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Bonnie and Clyde
Retrospectives
- March 2003
USA, 1967. Directed by Arthur Penn. Written
by Robert Benton, David Newman. Photographed by Burnett Guffey. Edited by
Dede Allen. Music by Charles Strouse. Released by Warner Bros. 111
minutes.
Starring Warren Beatty, Faye Dunaway, Michael
J. Pollard, Gene Hackman, Estelle Parsons, Denver Pyle, Dub Taylor, Evans
Evans, Gene Wilder, Mabel Cavitt, Russ Marker.
Always and perhaps forever, "Bonnie and
Clyde" seems to me like one of those parties where everyone is smiling,
but you can't believe anyone is actually having a good time. It was the cinematic
thunderbolt of the late 1960s. It continues to inspire new fans, writings,
imitations and fashion spreads. It is beautifully made. And yet I cannot
connect with it, because what it is built on is at best deep confusion and
at worst the clearest of moral voids.
The story behind it is true -- a legend of one
time, now superceded by the legend of this movie. Bonnie Parker and Clyde
Barrow were a pair of raggedy hicks who between 1930 and 1934 committed an
estimated thirteen murders while travelling across America in a series of
stolen cars and robbing banks for funding. They thought their news reports
were unfair, and reacted by sending pictures of themselves to papers, dressed
in their best, posing with their weapons, satirising their untouchable image.
As the lovers became more famous, their bounty kept increasing, and they
were eventually ended by a ninety-strong hail of bullets off a highway near
Sailes, Louisiana.
"Bonnie and Clyde" opened in the autumn of 1967,
by a terrified studio, to a first wave of negative reviews, and seemed destined
for failure. Then a handful of critics championed it as a masterpiece, most
memorably Pauline Kael. Word of mouth spread. The film became an enormous
critical and popular success, and refused to die as a topic of conversation.
A new movie era was signalled: The violence of "Bonnie and Clyde" was a
revolution in terms of graphic content and unapologetic presentation. Its
style was fast-paced, chic and spellbindingly picturesque.
That last part is what bothers me. The attractiveness
of "Bonnie and Clyde" is its downfall. Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway were
two of the sexiest screen actors of their generation; here, they speak in
Okie drawl, move awkwardly and act bumblingly, but do so with rhythm that
seems to give every backward gesture the status of mythic Americana. Beatty
shuffles around with that crafty little aw-shucks grin on his face -- in
the first scene he confesses to having been in prison and not being afraid
of cutting off his own body parts, but he's boyishly jokey about it, and
we cannot take his psychotic nature seriously. Dunaway is so striking, with
her perfect shape and beguiling green eye shadow, that her slumping around
and lazy speech seems like a slinky personal style. The two of them commit
their crime spree in elegant costumes and full makeup, with adventurous banjo
music on the soundtrack, losers for adversaries and lines that turn snippets
of vernacular into snappy composition. It can't help be catchy when she begins
to say, "I'm Miss Bonnie Parker, and this here is Mista Clyde Barrow -- we
rob banks!"
Of course, I'm going back to arguments that have
long dropped out of the mainstream. Among the critical establishment, the
definitive word on "Bonnie and Clyde" is now considered to be the wonderful
New Yorker essay by Pauline Kael, reprinted in her famous collection 'Kiss
Kiss Bang Bang'. She delights in the film's shifts in tone, which move from
the lighthearted comedy of folly to moments of devastating bloodshed: "The
whole point is to rub our noses in it, to make us pay our dues for laughing."
To the idea that the flashiness of Beatty and Dunaway is inappropriate, she
replies: "The accusation that the beauty of movie stars makes the anti-social
acts of their characters dangerously attractive is the kind of contrived
argument we get from people who are bothered by something and clutching at
straws."
Watching the movie again this week, I found myself
drifting into objectivity, and getting a clear view of the elements the film
contains. The comedy of the early scenes comes from the incompetence of the
gang. On Clyde's first attempt to rob a bank, he finds that the place has
been shut down and does not actually contain any money. He freezes like a
fool, and drags the cashier out to explain things to Bonnie, who ends up
laughing her ass off. Later, when their goofy sidekick C.W. (Michael J. Pollard)
is acting as getaway driver, he botches the escape plan by deciding to go
park the car in the middle of a robbery. The scenes of violence that interrupt
these moments are messy and brutal: Gunshots sound loud, hard and painful.
Images of bullets impacting on flesh are sudden and bloody -- nobody forgets
the image of the bank manager's head exploding against the car window as
Clyde pulls off a shot while driving away.
Laying out the content in these terms would lend
support to what Kael says: "Audiences are not given a simple, secure basis
for identification; they are made to feel but are not told how to
feel." The justification for the movie is that its shifts in tone keep us
on our toes -- we giggle at the stupidity of Bonnie and Clyde, recoil in
horror at the violent mess their lack of insight causes, find ourselves curiously
involved when their story turns to tragic melodrama, and are fascinated
throughout. If the film is shot in unforgettably stylish photography that
highlights primary colours and blazing sunlight, then that is because the
groovy visual style captures how the Barrow gang thought of themselves, while
the specifics of the material show things as they actually were. We're supposed
to be torn between beauty and horror.
