along for the ride
by Douglas Messerli
David Newman, Robert Benton, Robert
Towne [uncredited,] and Warren Beatty [uncredited] (screenplay), Arthur Penn
(director) Bonnie and Clyde / 1967
With Arthur Penn’s death this year
at the end of September, I determined to review his noted film, Bonnie and Clyde, a movie I saw when it
originally appeared in the theaters in 1967. Few of the reviews had been
particularly positive when I saw the film at Madison, Wisconsin’s Orpheum
Theatre. I absolutely loved the movie without really comprehending why I did
so. But I remember trying to talk about it with others and attempting to share
some of my feelings. In that sense it may have been one of my first attempts at
movie reviewing, even though I used my voice instead of a pen.
In the years since, I have seen it a couple of times and watched clips
from it on television, but I have not truly given it the attention it deserves.
My viewing of the other day was intended to be a correction, and a
reinvestigation of the work.
While I still believe it is a brilliant piece of filmmaking, it has
certainly lost much of its luster in my older mind. Perhaps the story of a
group of misfits, including a beautiful young man and woman—a 30-year-old
Warren Beatty (playing Clyde Barrow) and a 26-year-old Faye Dunaway (playing
Bonnie Parker)—who, bored with the drab world in which they live, suddenly
decide to take a wild road trip, replete with guns, robbery, and, ultimately,
murder, doesn’t have the same sense of innocence to it as it did in 1967, a
year in which I had just turned 20 myself.
By romanticizing the original Barrow gang’s story, by turning them into
beautiful people who perceived themselves as simply out on a lark, Penn and his
writers could use the bleak backdrop of the Great Depression as an explanation
for their character’s seemingly rapacious acts: it was a time when few people
had anything, so who cared if they stole from the rich? Like 20th
century Robin Hoods they kept very little for themselves.
These were, Penn underscored, basically “good folk,” as we witness, for
example, when they attend, on the run, a family reunion, filmed in red tinted,
near stop-cam action, a scene of notable film artistry that pulls these wild
Americans out of the white trash rabble and drops them, momentarily, into a
simulacrum of the European art film. After all, we are reminded, Bonnie is a
poet!
But Penn knows his American audience well, and while he allows them to
briefly rub shoulders, metaphorically speaking, with their European
counterparts, he keeps them sexually pure, a necessity if his audience is to
allow them for their other lusts. The fact that Clyde is sexually impotent and
Bonnie gets off with guns is as American as apple pie, just as are the more
generally violent acts which soon begin to dominate.
At the very moment that this sexless couple’s energy begins to flag,
they accumulate others, at first just an idiot gas station attendant, C. W.
Moss (perfectly played by Michael J. Pollard), and then Clyde’s older brother
Buck (the veteran actor Gene Hackman) and his wife, a minister’s daughter,
Blanche (Estelle Parsons), gradually transforming the couple into a
"gang."
As Penn and his writers, suggest, however, that is just when the “fun”
begins to dissipate, and they are all swept up into forces of the society they
have been attempting to escape. If Bonnie is a modern day Hedda Gabler, a kind
of feminist gunslinger, using her “weapons” to destroy the men who threaten,
Blanche is just the opposite, an old-fashioned, passive, subservient, and
selfish wife, whose every act results in a kind of hysteria, and, indeed, as in
the clinical description of that long misunderstood and perhaps sexist dilemma,
goes blind (she is shot in the eyes), perhaps even, in her ear-shattering
screams, falling deaf! Parsons won an Oscar for her hilariously over-the-top
portrayal.
What such thrill-seekers always forget, alas, is that authority in
American culture is just as violent and is far more vengeful and righteous in
its behavior. The so-called “good” people are generally more dangerous and,
accordingly, nearly always win out over what they define as the “bad.” Using C.
W.’s father as a ruse, the police lure the by now worn-out couple into an act
of kindness; as they attempt to help Mr. Moss change a worn-out tire, the
police brutally kill the two in a blood-bath of hundreds of bullets.
The ending, consequently, hits the audience as an utter shock, so
seemingly out of sync as it is with the tone of the rest of the film. Reality,
as it must, suddenly hits not only the characters as their bodies fill up with
lead, but the audience, who has gone along “for the ride,” with what might have
seemed simply as a kind of goofy gangster film, is suddenly forced to
understand the result of such societal behavior. For those of us against the
Viet Nam War, facing always the possibility of the draft, it came like a slap
in the face, an awakening from our presumably innocent childhoods themselves so
steeped in Western and gangster myths. It was not that we could not see it
coming; we knew it must end that way. But in Penn’s filming of that inevitability,
the impact stung us so deeply that it seemed almost that all of our laughter
had suddenly and irrevocably been sucked up into one deep, long howl. And
looking back, if we might ever want to locate the point of loss of American
innocence of the baby boom generation—in truth, I feel Americans are never
truly innocent but simply suppose themselves to be—it may not have been the day
years later, on September 11th, 2001, but that September in 1967 (the film was
released in August, but did not reach most of the smaller American cities until
the next month) in the dark of a movie house.
Los Angeles, October 4, 2010
Reprinted from World
Cinema Review (January 2011) and Reading
Film: My International Cinema (Los Angeles: Green Integer, 2012).
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