Two associations spring to my mind: First, how does 1973's Badlands relate to B&C? Those two are aimless with no hint of the folk-hero. Then of course the Badlands remakes (or versions of the Starkweather-Fugate story) followed. Maybe Badlands and B&C are different animals because the former went on a killing spree, the latter were robbers who killed? I dunno.
Also, Clyde's impotence called to mind a scene in an early Gus Van Sant movie (maybe Drugstore Cowboy?) where the girlfriend complains "I always have to drive and you never fuck me." Is the impotent or uninterested male a minor tradition of on-the run or lowlife characters?
chuck tryon
· 1 year ago
Hmmm..interesting question. Trying to remember other road-trip/on-the-run type movies (Easy Rider, Butch and Sundance), but it has been a while. Haven't seen Drugstore Cowboy in years. Need to remedy that.
Mannion
· 1 year ago
I hadn't thought of the Gus Van Sant connection. But I wonder if Van Sant was aware of this: Clyde wasn't impotent in the original script, he was bisexual.
chuck tryon
· 1 year ago
Just making sure that everything is working then I'll probably duck out for a bit. As I mentioned on my blog, Bonnie and Clyde is probably the film I most enjoy teaching. Such a beautifully executed film.
Mannion
· 1 year ago
Is the Siren here yet?
Campaspe
· 1 year ago
Present! I hope Chuck comes back too. I absolutely love this movie. Jack Warner was so wrong he was almost right. I love the way Bonnie and Clyde takes the subversive elements of the old Warners gangster pictures, the persistent sense that the violence and robbery and mayhem are fun, and brings it way up in the foreground.
chuck tryon
· 1 year ago
I'm here...responded to Lance's question about how I teach the film below, but I'll add here that I often teach a lot of the historical information you cited above (the connections to the French New Wave, etc). I especially get a kick out of telling my students that Shirley MacLaine was originally considered for the role of Bonnie and then wait for my students to figure out why that wouldn't work out so well. Now that I have a lot of non-traditional students, they usually figure it out pretty quickly.
But another thing while I'm thinking about it: they're usually really mystified by Clyde's sexuality. Many of them figure out (or speculate) that he's possibly bisexual (even though he's rewritten as impotent). Interesting stuff.
tomwatson
· 1 year ago
The requisite YouTube videos for some visual encouragement along the way:
I hope Chuck comes back soon. I'd like to know where he begins his class on Bonnie and Clyde.
chuck tryon
· 1 year ago
Hi, sorry got a bit distracted looking for images for the book. Basically, I teach Bonnie and Clyde in my Intro to Film class the week that I teach editing. Obviously it's a prefect film for that...some of the most brilliant editing of all time. I start with the scene at the beginning of the film in which Bonnie is sipping on a Coke and she's licking the bottle (which my students absolutely love, btw). And when Bonnie questions whether Clyde is really a bank robber he pulls (whips?) out his gun. But instead of panning down from a close-up of Clyde's face, it's an incredibly quick cut, perfectly registering Bonnie's excitement and shock (and maybe ours).
Mannion
· 1 year ago
I think I'd start at the ambush and work back from there.
Mannion
· 1 year ago
Would depend on what films the class had already watched and discussed.
Mannion
· 1 year ago
Roaring 20s, Little Caesar, Angels With Dirty Faces, White Heat...
Mannion
· 1 year ago
I found it funny that Jack Warner thought Bonnie and Clyde was just a run of the mill old fashioned gangster movie like the kind his studio used to make.
Mannion
· 1 year ago
Cagney's gangsters were never this dumb!
RickPerlstein
· 1 year ago
Hey, gang, Rick Perlstein here, sitting in a bar on the North Side of Chicago after seeing a sneak-preview rough cut of a new documentary called "What's the Matter with Kansas."
Mannion
· 1 year ago
Hey, Rick. Glad you could stop in. How was the documentary? And what are you drinking there?
RickPerlstein
· 1 year ago
$1 PBR.
The documentary, which a very sweet couple spent four years on, was disappointing. They're not good storytellers. And they're no Tom Frank.
chuck tryon
· 1 year ago
That's too bad. I actually think that it may be too little too late. Many of those so-called red states aren't quite as caught up in the Bush/theoconservative populism that was so major in 2004.
tomwatson
· 1 year ago
Hiya Rick - enjoying your book immensely, what a fine read.
Mannion
· 1 year ago
Or is the word I really want "innocent"?
Campaspe
· 1 year ago
ha, see below. That's my word.
RickPerlstein
· 1 year ago
In interviews I've called "Bonnie and Clyde" the most important text of the New Left, more important than anything by Marcuse of C. Wright Mills or whoever. Anyone think that's interesting? Right? Wrong? Crazy? Inscrutable?
Mannion
· 1 year ago
It's a whole lot more fun than Marcuse, that's for sure.
Mannion
· 1 year ago
I was just beginning to compare Bonnie and Clyde to Cagney and George Raft in the old time gangster movies, saying that next to them Bonnie and Clyde are kind of, well, dumb.
RickPerlstein
· 1 year ago
THe relation to the old gangster movies is fascinating. One of the most interesting things to me from the book was how the crusty old studio head did understand why all the fuss about just another gangster movie like they used to make in the 1930s.
"Dumb," perhaps; but I would say more importantly Beatty conveys this kind of bafflement before the world that resembles, to take another character described in the book, Benjamin Braddock.
Campaspe
· 1 year ago
I would call it more innocence than stupidity. It's an uncommonly destructive innocence, but they retain it up to the end.
Mannion
· 1 year ago
Rick, the quote from Ben Hecht in your book, just before the passage I put in my post, was priceless. Made me wonder though if Warner thought he'd already fought a lot of the battles "Bonnie and Clyde" faced. Cagney was always the hero of those movies even when he was at his worst. The anti-hero didn't get invented in the 60s after all. Warner might have felt like he'd been there, done that.
tomwatson
· 1 year ago
Bonnie and Clyde are a clueless pair of non-intellectuals, acting purely on impulse - they seem less like rebels against a system than free spirits who can't be controlled.
