Arthur Penn (1967)
In his brilliant book Scenes from a Revolution – The Birth of the New Hollywood, Mark Harris quotes from the prefatory note that Robert Benton and David Newman included with their original treatment for Bonnie and Clyde, which they submitted to François Truffaut:
‘Bonnie and Clyde were out of their time in the 30s. … If Bonnie and Clyde were here today, they would be hip. Their values have become assimilated in much of our culture – not robbing banks and killing people, of course, but their style, their sexuality, their bravado, their delicacy, their cultivated arrogance, their narcissistic insecurity, their curious ambition have relevance to the way we live now.’
Bonnie and Clyde has become a classic for a variety of reasons but the writers’ take on the material, as outlined in that quote, is one of the best of these. Harris goes on to explain that:
‘Truffaut got the point and helped the young writers move past the didacticism to which that statement of principle could have led and toward a kind of storytelling in which their concerns could be integrated organically. … Truffaut also let them know that, as much as they thought their idea was indebted to the French, they needed to look deeper into film history, particularly at some of the neglected American crime dramas that had inspired the directors of the Nouvelle Vague in the first place.’
Arthur Penn’s direction feeds off Benton and Newman’s insight that audiences were ready to be attracted by Bonnie and Clyde’s countercultural glamour. Penn also exploits nostalgic impulses – particularly the way the 1960s audience saw American cinema of the 1930s. (Now, of course, it taps into nostalgia for ground-breaking 1960s cinema too.) The film contains well-chosen examples of Bonnie and Clyde’s popularity at the height of their criminal career – this coincided with the depths of the Great Depression, when the idea of robbing the financial institutions that had done much to cause the slump had widespread appeal. In effect, Penn, Benton and Newman juxtapose the pair’s notoriety during their criminal lifetimes with a celebrity conferred on them through a 1960s prism.
Bonnie and Clyde is a watershed in American film in more ways than one – in terms of violence on screen, its creators’ conscious attempt to make a commercially successful art movie, and Warren Beatty’s contribution as producer as well as star. According to Mark Harris, it was Pauline Kael’s famous defence of the picture that got her the job on The New Yorker. (In addition to its starring role in Harris’s book, the film is also the starting point of Peter Biskind’s Easy Riders, Raging Bulls.) It was refreshing to see it again in the cinema, and to try and divorce that experience from the historical significance that the picture has accrued over the years. Although I wasn’t able to exclude entirely thoughts about what the film meant as a piece of film history, I was newly impressed by Bonnie and Clyde as a film.
The early sequences – the first meeting of Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker – don’t amount to a slam-bang opening but Arthur Penn develops a momentum amazingly quickly (and never loses it): you feel caught up with Bonnie and Clyde, as they are caught up with each other, before they’ve committed any crime together. The banjo instrumental (‘Foggy Mountain Breakdown’ by Flatt and Scruggs) is cleverly used by Penn. It’s the same, insistent theme throughout: because the mood of what’s on screen darkens so much, the unchangingness of the music underlines more powerfully the development of the story. The violence is still shocking – because it’s technically inventive, because it turns your increasing, sentimental complicity with the Barrow gang against you, and because the characters are so absorbingly realised in the meantime that the violent episodes always seem to erupt into normal life, always take you by surprise. At the same time, the bursts of gunfire get longer, presaging the extraordinary final sequence in which Bonnie and Clyde are killed.
Bonnie and Clyde isn’t perfect but even the imperfect bits have considerable compensations. The sequence in which the gang abduct a thirtyish courting couple goes on too long – this eventually dissipates the grimly funny balance between hysterical sociability and terror which Gene Wilder (in his big screen debut), as the splendidly named Eugene Grizzard, is able to sustain for a commendably long time. It’s effective, however, that the abduction comes to an abrupt end – with the couple turfed out of the car to find their own way home in darkness – as soon as Eugene reveals his profession. (He’s an undertaker.) The shifting registers of Bonnie and Clyde’s return to visit her family in rural Texas are confusing rather than enriching: the dialogue makes its point (that Bonnie and her people won’t see each other again) conventionally; yet the passage is photographed to give it the quality of a lovely, evanescent dream. Bonnie’s mother (Mabel Cavitt), although she’s affecting, seems a person who’s walked in from a documentary. Even so, the sequence is memorable (more so than a later scene that sees a group of locals assist the injured Bonnie and Clyde – although this fuses the dramatic and the documentary much more satisfyingly).
