Bonnie and Clyde

(1967)

Directed by

Arthur Penn

Review by Zach Saltz

“Some day, they’ll down together

They’ll bury them side by side,

To a few, it’ll be grief,

To the law, a relief,

But it’s death for Bonnie and Clyde.”     

Arthur Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde (1967) belongs on that short list of uniquely, unequivocally American masterpieces that include A Streetcar Named Desire (1951), In Cold Blood (1967), and Fargo (1996).  The key word in that distinction is American; the films aforementioned all contain elements -- overt and abstract -- that could only be mastered and materialized by writers and filmmakers that know the landscape of America intimately. 

Bonnie and Clyde does indeed know America better than any scholar or history book will tell you.  It knows that famous Americans thrust into the national spotlight -- like the film’s protagonists, Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker -- are usually painfully normal people, with tendencies, flaws, and urges just like you and me.  It knows about America’s insatiable yearning for the spectacle, for fame, and for wealth and material goods.  It also knows a bit about loneliness, too; the film is set during the Great Depression in the area of what is now collectively known as “The Dust Bowl.”  All the characters of the movie are isolated in some way or another, and feel an overwhelming emotion of liberation doing the only thing they believe they were sent on Earth to do:  To rob banks, naturally.

The story is very simple.  The opening scenes show a bored Bonnie Parker, basking cheerfully naked around the room, with the galore and sensuality of a starved sex kitten.  Clyde Barrow waits carefree outside her window, next to her mother’s car, apparently ready to steal it.  Their eyes meet.  He tells her that he robs banks.  She doesn’t believe him.  He drives over to a bank and sticks up the teller -- only to be told that the bank is now out of business and holds no tenure (Clyde of course forces him to tell Bonnie this so she knows he isn’t lying).

Bonnie and Clyde continue to rob banks, but it’s very difficult to deem them cold-blooded thieves.  They’re simply too nice, naïve, and desperate for anyone to think lowly of them.  Along the way, they pick of a dumb car hand named C.W. Moss (Michael J. Pollard) and eventually meet up with Clyde’s older brother, Buck, and his wife, Blanche (Gene Hackman and Estelle Parsons).  In a sense, they’re all as innocent as Huck and Jim floating down the Ohio; but the film is very keen in the way it presents a shifting morality in regard to social issues of the time.  Huck and Jim were defying a racist system of caste and hatred; Bonnie and Clyde are defying a system that flatly turns its back on people in a time of national economic crisis.  This is shown no more true than in the early scene were Bonnie and Clyde meet up with an old farmer visiting his repossessed house, and promptly give him a pistol to shoot at the repossession sign.

There is another scene later when Clyde is robbing a bank and asks a bystander if the money he is holding is his own or the banks.  The bystander tells him it is his own, and Clyde tells him that he can keep it.  It would be easy, then, to label them as Robin Hoods protecting average citizens from the scum government, but that would not necessarily be true either; they are enigmas, these people, at one point loveable, the next detestable.  Perhaps this quality shows the ever changing American aspiration to hail someone we love to hate.

Technically, the film is exemplary in its use of mise-en-scéne to heighten elements of story and character.  The exterior tones throughout the film are very bland, suggesting not only the presence of 1930s dust storms, but a morose, death-like quality that unabashedly shows the isolation of the protagonists alongside the foreshadowing of their eventual demise. The use of still photographs, especially during the opening credit sequence, establishes a nostalgic mood -- a time and place that was long, long ago, but whose lessons and morals can still be felt in America today. 

There are three scenes in particular that simply left me awestruck in their technical majesty and enhancement of emotion through mise-en-scéne.  These scenes also provide integral clues as to Bonnie and Clyde’s unalterably tragic fate. The first is a high angle shot of Bonnie running across a corn field, with Clyde chasing her down.  What is particularly amazing about this view is the slow movement of an unseen cloud overhead, shadowing over the entire wheat field, including Bonnie and Clyde.  This shot would be easy to create nowadays, with the innovation of computer generated effects; but one can only believe that this shot, filmed nearly forty years ago, was a product of pure and unadulterated luck.  The cloud present the first sign of Bonnie and Clyde’s downfall, and the wide angle expresses the open freedom of the two protagonists to do whatever they want -- but are ultimately held at bay by the cloud, about to beset grief and tragedy upon them.

The second scene is more of a sequence than a single shot; it is the reunion of Bonnie and her mother, whom she has not seen in months.  This scene is easily distinguishable from all other scenes in the film because of the soft focus mid-range shots.  It appears as though there is a party going on, but you could never tell that because of the dark, foreboding atmosphere in which director Penn chose to film the scene.  For a while, I suspected that the entire sequence may have been a dream (furthering this belief was the improbability of Bonnie being able to reunite with her entire family without the police knowing about it).  But whether it is reality or not is almost beside the point; this is a completely different and discrete atmosphere from the wild and vibrant mood when Bonnie and Clyde are robbing banks.  It suggests a very harsh reality, and shows the ramifications that shameless escapism and a life of crime can have on a normal, full-blooded family unit, and when Bonnie’s mother says goodbye to her daughter, we know it is the last exchange that will ever take place between these two women who, at one point it seems, loved and cared for each other very much.

The third scene comes toward the end of the film, and consists of a singe shot.  Both Bonnie and Clyde are at the height of their national popularity, but find themselves in deep trouble after being shot by the police.  C.W. drives them to an extended family of Okies (perhaps a mirror reflection of Bonnie’s reunion scene) and asks them to spare some water, as to heal the wounds.  The family is dumbstruck; perhaps they have seen Bonnie and Clyde’s names in the paper, perhaps it is just the mere sight of two bloodied and helpless bodies lying in the back seat of a car.  Whatever the reason, the group is stunned, and in the midst of one of the most painstakingly quiet sequences ever filmed, we see a man in a hat, standing outside Clyde’s window, quietly caress his bloody hand.  Again, this is beautifully ambiguous; is the man responsive to the fact that Clyde is by now a celebrity?  Is he astonished by the sudden presence of outsiders on his small ramshackle of land, and in this caress showing his longing for escape from the problems of poverty and sickness?  Or is it simply a gesture of human sympathy -- reaching out to help a dying man in time of crisis? 

It’s hard to believe that, for a while in the mid-sixties, the front-runners to direct this film were Francois Truffaut and Jean-Luc Goddard.  It is the unique American perspective and meditation on violence, notoriety, and stark isolationism contrasted with rugged individualism.  I do not mean to be course or narrow-minded, but could anyone outside this country convey the longing and inexplicable sadness expressed in this motion picture?  The speech and dialect of the film may be prescribed as banal, but there is a certain poetic beauty in those final few haunting lines of the poem Bonnie sends in to the papers to be published.  Her and Clyde know that their fates are up to the heavens, but for one brief, gleaming moment they see a path that may lead out of their abhorred and dull lives, and that route was through each other -- all of this implied in their last gaze into each other’s eyes moments before their sudden and violent deaths.  This makes Bonnie and Clyde a stunning American statement on the desire to love and to be loved, even if you are detested by everyone else.

Rating:

# 39 on Top 100

# 1 of 1967