Now Blanche Barrow, the preacher's daughter who gets in with a bunch of killers and becomes a willing (though regretful) accomplice - that's some dark and dangerous late 60s allegory right there.
Mannion
· 1 year ago
But their "dumbness" doesn't seem to have impressed itself on the audiences of 1967. They saw them as something else. "Innocent" maybe?
Campaspe
· 1 year ago
Hi Rick! I'd love to hear more about its political implications. I always found it rather anarchic. They aren't really out to right injustice, in fact they barely notice it for the most part. They haven't given up on the system, it doesn't even figure in their lives. The couple certainly fulfills a lot of right-wing notions about what the 60s left was like ...
tomwatson
· 1 year ago
Except if it were a right-wing flick, Bonnie and Clyde would be rich Scarsdale types...
Campaspe
· 1 year ago
robbing to get back all those "stolen" taxes.
tomwatson
· 1 year ago
Exactly - class traitors...which you can call the Barrow gang.
klg19
· 1 year ago
Nice intro, Lance. You absolutely set the scene.
I can't remember how old I was the first time I saw Bonnie & Clyde. In my 20s, maybe? Teens? Late '70s-ish?
I had sen Michael J Pollard in, like, "Lost in Space" episodes, or maybe Disney films, and wasn't really prepared for his role here. And the whole thing just blew me away.
LOVE the Jack Warner anecdote. Love it to death. Totally understand why he would think so, too--movies were changing so much and, on paper, this might have looked like "The Roaring Twenties" or something. "They Live by Night." How to predict that it would turn out to be?
Jane Fonda might not have been so bad...
Campaspe
· 1 year ago
I think Fonda could have hit it out of the park, but she would have been a tougher Bonnie, I think.
klg19
· 1 year ago
Yes, I think you're right. Klute-era Jane, tough as nails. God, she was great.
Dunaway had...well, yeah, a kind of innocent delight that I don't know if Fonda would have gotten. But who am I to say? How can I tell how she would have played it? Could any woman be completely tough around Beatty in 1967??
Campaspe
· 1 year ago
HA. I couldn't have. Vintage Beatty makes me swoon.
But yeah, think of Fonda in They Shoot Horses, Don't They? Tough as nails, grabbing her own fate no matter how horrible.
Come to think of it, Susannah York might have made an interesting Bonnie although she's all wrong vocally.
RickPerlstein
· 1 year ago
"Cluelessness" was political. The counterculture idea that it was the straight world that was insane, and that the insane--or the outlaws--were the only sane one. Huge theme of New Left intellectual life, for instance. R.D. Lang, the radical psychlogist: "The texture of the fabric of these socially shared hallucinations is what we call reality, and our collusive madness is what we call sanity"
Campaspe
· 1 year ago
Looked at like that, you've definitely got a point. There is often a 60s tinge to the film's ambience, as in the Gene Wilder scene. It's deliberately fusing the revolutionary, tear-it-down fervor of the moment with the Depression.
tomwatson
· 1 year ago
Right, the Wilder character - bourgeois undertaker worried about his fancy car and how well his hamburger is cooked, slightly excited (a thrill going up his leg) to be hanging out with real outlaws.
And the "people's" reaction to the Barrow gang's exploits - that's certainly New Left, the idea that common folk understood the hopelessness of the system. 'Course that was the case with the James gang as well, though they were racist vigilante murderers and Klan types.
Campaspe
· 1 year ago
Yes, what does the farmer say -- they did right by me, and I'll bring flowers to their funeral. The common people know the system's rigged and rebels are doomed.
tomwatson
· 1 year ago
Yep, that was a clear bit of clumsy politickin'
Mannion
· 1 year ago
I'm trying to imagine what it would have been like to have been a grown-up at a time when reading RD Lang and going to see Bonnie and Clyde would have been part of the same intellectual process.
tomwatson
· 1 year ago
Well, and Denver Pyle - only the year before he'd been an Andy Griffith Show character...
tomwatson
· 1 year ago
I have the film on now, one thought: if they gave an Oscar for location scouting, Bonnie and Clyde would be an easy choice. The locations are incredible, like another major star in the cast.
Mannion
· 1 year ago
And to think Goddard wanted to film it in New Jersey...in the winter.
RickPerlstein
· 1 year ago
Does the book say Goddard wanted to shoot the thing in New Jersey...in winter?
Mannion
· 1 year ago
Yep. I think he wanted to give it a contemporary setting too.
tomwatson
· 1 year ago
Wow - well, they made the right call. The locations make it. Is there any soundstage work in the entire movie?
RickPerlstein
· 1 year ago
Great minds and all that.
RickPerlstein
· 1 year ago
There's also a sixties countercultural fetish about media--the idea of spectacle. Abbie Hoffman said "I fight through the jungles of TV." Clyde's impotence is cured only when he sees his picture in the paper.
And my neighbor Bill Ayers always wears his "Weather Underground" movie jacket. First time I met him he wouldn't shut up about the Sundance festival, where he'd just been.
chuck tryon
· 1 year ago
Wow--that's an interesting point. I'm stealing that when I teach Bonnie and Clyde this fall.
