Bonnie and Clyde

Rating:
Summary: One of the great innovative films of our time!
Review: When Bonnie and Clyde was first released, all that was talked about was the final slo-mo bloody scene. How violent..etc. Time has proven this movie to be one of the great innovative films of our time! The attention to detail is amazing. Beatty's production values proved to be of the highest order. Notice the authenic advertising from the 30's on various buildings, along with the automobiles, and overall style. Prior to this, production values on a movie like this was usually, "Well, that's close enough". It also features the greatest array of character actors ever in a movie. Gene Hackman as Buck, Oscar-winner Estelle Parsons as Blanche, Michael J. Pollard as C.W. Moss and others like Denver Pyle, Dub Taylor and even a young Gene Wilder playing a funeral director beau. Historically, it does take a few liberties, but by and large it is mostly accurate. This movie is a first in many ways. The violence was the most graphic, but done with artistry. The music sets a rural fast pace. This should have been best picture of the year, not In The Heat Of The Night, which now seems so dated. From the beginning, when the credits start in white, then turn to red, with the click, click of an old Kodak, showing old photos in sepia, you can tell this is an ambitious effort. The red implies the violence to come. The script is poignant, and charming. One of the great movies of all time! DVD makes it even better! Director Arthur Penn also deserved the Oscar. This is Warren Beatty's masterpiece for the ages.

Rating:
Summary: You Will Route For The Bad Guys!
Review: Authentic account of infamous gangster couple's 1930s crime spree. Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow quickly grew accustomed to robbing banks and liquor stores and shooting people as they went. The thrill of it all made for great love-making. -- If it wasn't true, this story would be a pretty sick one. Whether in the 30s or in 1967 (when it was filmed), "Bonnie And Clyde" was a bit much to swallow. Of course the 90s gave us "Natural Born Killers", but at least that one was fiction. -- The acting and overall production are excellent. You will be glued to the screen right up to the pair's ugly demise. It's good film-making, but to the ones among us with "queezy stomachs" it's not exactly "entertaining" due to the subject matter.

Rating:
Summary: Nearly perfect film!
Review: If it weren't for Faye Dunaway's oft-hammy portrayal of Bonnie Parker as a Dust Bowl Fashionista, this would be the perfect film....of any genre. Producer/Star Beatty and director Penn work with an understated, elegant script, beautiful cinematography, dead-on soundtrack, masterful editing and a sublime supporting cast to create this complex ballet of art & drama.

Beatty is at his most physically beautiful and inwardly complicated best as Clyde Barrow. It's a performance that will remain as timeless as the quality of this picture.

Rating:
Summary: The original Natural Born Killers!
Review: Rarely has a film been as widely influential as director Arthur Penn's crime spree masterpiece. Single-handedly spawning the psychotic-lovers-on-the-run sub-genre (Badlands; Natural Born Killers; True Romance; SFW etc.) and simultaneously breaking the envelope in its frank, realistic depiction of violence - see this movie for a pre-Wild Bunch usage of exploding blood satchets in an equally elegiac gunshot death sequence - Bonnie and Clyde decisively consigned all vestiges of 50's Hollywood to the scrapheap of the 60s and signaled the start of the most creative, daring and satisfying decade in Hollywood history, the Seventies. Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway are at the peak of their powers as actors and pop culture icons and blister across the screen with their volatile, unpredictable and ill-fated relationship. One of the first movies to be decidedly anti-Establishment, its jaundiced view of family, town, country and violent confrontation with authority and tradition is obviously not for the Norman Rockwell crowd, although the authenticity of time and place is impeccable. With gorgeous golden rural landscapes, gorgeous golden Faye Dunaway and some of the best costume design ever put to screen, this is one film you need to have on DVD. Even the best VHS version is too grainy to do this movie aesthetic justice. An essential for collectors of crime movies and those interested in historically significant movies. But it also works on the simplest level as well: a well-paced exciting story, skillfully and violently told.

Rating:
Summary: Natural born killers
Review: Trust Hollywood to turn two common criminals into two American folk heroes. Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker were two small-town young people drifting aimlessly during the Great Depression of the 1930's; she's bored out of her gourd, and he's a felon who had killed fourteen men by the time he met his end at the ripe old age of twenty-four. They meet, fall sort of in love, and embark on a petty crime spree. At first it's all good-humored fun; they steal a couple of cars, hold up a couple of stores, and in a moment of hilarious insanity, Clyde attempts to rob a bank that went bust a week before, much to the amusement of the banker and Bonnie, who's collapsing with laughter over the steering wheel. But then a storekeeper takes offense at Clyde attempting to hold him up, and is pistol-whipped by Clyde in his frantic efforts to escape. Once the batterer storekeeper ID's Clyde's photo to the cops, things turn serious.

As Clyde's posse expands to include a lowlife neer-do-well named C.W. Moss and Clyde's brother Buck and his sister-in-law Blanche, their crimes get bolder and the violence spirals out of control. A bank robbery in broad daylight (while C.W. manages to get their getaway far stuck in a too-tight parking space) goes off almost without a hitch; but when Clyde shoots a pursuing cop in the face and his head explodes all over their back windshield, the fun stuff is over. They're wanted criminals being chased from Arkansas to Oklahoma and back to Louisiana. As their notoriety spreads, so does their audacity. In one of the funniest scenes in the film, they capture a sheriff who was about to sneak up on them and handcuff him while Clyde snaps pictures of Bonnie holding a gun on him. But their fame comes at a terrible price; they're wanted outcasts, alienated even from their own. When Clyde meets Bonnie's mother and tells her they'd like to live within three miles of her, Mrs. Parker tells her daughter, "You try to live three miles from me, and you won't live long, honey."

