as much guts as glory to be gleaned from the exercise. For the record, Bonnie Elizabeth Parker and Clyde Chestnut Barrow were not the fun-loving, misguided, and otherwise misunderstood galoots as outlined in David Newman and Robert Benton’s screenplay, but a rather ruthless pair of slightly psychotic binge-worthy boogie-'men', eventually undone buying into their own public image, transformed in the papers from those who dared to stage a string of audacious robberies across the American Midwest during the Great Depression into mile-high folk heroes, defying the system and the law. During their Tommy-gunned tirade of rural shops and gas stations it is believed the real Bonnie and Clyde were responsible for the deaths of 9 police officers and 4 civilians before meeting their own untimely end in a police ambush near Gibsland, Louisiana in 1934. And while the legend surrounding the couple would have us believe in Bonnie as an equal partner, in reality, she never partook of the actual robberies as anything but the getaway driver. She never even smoked – her embellishment as the tough-as-nails gun moll, part pure press-instituted pulp, and part Hollywood’s love affair with the gangster class. So, perhaps it isn’t surprising Warner Bros. should have made the picture to pay homage to this dastardly duo, as the studio was famously known as ‘murderer’s row’ in the early thirties – home to Cagney, Bogart, Raft and the like who proliferated the studio-sanctioned ‘ripped from the headlines’ crime/thriller, readily to sell out the house: audiences, infatuated by the deification of crime. Even if it didn’t pay – it made for one hell of a damn good movie, was glamorous while it lasted, and, perpetuated the mythology surrounding these public enemies, risen anew, sustained, and even nurtured as movie-land art.

Penn’s movie would have us believe in Parker and Barrow as just a pair of sincerely flawed figures of fun, with a gat and a smile, looting banks – who could afford to take the loss. Realistically, banks were too big for Bonnie and Clyde. He, preferred small, out-of-the-way filling stations and general stores with minimal collateral damage in amateur heroics from the locals. Newspaper headlines of the day were first to makeover the couple as infamous and compelling fugitives. But in life, Bonnie never fired a gun. She did not even directly participate in the stick-ups. Instead, she was the gang’s logistics expert – planning their activities and aiding in transportation to and from the crime scenes. The 1967 movie would prefer a more active role for Bonnie Parker. After all, it lends credence to the sexually neurotic performance given by a slinky Faye Dunaway - one of the cinema’s most enduring and electric femme fatales. Historically regarded as the first ‘new Hollywood’ production to shatter many pre-existing taboos and forever splinter the waning supremacy of the industry’s reigning production code of ethics – for its time, Bonnie and Clyde was something quite unique and daring - becoming a runaway hit with younger audiences, who favored its glib devil-may-care ultra violence and laissez faire approach to sex - strangely blue and even slightly comedic. So meager was Warner Bros. faith in the project, they offered actor, Warren Beatty 40% of the movie’s gross in lieu of his usual fee. Beatty accepted and was well-rewarded when the picture went on to gross over $70 million worldwide, making Beatty an overnight millionaire.

The artistic liberties taken with fact are many and worth noting. First off, for budgetary reasons, the number of gang members was pared down to a manageable five.  To expedite the narrative – getting to the good stuff sooner – virtually all references to the gang’s repeated incarcerations was omitted. Bonnie and Clyde would instead appear to have gone on one uninterrupted crime spree capped off by their untimely end. Finally, the Newman/Benton screenplay chose to overlook virtually all of the cold-blooded murders the gang committed. The character of C.W. Moss (Michael J. Pollard) was actually an amalgam of two Barrow Gang members - Henry Methvin and Henry Daniel Jones – the latter, still very much alive when the picture was made, and, filing a lawsuit against Warner Bros., claiming his ‘credibility’ had been ‘maligned’. The movie also presents Texas Ranger Frank Hamer (Denver Pyle) as a reoccurring fop, rife for humiliation - an inept and hateful cliché of southern bigot gone to seed. In actuality, Hamer’s first contact with the duo was the successful ambush that riddled the couple's car in a hailstorm of bullets.