RickPerlstein
· 1 year ago
It' all in my book!
chuck tryon
· 1 year ago
I'll be sure to read it as soon as I finish working on mine (which will be later this summer, hopefully).
tomwatson
· 1 year ago
Mine comes out in October (call this the plug thread)!
chuck tryon
· 1 year ago
Mine doesn't come out 'til March 2009, but I have to have a full draft by the end of the month.
tomwatson
· 1 year ago
Looking forward to it, Chuck
Mannion
· 1 year ago
Bill Ayers is your neighbor too, Rick. Damn. There go your prospects for running for President.
chuck tryon
· 1 year ago
BTW, not sure you saw it, but I responded to your teaching question above. Short version: I use B&C to teach editing. But I forgot to mention earlier that I also show them a lot of the Works Progress Administration photographs of the Dust Bowl and th Migrant Mother photos and compare them to the scene at the foreclosed house and the scene where Bonnie goes back to see her mother.
tomwatson
· 1 year ago
Loved that scene, the mother's farewell - that vacant stare is borrowed from Grapes of Wrath.
Campaspe
· 1 year ago
I must have seen this movie a half-dozen times and I may never figure out precisely how they manage the contrast between the gleaming, gorgeous Bonnie and Clyde and their almost slapstick exploits, and all the visual quotation of those harrowing WPA photographs. One tiny misjudgment and it becomes the worst kind of exploitative bad taste.
Well, I suppose it did strike critics that way at the time...
chuck tryon
· 1 year ago
Yeah, but it works brilliantly. I sort of feel sorry for Bosley Crowther for writing such a notorious review.
klg19
· 1 year ago
Well, Crowther was a Very Moral Man. Have you ever read his review of Ocean's Eleven? He's shocked--shocked!--that fine, upstanding WW2 veterans would use their skills in the service of crime. It's a scream.
Campaspe
· 1 year ago
I do too. Did you catch AO Scott's defense of Crowther a few months ago? He ended by saying, "basically, Crowther was right" (about the escalating violence in film). To which most bloggers responded "no, he bloody well wasn't."
klg19
· 1 year ago
No, I missed that. Wow. No wonder Elvis Mitchell left when Scott got the lead reviewer spot. What a very unnuanced thing to say.
RickPerlstein
· 1 year ago
Comedy open mic's about to start. Should I take the stage?
"What did the hippie say about the Indianapolis 500?" "They're innocent, every last one of them!"
Mannion
· 1 year ago
Rim shot.
RickPerlstein
· 1 year ago
"What would a Goldwater presidency be like?" "Brief."
Mannion
· 1 year ago
Rick, you ever feel you were born 20 years too late?
Does B&C stand the test of time for people as a good movie, or merely an interesting, or historically interesting, one?
klg19
· 1 year ago
Lord, I can't imagine that it doesn't stand on its own merits! When I saw it, I wasn't watching as a cineaste or a film theorist or an historian. It blew me the hell away, and I didn't even understand why at the time. Chuck, how do your students react, on a basic level? Before they sit down to analyse it? Don't they just love it?
Mannion
· 1 year ago
klg19, I was the same way when I saw it the first time. I was probably about the same age. I didn't have a single political thought about the film. I just was ready to go anywhere for a girl in a beret.
Campaspe
· 1 year ago
I completely agree. Now when I see this movie again there are certain things I'm trying to watch for, but I often forget and just get swept along.
RickPerlstein
· 1 year ago
I tried to convey in NIXONLAND that the movie had the force of revelation (for those to whom the movie had the force of revelation, which is to say, hip young people) because it TOTALLY turned its back on the ethic of the production code, which I cited Ben Hecht to explain:
The old Hollywood moguls were conservative men, kowtowing to the country's loud and well-organized moralists via a strict "production code." "One basic plot only has appeared daily in their fifteen thousand theaters," the greatest screenwriter of old Hollywood, Ben Hecht, wrote in his 1953 memoir--"the triumph of virtue and the overthrow of wickedness." Hecht was also the inventor of the gangster genre, and wrote of the frustrating constraints under which he was forced to work: "Two generations of Americans have been informed nightly that a woman who betrayed her husband (or a husband his wife) could never find happiness; that sex was no fun without a mother-in-law and a rubber plant around; that women who fornicated just for pleasure ended up as harlots or washerwomen; that any man who was sexually active in his youth later lost the one girl he truly loved; that a man who indulged in sharp practices to get ahead in the world ended in poverty and with even his own children turning on him; that any man who broke the laws, man's or God's must always die, or go to jail, or become a monk, or restore the money he stole before wandering off into the desert; that anyone who didn't believe in God (and said so out loud) was set right by seeing either an angel or witnessing some feat of levitation by one of the characters; that an honest heart must always recover from a train wreck or a score of bullets and win the girl it loved; that the most potent and brilliant of villains are powerless before little children, parish priests or young virgins with large boobies; that injustice could cause a heap of trouble but it must always slink out of town in Reel Nine; that there are no problems of labor, politics, domestic life or sexual abnormality but can be solved happily by a simple Christian phrase or a fine American motto." Bonnie and Clyde sounded the death knell for all that.
Mannion
· 1 year ago
That's the quote!
tomwatson
· 1 year ago
The movie holds up as entertainment, as a high form of cinema - at least to me. Watching now in 2008, there's a creamy timelessness to it, regardless of the underlying political debate of its era.
Mannion
· 1 year ago
Funny, you should say that, Tom. Commenter over at my place thinks that Bonnie and Clyde's dated horribly.
tomwatson
· 1 year ago
Man, I disagree - it holds up. The editing is superb and perfectly modern. Sure, Beatty and Dunaway are gorgeous and we know they're now old, so perhaps their youthful looks make it seem a little dated, but stepping back, it's just a beautiful film - the least dated of the five, to me.
Campaspe
· 1 year ago
**narrows eyes** Who, who?
RickPerlstein
· 1 year ago
Well, you all ARE baby boomers, after all...
Campaspe
· 1 year ago
hey, I was in diapers when this movie came out.
chuck tryon
· 1 year ago
Yeah, I make a point similar to this one in class with my students, at least where it concerns the end of the Hays Code and the changing moral codes associated with it.
