Classic 60s Movie: Bonnie and Clyde

January is Classic 60s Movie month. Today’s guest post comes from Ipsita Barik.

Movie Title: Bonnie and Clyde

Year: 1967

Writers: David Newman, Robert Benton & Robert Towne

Lead Actors: Warren Beatty, Faye Dunaway, Michael J. Pollard, Gene Hackman

Director: Arthur Penn

IMDB Plot Summary: A somewhat romanticized account of the career of the notoriously violent bank robbing couple and their gang.

Why I Think This Is A Classic 60s Movie: The movie opens with a brilliant scene. Why brilliant? Because it is. The scene is everything, the rest of the movie ain’t. You get the hint in the very scene that the movie is going to be a strong counter to the first few moments. The boredom that Bonnie experiences in the morning, as she persuades herself to get ready for work and get going, is one of familiarity. But the way the weariness, the dullness and the disillusion swirls about in that sparsely furnished room, is a powerful shot and impressively captured, that you almost begin to understand the emotional landscape of Bonnie, even though she doesn’t speak a word! The close up on Bonnie’s bland and unemotive eyes is striking. In the very next shot she shuffles up to the window and sees Clyde attempt to steal her mother’s car, “And she doesn’t blink an eye,” Arthur Penn says. “It was — It triggered so many things.”

The first two scenes of the movie are set in a quaint little town, both settled and unsettled, captured in the dialogue , “what do you all do for a good time around here? Listen to the grass grow?”, Clyde. The danger or the thrill often lurks in the scenic backdrop, in the movie, rather than in the situation itself. The story moves through quaint little fields and picturesque neighborhoods as it proceeds, but none emanate the innocence of the initial set up. They all harbor a sense of sinister, menacing and disquieting in their harmonious and calm scenery, and you know that either the cops are around or something disasterously bad is about to happen. One of the scenes where this is ominously defining is when Bonnie & Clyde make love in the fields, and the newspaper that carries Bonnie’s poem, ruffles and scuttles away in the breeze, rolling through the fields, underlining the end written into the beginning.

The movie set in the Depression is a classic crime thriller on a road trip. Embedded deeply in the french new wave cinematic style, the movie is one of the earliest in the list of New Hollywood. It broke a lot of conventions including the depiction of all out and unwavering graphic violence . It also went onto become a cult with the 60s counterculture wave and the anti establishment sub culture. M. A. Jackson and J. E. O’Connor, say “ Bonnie and Clyde struck a chord with the youth as ‘the alienation of the young in the 1960s was comparable to the director’s image of the 1930s’.”

We get to know the characters slowly and steady , more through the conversations than the actions. When in their first encounter Clyde remarks that Bonnie seems to be a waitress, we can see that she finds the assumption (though correct) to be offensive and we understand the job to be amongst one of the reasons for her discomfort. When Clyde confesses his sexual inadequacies openly, “I ain’t much of a lover boy” or when he correctly assumes a lot about Bonnie’s life without prior knowledge, and we know him to be both street smart, open and caring. Though the characters are based on real people, the story makes a lot of fictional detours, including with the characters’ personae. But the narrative deeply intertwines the audience with the characters and by the end of it , you are stunned into silence at the brutality of their deaths. Bonnie and Clyde are partners and none overwhelms the other. Both understand and embrace each others’ vulnerabilities and are genuine in their care and fondness for each other. I think its beautifully romantic and powerfully emotive, in the deeply layered characters that both turn out to be.

Even though they kill people in cold blood and rob banks, the characterization is so emphatic and brilliant that by the end of it the audience are bound to be rooting for Bonnie & Clyde. In the 1930s, when the Barrow Gang was at large, “the country was really … in desperate straits,” Penn says. “I didn’t have sympathy for the killing, but I could understand these bumpkins essentially working out the equation in their mind: ‘If the banks come and take my house, I’m gonna go get what they have.’”

The Depression era set up underlines the narrative. In the scene at their first hideout, Bonnie and Clyde encounter the real owner of the ramshackle house, who tells them that the house had foreclosed by the bank and that they are welcome to stay, since it doesn’t belong to him anymore even though he has spent all his life there. Clyde offers him his gun to take a shot at the bank’s signboard and remarks, “we rob banks”, with a smile and nod. its a powerful counterculture statement, empathizing with the displaced and the vulnerable and has contemporary resonance through the recession and the Occupy movement.