There’s plenty in Mark Harris’s book about the gradual attenuation of what Benton and Newman put in early versions of their screenplay about the sexually ambivalent relationships among Bonnie, Clyde and C W Moss, the mechanic who joins the gang. Warren Beatty notoriously insisted on the inclusion of a scene in which the impotent Clyde rises to the occasion with Bonnie. This moment does feel artificial, not least because the earlier descriptions of the couple’s sexual failures are so convincing – especially an extended, cramped bedroom sequence, which has remarkable emotional volatility. Yet it’s hard to see, given the intrinsic falsity of the consummation, how the filmmakers could have got closer to making it credible – both the lead-in and the follow-up. Bonnie reads one of her poems to Clyde and he’s enthused by the sense that her setting them down in writing has made him someone. Beatty brilliantly conveys the mixture of affectionate gratitude and narcissism which turns Clyde on and which carries through into his euphoria at making it with Bonnie.
The five main performances in Bonnie and Clyde are so well known that it’s good to be reminded they’re all excellent. Gene Hackman is outstanding as Clyde’s brother Buck – gauchely genial, as infantile in his way as Clyde is in his. As so often, Hackman illuminates lack of glamour: he’s marvellous telling a joke about putting brandy in an old woman’s drink of milk; he’s magical telling the same joke a second time. Estelle Parsons’s holier-than-thou hysteria as Buck’s wife Blanche (a preacher’s daughter) is very powerful. You get the sense that this shrill, nagging woman would make a prim fuss about nothing: as Blanche has more and more reason to make a fuss, she becomes grotesquely, pitifully funny. Parsons inhabits the dumpy Blanche’s outfits very expressively. Michael J Pollard, as CW, never had a part like this before or after Bonnie and Clyde. He has the sense not to work his eccentric appearance and he’s genuinely touching in his loyalty to Bonnie and Clyde, especially his tearful expression of ashamed inadequacy (as the trio watch the ‘We’re in the Money’ number from Gold Diggers of 1933 in a picture house, after making a getaway that’s badly botched by CW’s parking of their car outside the bank). Pollard’s slender, boyish body under the round, comical face makes you aware of CW’s youth in an unstressed, upsetting way.
Faye Dunaway as Bonnie is less straightforwardly successful than the other four. She seems awkward and actressy in the opening sequences, as Bonnie lies furiously bored in her bedroom at home then flirts with Clyde; there are some later moments when her acting seems relatively effortful. But Dunaway’s fashion model looks and the fact that she wears Bonnie’s outfits superbly make a vital contribution to the underlying cross-over between 1930s and 1960s celebrity and allure (since she was barely known as a screen actress in 1967 her impact in this respect must have been all the stronger at the time). And there’s no doubting her chemistry with Beatty: from the moment that Clyde first evades Bonnie’s sexual advances to him, she’s a woman with a mission. Dunaway is very good and communicative when Bonnie is listening to Clyde. The playing in some of the smaller parts is variable. Evans Evans is good as the undertaker’s girlfriend; Denver Pyle as the Texas ranger and Dub Taylor as CW’s father, although they’re theatrically effective enough, are a shade too emphatic (and Pyle, because the role is larger, becomes monotonous).
The picture won Oscars for Best Supporting Actress (Parsons) and Best Cinematography (Burnett Guffey) and was robbed of plenty of others – including the prizes for direction, writing, film editing (Dede Allen) and costume design (Theadora van Runkle).
15 July 2009