Campaspe
· 1 year ago
Ben was sounding quite bitter there, which I guess years of dealing with Breen's nonsense will do to a man. I do think there are a great many more mixed messages in studio films than Hecht is acknowledging, and many movies whacked away at all those pieties before 1967 and Bonnie and Clyde. I think of the Penn movie as not so much the death knell, as the last shovelful of dirt. Done, finished, over with.
chuck tryon
· 1 year ago
That's probably a better way of putting it. After I talk about the strict rules of the Hays Code, I show my students Hitchcock's NxNW and they are shocked at what Hitch gets away with.
Mannion
· 1 year ago
Your students are shocked? I'm shocked! But I'm glad. It's nice to know. Means they are really watching the movie.
What do they make of Eva Marie Saint's tiny razor?
Campaspe
· 1 year ago
Deniability. It was all about deniability. If it was innocent enough on the face, it passed.
But man, the censors had dirty minds. I just finished reading about Breen vetting "On the Town" -- nice, wholesome On the Town-- and sternly ordering that they cut the line "They sat all the day just beating their tom-toms" from "Prehistoric Man."
klg19
· 1 year ago
The Code-era film that always shocks me is The Miracle of Morgan's Creek. How on earth Sturges got away with making a film about a woman who can't remember getting married or knocked up is just beyond me.
klg19
· 1 year ago
That's Jeanine Basinger's point in "A Woman's View" -- that within the constraints of the Code, the films still put examples of renegade behavior out in front of the public. Merely seeing it modeled, despite what the film claimed the consequences might be, could be mighty empowering.
nycweboy
· 1 year ago
But o course, Rick, Bonnie and Clyde says the same thing - the wages of sin are death, the girl who engages in sexual outlaw behavior gets killed (as does the probable homosexual)... Isn't the genius of Bonnie and Clyde - and really, any great film made under the code, in the fact that you see what you want to see, while ostensibly fulfilling the crowd's moral expectations? I am leery of saying that B&C really up-ends the value system of the code, when, for all their antihero leanings and populist posturing, the main characters are basically thieves who die at the end. Which fits the Code.. and America's moral sensibilities.
Campaspe
· 1 year ago
But they die as the result of institutional corruption and a low trick, and they die in a manner that's simultaneously beautiful and gruesome, like a saint's martyrdom. No Code movie would have countenanced the way law enforcement is portrayed there, as simple murder.
tomwatson
· 1 year ago
Well, except that the Denver Pyle character is exacting some revenge for his "unmanning" at the hands of the gang...which, btw, never happened.
RickPerlstein
· 1 year ago
And in real life, Clyde Barrow didn't have RFK hair.
tomwatson
· 1 year ago
Or dimples - or a gun-toting model for a girlfriend (the real Bonnie never fired a shot)
RickPerlstein
· 1 year ago
As a historian, I"m always amazed at how much shit you're allowed to simply make up in "historical" films. Like in a film in the B&C lineage--"American Gangster." I rushed to look up the New York magazine it was based on. The character was totally made up. In real life he was just a typical dealer-thug.
Mannion
· 1 year ago
Sorry to hear that. I've been planning to watch American Gangster. I thought we'd gotten beyond the My Darling Clementine and They Died With Their Boots On approach to history in the movies.
Have you seen The Assassination of Jesse James By the Coward Robert Ford, though?
Campaspe
· 1 year ago
Oh yeah, but he's still aiding and abetting an extrajudicial execution.
tomwatson
· 1 year ago
True - wouldn't a (then-retired) Jimmy Cagney have been cool in that role - just a wild thought.
Mannion
· 1 year ago
Cagney sort of does a version of that in Ragtime, come to think of it.
RickPerlstein
· 1 year ago
But WeBoy, if that's true, why did "old" viewers find the film either annoying or offensive, and hip young viewers see it as redemptive and grand? A letter to "Time" from the time:
"Sir: Bonnie and Clyde is not a film for adults, and I believe much of its degradation has come from that fact. Adults are used to being entertained in theaters--coming out smiling and humming the title song.... The reason it was so silent, so horribly silent in the theater at the end of the film was because we liked Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow, we identified with them, and their deaths made us realize that newspaper headlines are not so far removed from our quiet dorm rooms."
nycweboy
· 1 year ago
Yes to both of you... but they're still dead.
I'm not saying the presentation isn't subversive; but heck, you can trace subversive undermining of the production code at least back to Mae West. Hollywood's always chafed under the strictures (as you say Siren, Hecht's diatribe has an air of bitterness that's a bit over the top), and its most creative people have always fought those impulses in every way. In some ways, really, isn't that the true nature of creativity? Find a repressive stricture... and fight it? This description we're making of Bonnie and Clyde as brave or daring or beyond other films seems to ignore so many things and people (Otto Preminger comes leaping to mind, for instance) that did the yeoman's work of tearing at the code for years under far more restrictive pressures. By 67, much of the force of the code is all but dead, after all (remember, we're what, a year away from Midnight Cowboy?).
Still, I think you're right Rick about kids seeing what they wanted to see... but all I'm saying is, that doesn't make it so; Bonnie and Clyde - and the romance of the outlaw - may have had its place... but it was also misplaced (as was the fascination with violence, which didn't really help or improve the politics of the left). And I think, looking back on it, one can miss that many people saw it, and liked it, without agreeing to all the politics of it. That, after all, is what's so true about the sex appeal of Beatty and Dunaway - there may be more than meets the eye... but look at what meets the eye. And myself, I don't see all that others layer onto Bonnie and Clyde.
Mannion
· 1 year ago
Not to mention fitting the actual history.
chuck tryon
· 1 year ago
I think it's a genuinely well-made film. It's definitely interesting as kind of an early precursor to the 1970s auteurist films, but the editing is fantastic--I often spend an entire class just looking at various editing techniques in B&C with my students.