I love the political punch lines in the movie. They are politically loaded and sharply critical of the social setup. Interestingly the movie set in the 30s, made in the 60s and still fits right in with the contemporary political and economic milieu. Whether its their first bank robbery being botched up, as the bank had failed a week back, and Bonnie bursts out laughing at the situation, even as Clyde remarks “we got $1.98 and you are laughing!” or when in the local grocery store where Clyde gets food by brandishing his gun and is attacked from behind. Escaping the situation he remarks, “you try and get something to eat around here and some son of a bitch comes up on you with a meat cleaver. I ain’t against him. I ain’t against him,” — is as effectively political as it can get.

My Favorite Moment In The Film: When the Barrow Gang goes to meet Bonnie’s family — the moments are devastatingly beautiful and yet forbidding of the lurking deaths. Children playing and rolling down the dunes, food partaken, albums shared, photos clicked, laughter, conversations, warmth and love, its all there in those few moments of family reunion and yet it is frightening in every sense. You can almost feel the goosebumps, in the silent backdrop to the laughter and the conversations, in the rustling leaves and grass, in that singular moment when you see C.W.Moss up on the dune with his gun, or when we see Bonnie looking at Clyde playing with a child from behind, and as the members of Bonnie’s family begin to depart , her mother tells Clyde, “you best keep running, Clyde Barrow and you know it.” That moment, it strikes both the audience and Bonnie herself, as her face clouds and she looks ashen, that its not going to end well.

My Favorite Dialogue In The Movie:

Bonnie: “Someday they’ll go down together, They’ll bury them side by side, to few it will be grief, to the law a relief, but it’s death for Bonnie and Clyde”

Key Things You Should Look For When Watching This Movie: The music, by Charles Strouse that blends in beautifully with the story and the brilliant cinematography, for which Burnett Guffey won an Academy Award for Best Cinematography.

Of course the finale. One of the most defining scenes in the movie, it has been widely acclaimed to be cinematically intelligent and brutally crafted. The scene transformed the depiction of violence in American cinema. “The scene taught movie technicians that blood, puffs of smoke, and even fragments of clothing and flesh were part of the way bullets worked. More or less before 1967, getting shot was a tidy event. Now sachets of blood and small powder charges sewn into clothes would become part of a film’s resources,” — David Thomson (Guardian).

Arthur Penn said that the finale was deeply influenced by the news and visual reports about the Vietnam War, “It was a time,” Penn said, “where, it seemed to me that if we were going to depict violence, then we would be obliged to really to depict it accurately; the kind of terrible, frightening volume that one sees when one genuinely is confronted by violence.”

The scene visually was shot in slow motion with multiple angles, “building up to a shatteringly edited montage of destruction (Dede Allen did the editing)…there are ravishing cross-cut close-ups” — David Thomson (Guardian).

Thanks, Ipsita! To show our gratitude for your guest post, here’s a dash of creative juju for you. Whoosh!

We already have a set of classic 70s movies, 80s Movies and 90s Movies. This month, we’re working on 60s Movies.

We have 31 volunteers. I have put in bold those who have already sent their guest post to me.

Ipsita Barik — Rosemary’s Baby
Ipsita Barik — Bonnie and Clyde
Mike Dobbins — The Sound of Music
Brandnewusedcar — Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid
Markham Cook — Jules et Jim
Steve Cook — The Blue Max
JasperLamarCrab — 2001: A Space Odyssey
N D — Lonely are the Brave
Drew Dorenfest — Easy Rider
Rick Dyke — Dr. Strangelove: Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb
Rick Dyke — Fail Safe
Felicity Flesher — The Music Man
PaulG — Lawrence of Arabia
D.L. Gill — Zulu
Jeff Guenther — Cool Hand Luke
Kate Hagen — Repulsion
John Henderson — Night of the Living Dead
John Henderson — The Odd Couple
John Hörnschemeyer — The Graduate
Zach Jansen — They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?
Will King — The Pink Panther
William Leitch — If…
Lisaisfunny — Blow Up
Jack McDonald — Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
Nick — Lonely are the Brave
Daryl Powell — The Apartment
jprichard — Persona
Ally Shina — The Jungle Book
Mark Twain — The Loved One
Liz Warner — The Manchurian Candidate
Michael Waters — Dr. No

For those who have signed up, but have yet to email me your post, please do so ASAP. This is the last week for the series.

Thanks in advance!

For the original post explaining the series, go here.