I'd like to buy that argument, but I cannot. The
glamour of the movie does matter, because it is the one thing that
remains constant throughout every changing mood. When we go to the movies,
the visuals are the reality the filmmakers are presenting us with, and if
they do not seem to match with content, then we do not feel conflicted, but
overpowered by the images. Because "Bonnie and Clyde" looks so colourful,
and its main characters have been dressed up to appear so endearingly iconic,
we remember it as a trend-setting thrill ride rather than a balancing act
that fills us with differing emotions. The technique puts everything in warped
context: The early scenes of tomfoolery seem less like dangerous incompetence
than cute, endearing flaws. The violence is horrific, but its accidental
nature lets the characters off the hook, and by the pathos of the third act,
we're supposed to be weeping for a couple of misunderstood sex
symbols.
The fact that Beatty and Dunaway are so good-looking
would only be irrelevant if every actor in the movie looked the same way.
But surrounding them are smoke-dried, weary faces that make Bonnie and Clyde
stand out as beautiful inhabitants of an ugly and bitter society. The delivery
boy who tips the cops off to their hideout is a scrawny, weaselly little
sneak. The Texas Ranger who plots to kill the pair is flabby and humourless,
and his ridiculous handlebar moustache creates the look of a morose catfish.
The posse that ends up blowing Bonnie and Clyde away is comprised of frowning
old men; Dennis Hopper would use a similar technique a few years later in
"Easy Rider", using the cynical faces of his older extras to suggest that
the young heroes of the movie were being crushed by the establishment. The
difference is that Hopper's characters were benign hippies, getting along
with smoking dope and riding their motorbikes. Bonnie and Clyde wielded tommy
guns, used them and felt sorry for themselves.
The movie does a pretty grotesque job of implying
that venomous, hate-filled sheriff types were the only opponents of the Barrow
gang, while reg'lar folks got on with em jes' fine. "Is that your money or
the bank's?" asks Clyde during one of the raids. "Mine," says a humble-looking
guy in dungarees. "Alright, you can keep it then." Later, Bonnie, Clyde,
C.W. and Clyde's brother Buck (Gene Hackman) come across a shanty town, where
victims of the Depression are seen as sad, noble, distant figures with earnest
gazes and an instinctive kinship with the outlaws.
It is true that the guts of the pair was sort
of half-admired at the time, and they had more in common with the poor than
the rich, but to dramatise that in these terms is to create a lie. Intentional
or not, it seems that there is a very definite attempt to tell us how to
feel: Bonnie and Clyde were rebellious anti-heroes -- cuz, like, they're
all snazzy and young, while their opponents are slimy old bastards. And although
the moments where Bonnie and Clyde kill people are horrific, the most prolonged
and harrowing scenes of violence are the ones depicting the gang under
attack.
I am neither worthy of a moral high horse nor
particularly enthusiastic about putting myself in that position. This piece
is not an attempt to be smartass and superior. It's just that the balance
needs to be readdressed. Reviews of the time are now presented for ridicule,
as if the old order just didn't get it, and to decry "Bonnie and Clyde" is
to be steeped in stuffiness. Notice how books on the movie can rarely resist
mentioning the review of Bosley Crowther, a man whose name has long been
synonymous with the idea of the critic as a snarfy old git.
Truth is, even Crowther made some good points.
In calling the film "a cheap piece of bald-faced slapstick comedy that treats
the hideous depredations of that sleazy, moronic pair as thought they were
full of fun and frolics", he makes the useful observation that the film's
surface jazziness has more impact than anything else. If we who cannot feel
at one with the film can be accused of clutching at straws, surely its fans
are just as vulnerable to attack for thinking up tortured justifications
for their admiration of the film's stylistic freshness. Few would today argue
that "Bonnie and Clyde" was free, uncompromising and stunning, or that it
inspired a tradition of violent American road movies that includes "Badlands"
and "Natural Born Killers". The question is whether it adds up to anything
truthful, or evokes disquiet by crudely trying to con us into emotional reactions
that do not make much sense.
Sigh. Every time I see the film, I want to resist
it less, and end up resisting it more. I find myself wanting to like it because
it looks so darn cool. I cannot, because there should be better reasons.
There is an episode of 'The Simpsons' where Homer tells Bart, "That's Bonnie
and Clyde's car! Show some respect!" And that, I think, is how the fans of
the movie honestly feel. It plays like a glorification, and has immortalised
its characters as figures to be admired rather than understood. To ignore
that is not natural. Maybe I just don't get it, but count me
out.
COPYRIGHT©
2003 Ian Waldron-Mantgani
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