Mannion
· 1 year ago
Mark Harris has some good stuff on the editing and the editor in Pictures at a Revolution.
nycweboy
· 1 year ago
Hi - I'm a little late, again...
My first question is... does Faye Dunaway ever have a naturalistic moment on film? I was surprised, watching it again, that the film I think of as her at some of her most natural turns out to be as mannered and unnatural as all get out. It works, I think, because that's Bonnie - she's all artifice, all put-on, all come-on. I think that same sense of artifice is what got Faye her Oscar for Network - she's best when her inability to be natural works for the character.
I think the French Wave/Nouvelle Vague stuff is as there as it can be in an American film - the film is sexier than so much of American film, often while keeping all its clothes on. And the composition of the images... really very striking, especially for an era where things like dramatic, artful staging were often eschewed.
I still don't see all the "new left" counterculture references; yeah, it's kind of about these two crazy kids as rebel outlaws... but it does make clear that they're violent, that they're at least a little off, and that there's little real romance in killing. What I think really defines the film is that although it's about gangsters... it's really about sex, and not in any kind of subtle way - from topless Faye to "touch my pistol..." - and that's just the first ten minutes. (I'd forgotten that "family photo" moment when Faye - wonderfully costumed - grabs the gun and the cigar; oh yeah... subtle.)
I agree with Siren, ultimately that what's on display most here is beauty.... sheer, untrampled physical attractiveness. There's always an audience for that, though I think by the late sixties, with more "natural" looks coming into Vogue, such extravagent physical beauty was indeed a revelation. I do disagree a bit about the script, because it's best strength is in fact structural; the dialogue is good (but it doesn't always flow naturally, nor do their put-on accents, often), but at times it clunked more than I expected. But the movement of the storytelling, the conveying of things without words... that's great script creation, and I think Benton, for one, excelled at it.
In the end, Bonnie and Clyde still holds a lot of appeal to me, and it holds up damn well (it's Beatty, I think... no one has a right to be that frickin beautiful); still, I think it's imbued with more than it ever was - it's a gangster pic, with some arty Euro touches, but basically as straight up as any film from the genre (I think Warner's a smarter man than people give him credit for being). Three ways and bisexualty? I wish. But it would still be the romance of crime and robbery and sex... and that sells in nearly any package.
chuck tryon
· 1 year ago
There are definitely a number of mannered moments in Dunaway's performance. I think they work because the film has a bit of a "dress up" quality to it. The film is constantly quoting--Grapes of Wrath, WPA photos, etc--so Dunaway's performance fits for me.
RickPerlstein
· 1 year ago
Anyone seen "Gun Crazy"?
Mannion
· 1 year ago
AKA "Deadly Is the Female"? Not me. But C. must have.
Campaspe
· 1 year ago
Yep! It's interesting and quite skilled, but not as good as Bonnie & Clyde. There, don't say I never go for the newfangled stuff.
klg19
· 1 year ago
Yes, I've seen "Gun Crazy" too. I agree with the Siren--not only not as clever as B&C, but Cummins and Dahl are no Beatty and Dunaway.
Campaspe
· 1 year ago
Great points, and you definitely sum up Dunaway perfectly. I agree and said above (it's a bit buried now!) that Warner wasn't completely wrong, the movie owes a lot to the old gangster pictures.
But as much as I love the sexual element of B&C I do think it's quite consciously about something more, as Rick is saying above. It's definitely epater les bourgeois.
Mannion
· 1 year ago
Here's one for you, Rick. One of the points you make in that passage about Bonnie and Clyde is that people on the left also identified with Bonnie and Clyde as actual criminals, as opposed to free spirits or avengers of the little people. Their violence was attractive. That's a theme that comes up at a number of points in Nixonland---that people on the Left could be as bloody minded as anyone on the Right. Violence was kind of infection of the times. Bonnie and Clyde must have scared as many people as it excited.
RickPerlstein
· 1 year ago
Another quote from my book; the black guy is also mentioned in Mark Harris's:
Director Arthur Penn also broke the old production code's most ironclad rule: show all the shooting you like, but never show what happens on the receiving end. In Bonnie and Clyde, the bullets were shown from first to last--not least in the final shot, Bonnie and Clyde riddled from law enforcement tommy guns in a lowdown and dirty ambush. The New York Times' schoolmarmish film critic Bosley Crowther, aghast that "so callous and callow a film should represent [the] country in these critical times," led the party of the outraged with not one but three attacks in the Paper of Record. Newsweek called it "reprehensible." Film in Review tagged it "dementia praecox of the most pointless sort." Others recollected a generational primal scene. If "you want to see a real killer," Jimmy Breslin wrote in disgust, "then you should have been around to see Lee Harvey Oswald." Tom Wolfe compared its "pornoviolence" to the Zapruder Film. Arthur Penn led his own defense by, more or less, agreeing. He boasted of the black man who emerged from a preview screening and said, "That's the way to go, baby. Those cats were all right." Pauline Kael published 9,000 words saying much the same thing: that "Bonnie and Clyde brings into the almost frighteningly public world of movies what people have been feeling and saying and writing about." Afraid of Bonnie and Clyde? Then you were afraid of the abundance of life. New Left Notes, the theoretical journal of Students for a Democratic Society, devoted a quarter of <<<an>>> issue to its meaning for the struggle ("We are not potential Bonnies and Clydes, we are Bonnies and Clydes"). ...
Mannion
· 1 year ago
"We are Bonnie and Clydes." I wonder who wrote that and where they are now.
RickPerlstein
· 1 year ago
I'm about to Google the letter (Time's archives are online) and trying to find out.
RickPerlstein
· 1 year ago
The Time letter writer was "Lynda Bender."