From the scene where Buck expires in a hail of police bullets to the slow dance on the killing ground in Louisiana, the film takes on a somber tone in stark comparison to the lighthearted opening sequences. Once the cascading violence has turned brutal, the movie becomes darker and more foreboding as well. But as bad as they are, we can't help but like them. Maybe that's the difference between Hollywood and real life. One wonders how many people who came across Bonnie and Clyde actually liked this pair?

The tension between Bonnie and Clyde helps keep the movie on edge. Arthur Penn's superb direction, assisted by knockout performances from the cast, helps keep the movie on a razor edge balanced between laughter and revulsion. Warren Beatty was never better than in his title role as Clyde Barrow, and Faye Dunaway makes a perfect Bonnie to his Clyde. Michael J. Pollard is winning as the doofus C.W. Moss and Gene Hackman is wonderful as Buck, torn between his loyalty to his brother and his love for his ditzy wife. But Estelle Parsons, as that ditzy wife, almost runs off with the film; her hysterics during the shootout between Clyde's gang and the cops has the viewers in equal hysterics rolling in the aisles. The cinematography is great; we feel all the heat, dust, and emptiness of Depression-era America, and the foot-stompin' banjo music by Flatts and Scruggs helps anchor the movie to its time and place. "Bonnie and Clyde" has become an American classic, one of the best films to come out of the 1960's.

Rating:
Summary: The debate started here
Review: The debate about how graphic violence in the movies affects human behavior is an old story. And that debate started in 1967 with the release of Arthur Penn's BONNIE AND CLYDE.

First to the film: Though heavily romanticized, this portrait of the two notorious Depression-era bank robbers Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow remains significant as a film for having put Faye Dunaway and Warren Beatty (who produced the film) into their roles and making big names out of them. Gene Hackman and Gene Wilder also became stars in this, and Estelle Parsons snagged a Best Supporting Actress Oscar. Burnett Guffey also picked up an Oscar for his brilliant cinematography.

And now to the violence: Up until this film, most cinematic violence had been clean (the PSYCHO shower scene being an obvious exception). But the way Penn handles the violence in BONNIE AND CLYDE was totally unanticipated either by critics or audiences in 1967. It was nasty and it was bloody. Each outburst of violence in the film increases in intensity until that infamous 30-second fusillade of bullets and blood at the end. This scene caused the most debate, and obviously paved the way for THE WILD BUNCH.

But in all aspects, even the infamous bloodshed, BONNIE AND CLYDE remains a most influential movie, making antiheroes out of thieves (which was correct for the rebellious youth of 1967). The film's folkiness is underlined by the hard-driving bluegrass of Flatt and Scruggs' "Foggy Mountain Breakdown" for the chase scenes involving the Barrow gang and the law. This remains one of the touchstone films of the turbulent 1960s; and for that reason alone, it is a must-see.

Rating:
Summary: We Rob Banks!
Review: To me, the best film of 1967 (above the other landmark film of that year, The Graduate), and one of the most startling films ever made. I think that the "modern era" of moviemaking begins with Bonnie and Clyde." It's really about a "family" of bankrobbers who owe much of their success to the press; the newspapers make it seem as if they intend to terrorize every small town that has a bank to begin with. And so the Barrow gang becomes legendary during the depression, and heroes to some because they are against the government that is taking so much away from the "little people." Although much praised, "Bonnie and Clyde" was controversial in its day, partly because of the considerable bloodshed and partly because audiences felt bad for the two criminals. As one character says, "they're just a bunch of kids!" This is one of the rare films in which the violence punctuates the story--it makes the viewing experience more powerful. Because of it, one watches much of the film in a state of apprehension.

Rating:
Summary: Faye's finest moment on film
Review: After watching and studying each screen performance by Faye Dunaway, I have to conclude, this is the best one, even better than Chinatown, Network, Eyes of Laura Mars, Barfly, and that other one we won't mention. Miss Dunaway plays and captures Bonnie Parker perfectly, renegade, desperate, scared, tough, hard-edged, innocent, bold, vulnerable, in love, everything, all wrapped up into one. She really pulls it off. There's not a scene where she's not each one. She stands out brilliantly, even with a stellar, far more experienced cast in what was only her third movie. Third movie! True talent, folks. That's called true talent.

Rating:
Summary: Good
Review: 'Bonnie and Clyde' was a good movie. The final scene was awesome and way ahead of its time. Violent though.

Rating:
Summary: A landmark film from the 60s
Review: Bonnie and Clyde changed the course of American filmmaking; I often compare it in my mind to Thelma and Louise - you can look at both of those films as milestones and sort of chart your life around them: before Bonnie and Clyde, after Thelma and Louise...
Such violence and bloodletting hadn't been seen on screen before, but there was art behind it, not mindless gore. A film classic as soon as it was released, the movie takes place during the Great Depression with the impossibly young Faye Dunnaway as Bonnie and Warren Beatty as Clyde (handsome, swashbuckling, ? impotent), the brains behind the gang. Also along for the ride, so to speak, are Gene Hackman as Clyde's brother, his wife Blanche (played by Estelle Parsons) who is skittish as a squirrel on a freeway and really should have stayed home baking rhubarb crisp, and, best of all, almost stealing every scene in which he appears, Michael J. Pollard as CW Moss.
If by some chance you haven't seen it before, see it now. If you've already seen it, even if you've seen it several times, see it again. It doesn't get stale.