Bonnie and Clyde

The screenplay by Newman and Benton follows Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow from their meeting in Midlothian, Texas, in 1931 through three years of headline-magnifying robberies and killings, climaxing with their death under a thousand-round rain of bullets in a police ambush near Arcadia, La. Though newspapers entertained their readers with tales of their cunning and brutality, the Barrows gang is pictured as having been clumsy practitioners who succeeded in spite of internal bickering and miscalculation and seldom took enough from their poor, small-town targets to sustain them to the next heist. But during a period when a life in crime was one of the few available avenues of free enterprise, newspapers and rumor elevated them to the status of folk heroes, a distortion which would make their capture or annihilation by police seem a more awesome victory.

Clyde is pictured as a likably deranged young man for whom violence and danger are necessary means of expression. The life he assumes provides both personal satisfaction and sexual sublimation. Asked if he would change any part of his life, Clyde replies only that he would alter the means of the same operations. In the midst of their flights, he sighs, “Ain’t life grand!” Bonnie shares with Clyde the excitement of lawbreaking, a love of publicity, the symbolic attraction to guns, delight in the chases in which they escape their pursuers, but she wearies early in the game, fatalistically accepting the inevitably of their early deaths. One of the film’s most eloquent interludes involves her reunion with her mother and relatives, a moody sequence with filtered and slowed action, and protracted editing underscoring unspoken sorrows. The dialogue is spare and tuned to the ear and the region. The ingenuity of the chases is superbly timed, building to peak hilarity and fading to blackouts. While the film was made on location throughout Texas in cities which have little change since the early thirties, the film sustains the documentary evocation of period one has long associated with Warner Brothers pictures. The legend of the film’s production has become almost as famous as its heroes, and for this reason, you should need no other to watch the film.