One Lynda Bender lives in Peoria. From LinkedIn:
Lynda Bender Director of Education/Public Programs at Maltz Museum of Jewish Heritage Cleveland/Akron, Ohio Area
RickPerlstein
· 1 year ago
Here's another:
Lynda Bender's Job History AMT Financial Consultants, Inc. 2005
Mannion
· 1 year ago
Interesting. Which is she? Did she go the Jerry Rubin route or did she stay true to her ideals?
Mannion
· 1 year ago
I hate to say it, Rick, but there were times when I was reading your book when I wondered if I would have voted for Nixon! Reading that quote was one of those times.
chuck tryon
· 1 year ago
Kael is really helpful in providing historical context for the film. I often pit her enthusiasm for B&C against Bosley Crowther's moralistic review, but the New Left Notes quote is amazing.
RickPerlstein
· 1 year ago
THe author of the New Left Notes piece was named Neil Buckley--36,000 Google hits for that name. I'm about to check some historical newspaper databases.
Mannion
· 1 year ago
Probably not a relation to William F.
RickPerlstein
· 1 year ago
I found the fuller quote from New Left Notes:
"We are not potential Bonnnies and Clydes, we are Bonnies and Clydes, the real thing, challenging America in a real and fundamental way (Which BOnniee and Clyde did not do--which makes us exceedingly dangerous.)
"IN its essential element, Bonnie and Clyde is revolutionary because it defines possible futures for us based on the reality of conditions under which we struggle. The film does not depict a revolutionary ideology. It does much more than that; it defines a revolutionary's lot."
The left is SO much healthier now.
tomwatson
· 1 year ago
Bonnie's mother's face looked like the faces of mothers sending their kids to Vietnam....not to campus protests.
Mannion
· 1 year ago
Oh, and one for the Siren, about the music:
C, I never would have thought of you as a Flatt and Scruggs kind of Southern gal.
Campaspe
· 1 year ago
I love Flatt and Scruggs. Mr. C. likes bluegrass too, it's just about the only country he will tolerate.
tomwatson
· 1 year ago
Love 'em too...brilliant. Enjoyed that video today, Sireen.
Campaspe
· 1 year ago
I must go now, I've loved the talk. I am going to leave with this bit from a commenter, Vanwall, at my place:
"Weird fact - the death car was restored to drivable condition and driven in some sort of cross-country car rally in '87, and the damnedest, most creepy thing I heard from the drivers was the eerie whistling noises it made at speed from all the bullet holes."
god that's spooky, isn't it?
tomwatson
· 1 year ago
The death car toured the country for 50 years - it's in some museum now.
chuck tryon
· 1 year ago
Yeah, one of my students told me about that last semester. She brought in copies of photos of the car and everything, which was sort of fun. Weird stuff.
RickPerlstein
· 1 year ago
Dearborn Vilage, Henry Ford's museum, outside Detroit. Kathy and I saw it last year. The JFK assassination limo, too.
tomwatson
· 1 year ago
This is a great thread, folks - a quick and (hopefully) painless reminder, since we have a crowd - we're in fundraising mode to pay for the server work that saved us. If you feel so inclined, hit the Sponsor link at the top of the page. Operators are standing by. Please excuse the commercial!
RickPerlstein
· 1 year ago
Is your book about how you pulled out the 1981 Master's? That famous hole-in from the rough was killer!!
chuck tryon
· 1 year ago
Will try to donate soon. I should probably take off, but it has been fun chatting about B&C. I'm actually excited about being able to trot out some new material when I teach B&C next fall (thanks, especially, to Rick).
Mannion
· 1 year ago
11:40 and things have quieted down. Rick Perlstein's probably up on stage at that bar doing more of his Goldwater jokes. It was great of him to stop by. Read Nixonland, folks. Heckuva book. As is Mark Harris' Pictures at a Revolution. This has been fun, not just tonight, but all five threads. If you're arriving late, remember these threads never shut down. Lots we didn't get to talk about.
1butch1
· 1 year ago
Hi. A few comments after reading what everyone else had to say: 1. James Agee had a great line about Miracle of Morgan's Creek. He said Preston Sturges must have raped the Hays Office in its sleep. 2. The Clyde Barrow-type character in Gun Crazy, a man in love with Peggy Cummings, was portrayed by John Dall, a homosexual. The impotent Clyde was played by notorious stud Warren Beatty (an intentional joke). 3. The other day AFI saluted Beatty. I respectfully disagree on his getting this honor and I believe Faye Dunaway should have received it instead. Bonnie and Clyde is his best film and he didn't write or direct it. Reds and McCabe and Mrs. Miller are good but overrated and I HATE Heaven Can Wait. (Here Comes Mr. Jordan is better.) Dunaway did three undisputed classics: Bonnie & Clyde, Network, Chinatown. Beatty was overpraised because he was considered one of the boys, one of the powerful, studly inner circle and Dunaway was put down and overlooked because she was a woman. 4. Someone should ask Shirley MacLaine who Warren was in another life. 5. No argument that Bonnie and Clyde is brilliant. I can never see why some wildly successful collaborators didn't get together again. Orson Welles and Herman Mankiewicz, Citizen Kane. Quentin Tarentino and Roger Avary, Pulp Fiction. Alfred Hitchcock and Anthony Perkins, Psycho. And the whole Bonnie and Clyde gang - Penn, Beatty, Dunaway, Benton, Newman, Towne.
All Comments
Also, Clyde's impotence called to mind a scene in an early Gus Van Sant movie (maybe Drugstore Cowboy?) where the girlfriend complains "I always have to drive and you never fuck me." Is the impotent or uninterested male a minor tradition of on-the run or lowlife characters?
But another thing while I'm thinking about it: they're usually really mystified by Clyde's sexuality. Many of them figure out (or speculate) that he's possibly bisexual (even though he's rewritten as impotent). Interesting stuff.
Trailer
Faye Dunaway's lips - the opening
Gene Wilder
The ambush
The documentary, which a very sweet couple spent four years on, was disappointing. They're not good storytellers. And they're no Tom Frank.