Greatly influenced by the French New Wave's non-linear editing style, Benton/Newman's screenplay opens with a screwball slapstick interpretation of Clyde Barrow’s (Warren Beatty) first stick-up. Flatt & Schrugg’s Foggy Mountain Breakdown banjo music transforms this violent crime into Keystone comedy and immediately sets the tone for the artifice that will follow it. We cut away to a sexually repressed Bonnie Parker (Faye Dunaway) longing for the touch of a man inside her hot upstairs attic bedroom while her mother (Mabel Cavitt) decries the girl’s lack of ambition to do anything but laze around all day. Presumably to escape eternal boredom, Bonnie elopes with Clyde and thereafter accompanies him on every hold-up – the couple, ‘getting off’ on their mutual rush of exhilaration in pulling off these daring capers with complete success. Along the way, Clyde acquires the services of a backward clerk, C.W. Moss (Michael Pollard), his cousin, Buck (Gene Hackman) and his wife, Blanche (Estelle Parsons). This gang of five cuts a formidable swath across the Midwest, much to the chagrin of Sheriff Frank Hamer, whose embarrassment, anxious dismay and seething anger incrementally grow with each new robbery. Eventually, the authorities catch up to Clyde and his entourage. In a shoot out worthy of the old thirties ‘crime doesn’t pay’ dramas, the cops capture Blanche, Buck and C.W. Alas, the daring duo once again escapes, bidding a final farewell to Bonnie’s mother before becoming the victims of a staged turkey shoot along the lonely open road.

The final moments of Bonnie and Clyde unfurl as pure homage to this Romeo & Juliet of the Tommy-gun age; Bonnie, passionately reaching for Clyde just moments before Hamer and his deputies open fire. The introduction of ‘squibs’ – small explosive charges detonated beneath actors' clothing – afforded this sequence its then uncharacteristic and intense bloody finish. Despite Bonnie and Clyde's initial success, critics were appalled by the escalated level of violence, also, its mostly tongue-in-cheek handling to act as a counterbalance to the reality of crime itself – still, hopefully regarded as not worth the time and effort to commit. Today, some 50+ years after its release, controversy continues to surround the movie. To be certain, from a pure narrative perspective, the story remains uneven and untrue. Characters here are played as cardboard cutouts, cartoony, crass and comical. Beatty’s Barrow is portrayed as a cute and sexy guy who gets out his frustrations by stealing from those who can afford to lose, while Dunaway’s Bonnie is recast as a hot-blooded nympho, who is as aroused by stealing as sex.  The employment of such ultra lampoon builds a monument to these mythologized criminals.  Although Faye Dunaway delivers a fairly straight forward performance – arguably the one credible piece of acting in the movie – the rest of the cast never seem to take either the script or themselves too seriously. Given such indifference at representing the duo as big-hearted, thick-headed and gun-totting avengers out for a good time, we are somewhat stilted in our admiration, left wondering what all the fuss was to have made Bonnie and Clyde such a household name in the first place. The slapstick approach to violence does more than simply make the whole enterprise slightly silly. It distills the legend into mere figures of fun.

Warner Home Video’s Blu-Ray sports some fairly attractive colors. The studio undertook a considerable effort to restore the image with minimal tinkering, perfectly to capture the dusty, southwestern palette of browns, beiges, greens and blues, with warmly saturated skin tones. Occasionally, there is a momentary splash of color, as in Dunaway’s blood red lips. But otherwise, cinematographer, Burnett Guffey has achieved a very ‘Depression-era’ look to these visuals, sporting some delicious grain, and deep black levels.  Bonnie and Clyde was released to Blu in the early foray of the studio’s hi-def offerings. So, we get only a Dolby Digital 1.0 mono track – true to its source, with the anticipated ‘dated’ characteristic. Extras include a 43-minute History Channel bio on the real Bonnie and Clyde and a 22-minute ‘making of’ for this movie. We also get deleted scenes, screen and wardrobe tests, and, a theatrical trailer. Bottom line: while I have never particularly warmed to Bonnie and Clyde – the movie – this Blu-ray gives an accurate representation of what it must have looked like theatrically. So, recommended for fans of the movie.

FILM RATING (out of 5 - 5 being the best)

3.5

VIDEO/AUDIO

4.5

EXTRAS

3