ZingDash

Roger concluded his original review of “Bonnie and Clyde” saying its Depression-era setting was almost irrelevant: “It had to be set sometime. But it was made now and it's about us.” If it had been made now, fifty years after those words were written, I’m inclined to believe every film critic would still be saying the same thing—and how alarming, that half a century has passed and this movie still speaks as clearly as ever. “When we started out, I thought we were really going somewhere,” Bonnie tells Clyde near the end of the film. “But this is it. We’re just going.” It feels cynical or despairing to equate Bonnie’s words with America, or the American people, or the American writers and artists and filmmakers who were really onto something new and exciting back then, but I can’t help it; talks of nuclear war are in the air again, and we are still so far from where any of us want to be. I’m sure Arthur Penn and the rest of them all thought we were really going somewhere, too—somewhere more enlightened, more advanced, healthier and more beautiful—but it too often feels like we’re still just going.

MATT ZOLLER SEITZ

Like a lot of landmark older films, "Bonnie and Clyde" requires a bit of imagination to appreciate. Everything in it that once seemed shocking and new has become commonplace in films and on TV—well, everything except the tricky tone, which seems at once detached and powerfully immediate, and its deep connection to the history it moved through and the ideas it conveyed. These are the aspects of moviemaking that can never be photocopied, only approximated. 

At the time, audiences and critics were drawn to the pop-Freud sexual tension between Bonnie and her "lover" Clyde, who can't respond to her physically and experiences his only release when robbing banks and shooting guns, and to the bursts of graphic violence, which would be imitated in years to come, then one-upped, then made cartoonish. The slow-motion bloodletting of the film's instantly notorious finale, which shows the lovers being raked to pieces by machinegun fire from hidden Texas Rangers, would be escalated by directors like Sam Peckinpah, whose 1969 Western "The Wild Bunch" climaxed with a sequence that felt a bit like the last two minutes of Bonnie and Clyde's lives stretched  into an epic set piece. In the coming decades, audiences would see the Bonnie and Clyde ending made more intimate and psychologically-oriented (in the final shootout of Martin Scorsese's "Taxi Driver" especially), turned into a reactionary turkey shoot (see the last act of "Rambo: First Blood, Part II," where the Vietnamese meat puppets dancing in the hero's gunsights are literally cannon fodder), and abstracted into a bullet ballet (see John Woo's whole career, and a good portion of Walter Hill's). 

But whatever their merits or demerits, none of these movies ever recaptured the mix of shock and delight audiences felt when they beheld the newness of "Bonnie and Clyde." In an American decade increasingly defined by the Pill and “Free Love,” here was a film in which the gorgeous heroine blatantly came onto her equally gorgeous boyfriend—it's usually the other way around—and inspired only anxiety and embarrassment. This was a film that extended and perfected a lot of the games Alfred Hitchcock played with audience identification—the masterpiece being "Psycho," a film that makes you sympathize with a woman who embezzles from her boss, the motel manager who stabs her to death and hides her body, and then finally the dead woman's sister and lover, who've arrived seeking answers. You start out finding Bonnie, Clyde and the gang curious and odd and exciting; then you cheer for them as populist wealth-redistributors, the Robin Hoods of the American Depression; then you're shocked and ashamed at ever rooting for them in the first place, once the violence becomes more stark and the film flat-out tells you "They are killing people who have nothing to do with The System, just because they happen to be in the way.” Then you go through a long period of not knowing quite what you feel about them, except pity at how deluded and limited they are. Then comes that spectacular finale, with blood spurting out of what looks like dozens of holes in the lovers' bodies, and you feel horror and revulsion, because you're watching agents of the state execute two people who, at that particular point in the story, pose no immediate threat to them. 

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