"Dumb," perhaps; but I would say more importantly Beatty conveys this kind of bafflement before the world that resembles, to take another character described in the book, Benjamin Braddock.
Now Blanche Barrow, the preacher's daughter who gets in with a bunch of killers and becomes a willing (though regretful) accomplice - that's some dark and dangerous late 60s allegory right there.
I can't remember how old I was the first time I saw Bonnie & Clyde. In my 20s, maybe? Teens? Late '70s-ish?
I had sen Michael J Pollard in, like, "Lost in Space" episodes, or maybe Disney films, and wasn't really prepared for his role here. And the whole thing just blew me away.
LOVE the Jack Warner anecdote. Love it to death. Totally understand why he would think so, too--movies were changing so much and, on paper, this might have looked like "The Roaring Twenties" or something. "They Live by Night." How to predict that it would turn out to be?
Jane Fonda might not have been so bad...
Dunaway had...well, yeah, a kind of innocent delight that I don't know if Fonda would have gotten. But who am I to say? How can I tell how she would have played it? Could any woman be completely tough around Beatty in 1967??
But yeah, think of Fonda in They Shoot Horses, Don't They? Tough as nails, grabbing her own fate no matter how horrible.
Come to think of it, Susannah York might have made an interesting Bonnie although she's all wrong vocally.
And the "people's" reaction to the Barrow gang's exploits - that's certainly New Left, the idea that common folk understood the hopelessness of the system. 'Course that was the case with the James gang as well, though they were racist vigilante murderers and Klan types.
And my neighbor Bill Ayers always wears his "Weather Underground" movie jacket. First time I met him he wouldn't shut up about the Sundance festival, where he'd just been.
Well, I suppose it did strike critics that way at the time...
"What did the hippie say about the Indianapolis 500?"
"They're innocent, every last one of them!"
"Brief."
"10...9...8...7..."
(I'll stop now.)
Does B&C stand the test of time for people as a good movie, or merely an interesting, or historically interesting, one?
The old Hollywood moguls were conservative men, kowtowing to the country's loud and well-organized moralists via a strict "production code." "One basic plot only has appeared daily in their fifteen thousand theaters," the greatest screenwriter of old Hollywood, Ben Hecht, wrote in his 1953 memoir--"the triumph of virtue and the overthrow of wickedness." Hecht was also the inventor of the gangster genre, and wrote of the frustrating constraints under which he was forced to work: "Two generations of Americans have been informed nightly that a woman who betrayed her husband (or a husband his wife) could never find happiness; that sex was no fun without a mother-in-law and a rubber plant around; that women who fornicated just for pleasure ended up as harlots or washerwomen; that any man who was sexually active in his youth later lost the one girl he truly loved; that a man who indulged in sharp practices to get ahead in the world ended in poverty and with even his own children turning on him; that any man who broke the laws, man's or God's must always die, or go to jail, or become a monk, or restore the money he stole before wandering off into the desert; that anyone who didn't believe in God (and said so out loud) was set right by seeing either an angel or witnessing some feat of levitation by one of the characters; that an honest heart must always recover from a train wreck or a score of bullets and win the girl it loved; that the most potent and brilliant of villains are powerless before little children, parish priests or young virgins with large boobies; that injustice could cause a heap of trouble but it must always slink out of town in Reel Nine; that there are no problems of labor, politics, domestic life or sexual abnormality but can be solved happily by a simple Christian phrase or a fine American motto."
Bonnie and Clyde sounded the death knell for all that.
What do they make of Eva Marie Saint's tiny razor?
But man, the censors had dirty minds. I just finished reading about Breen vetting "On the Town" -- nice, wholesome On the Town-- and sternly ordering that they cut the line "They sat all the day just beating their tom-toms" from "Prehistoric Man."
Have you seen The Assassination of Jesse James By the Coward Robert Ford, though?
"Sir: Bonnie and Clyde is not a film for adults, and I believe much of its degradation has come from that fact. Adults are used to being entertained in theaters--coming out smiling and humming the title song.... The reason it was so silent, so horribly silent in the theater at the end of the film was because we liked Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow, we identified with them, and their deaths made us realize that newspaper headlines are not so far removed from our quiet dorm rooms."
I'm not saying the presentation isn't subversive; but heck, you can trace subversive undermining of the production code at least back to Mae West. Hollywood's always chafed under the strictures (as you say Siren, Hecht's diatribe has an air of bitterness that's a bit over the top), and its most creative people have always fought those impulses in every way. In some ways, really, isn't that the true nature of creativity? Find a repressive stricture... and fight it? This description we're making of Bonnie and Clyde as brave or daring or beyond other films seems to ignore so many things and people (Otto Preminger comes leaping to mind, for instance) that did the yeoman's work of tearing at the code for years under far more restrictive pressures. By 67, much of the force of the code is all but dead, after all (remember, we're what, a year away from Midnight Cowboy?).
Still, I think you're right Rick about kids seeing what they wanted to see... but all I'm saying is, that doesn't make it so; Bonnie and Clyde - and the romance of the outlaw - may have had its place... but it was also misplaced (as was the fascination with violence, which didn't really help or improve the politics of the left). And I think, looking back on it, one can miss that many people saw it, and liked it, without agreeing to all the politics of it. That, after all, is what's so true about the sex appeal of Beatty and Dunaway - there may be more than meets the eye... but look at what meets the eye. And myself, I don't see all that others layer onto Bonnie and Clyde.
My first question is... does Faye Dunaway ever have a naturalistic moment on film? I was surprised, watching it again, that the film I think of as her at some of her most natural turns out to be as mannered and unnatural as all get out. It works, I think, because that's Bonnie - she's all artifice, all put-on, all come-on. I think that same sense of artifice is what got Faye her Oscar for Network - she's best when her inability to be natural works for the character.
I think the French Wave/Nouvelle Vague stuff is as there as it can be in an American film - the film is sexier than so much of American film, often while keeping all its clothes on. And the composition of the images... really very striking, especially for an era where things like dramatic, artful staging were often eschewed.
I still don't see all the "new left" counterculture references; yeah, it's kind of about these two crazy kids as rebel outlaws... but it does make clear that they're violent, that they're at least a little off, and that there's little real romance in killing. What I think really defines the film is that although it's about gangsters... it's really about sex, and not in any kind of subtle way - from topless Faye to "touch my pistol..." - and that's just the first ten minutes. (I'd forgotten that "family photo" moment when Faye - wonderfully costumed - grabs the gun and the cigar; oh yeah... subtle.)
I agree with Siren, ultimately that what's on display most here is beauty.... sheer, untrampled physical attractiveness. There's always an audience for that, though I think by the late sixties, with more "natural" looks coming into Vogue, such extravagent physical beauty was indeed a revelation. I do disagree a bit about the script, because it's best strength is in fact structural; the dialogue is good (but it doesn't always flow naturally, nor do their put-on accents, often), but at times it clunked more than I expected. But the movement of the storytelling, the conveying of things without words... that's great script creation, and I think Benton, for one, excelled at it.
In the end, Bonnie and Clyde still holds a lot of appeal to me, and it holds up damn well (it's Beatty, I think... no one has a right to be that frickin beautiful); still, I think it's imbued with more than it ever was - it's a gangster pic, with some arty Euro touches, but basically as straight up as any film from the genre (I think Warner's a smarter man than people give him credit for being). Three ways and bisexualty? I wish. But it would still be the romance of crime and robbery and sex... and that sells in nearly any package.
But as much as I love the sexual element of B&C I do think it's quite consciously about something more, as Rick is saying above. It's definitely epater les bourgeois.
Director Arthur Penn also broke the old production code's most ironclad rule: show all the shooting you like, but never show what happens on the receiving end. In Bonnie and Clyde, the bullets were shown from first to last--not least in the final shot, Bonnie and Clyde riddled from law enforcement tommy guns in a lowdown and dirty ambush. The New York Times' schoolmarmish film critic Bosley Crowther, aghast that "so callous and callow a film should represent [the] country in these critical times," led the party of the outraged with not one but three attacks in the Paper of Record. Newsweek called it "reprehensible." Film in Review tagged it "dementia praecox of the most pointless sort." Others recollected a generational primal scene. If "you want to see a real killer," Jimmy Breslin wrote in disgust, "then you should have been around to see Lee Harvey Oswald." Tom Wolfe compared its "pornoviolence" to the Zapruder Film. Arthur Penn led his own defense by, more or less, agreeing. He boasted of the black man who emerged from a preview screening and said, "That's the way to go, baby. Those cats were all right." Pauline Kael published 9,000 words saying much the same thing: that "Bonnie and Clyde brings into the almost frighteningly public world of movies what people have been feeling and saying and writing about." Afraid of Bonnie and Clyde? Then you were afraid of the abundance of life.
New Left Notes, the theoretical journal of Students for a Democratic Society, devoted a quarter of <<<an>>> issue to its meaning for the struggle ("We are not potential Bonnies and Clydes, we are Bonnies and Clydes"). ...
One Lynda Bender lives in Peoria. From LinkedIn:
Lynda Bender
Director of Education/Public Programs at Maltz Museum of Jewish Heritage
Cleveland/Akron, Ohio Area
Lynda Bender's Job History
AMT Financial Consultants, Inc.
2005
"We are not potential Bonnnies and Clydes, we are Bonnies and Clydes, the real thing, challenging America in a real and fundamental way (Which BOnniee and Clyde did not do--which makes us exceedingly dangerous.)
"IN its essential element, Bonnie and Clyde is revolutionary because it defines
possible futures for us based on the reality of conditions under which we struggle. The film does not depict a revolutionary ideology. It does much more than that; it defines a revolutionary's lot."
The left is SO much healthier now.
C, I never would have thought of you as a Flatt and Scruggs kind of Southern gal.
"Weird fact - the death car was restored to drivable condition and driven in some sort of cross-country car rally in '87, and the damnedest, most creepy thing I heard from the drivers was the eerie whistling noises it made at speed from all the bullet holes."
god that's spooky, isn't it?
A few comments after reading what everyone else had to say:
1. James Agee had a great line about Miracle of Morgan's Creek. He said Preston Sturges must have raped the Hays Office in its sleep.
2. The Clyde Barrow-type character in Gun Crazy, a man in love with Peggy Cummings, was portrayed by John Dall, a homosexual. The impotent Clyde was played by notorious stud Warren Beatty (an intentional joke).
3. The other day AFI saluted Beatty. I respectfully disagree on his getting this honor and I believe Faye Dunaway should have received it instead. Bonnie and Clyde is his best film and he didn't write or direct it. Reds and McCabe and Mrs. Miller are good but overrated and I HATE Heaven Can Wait. (Here Comes Mr. Jordan is better.) Dunaway did three undisputed classics: Bonnie & Clyde, Network, Chinatown. Beatty was overpraised because he was considered one of the boys, one of the powerful, studly inner circle and Dunaway was put down and overlooked because she was a woman.
4. Someone should ask Shirley MacLaine who Warren was in another life.
5. No argument that Bonnie and Clyde is brilliant. I can never see why some wildly successful collaborators didn't get together again. Orson Welles and Herman Mankiewicz, Citizen Kane. Quentin Tarentino and Roger Avary, Pulp Fiction. Alfred Hitchcock and Anthony Perkins, Psycho. And the whole Bonnie and Clyde gang - Penn, Beatty, Dunaway, Benton, Newman, Towne.