United States, 1967
Directed by Arthur Penn
With Faye Dunaway (Bonnie Parker), Warren Beatty (Clyde Barrow), Michael J. Pollard (C. W. Moss), Gene Hackman (Buck Barrow), Estelle Parsons (Blanche Barrow), Denver Pyle (Frank Hamer), Dub Taylor (Ivan Moss)
This is about desire and fulfillment. “Bonnie and Clyde” opens with a stunning, jerky, exciting string of shots on the face and body of Bonnie Parker as she fidgets in her bed and around it, from a close-up on her sensual lips to the medium shots on her nicely curvaceous, fully naked back, capturing the girl’s sulking mood and her expectant gaze. She is waiting for something, someone, to come – and when she notices Clyde Barrow standing around her relatives’ car, she has been more than ready to embrace him. Later her provocative glimpse on his handgun plainly spells out her desire. As it happens, it is not going to be that easy to satisfy as Clyde Barrow signals he is not made for love; a rollicking spell of kisses and caresses would indeed lead to nowhere – he can say, “Least I ain’t a liar”.
But despite this astonishing proof of impotence, despite the risks his criminal career carries, and also despite her inability to get along with the wife of Clyde’s brother, Buck, and her anxieties in the face of their isolation, Bonnie sticks to him, still in love, still expectant. The time they spent recovering from a nearly missed arrest involving a nasty gunfight leaving them seriously wounded proves to be the best opportunity to get closer. And this time, Clyde does it, against the backdrop of a sunny afternoon on a meadow; their union is as perfect as Bonnie hoped and a brighter future to be spent together inspires him to make fresh plans. The following scenes duly highlight Bonnie’s radiance and Clyde’s satisfaction – she is now a fully satisfied woman who can bite a fresh pear with an intense, sensual awareness of her bliss as the couple merrily drives along a scenic, nice country road. What the end of it hides would bring a ghastly and sad termination to these heady sensations, the abrupt denying of their fulfillment.
The film follows the lead of movies from the noir genre as it investigates a couple of criminals as the surprising and irrepressible attraction, a case of rather mysterious and purely sexual seduction. But it manages to tweak it, tailoring this pattern to real-life, quasi-mythical, figures and goes farther than those other movies as the male hero’s virility and strength are latched solely on his criminal skills while portrayed as an impotent – not even a frustrated man, not even a gay (an unfounded rumor that was really spread about Clyde Barrow) but a guy seriously unable to come. The femme fatale is more than a raunchy character and a provocative and moralistic statement on women losing their ways and abusing their charms; she is the starting point of the story and the personality who helps shape the male hero, allowing him to feel complete and secure.
And not only on an intimate, essential way: after all, her teasing words and her inciting attitude play a great part in the enrollment of a new sidekick, a shy mechanic who was also quite ready to take part in a big, thrilling adventure, C. W. Moss, a character that is actually an amalgamation of different members of the real Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker gang. Bonnie proves a perfect, if sometimes awkward, sidekick, the kind of partner who can stimulate an impulsive, stubborn character. This vision of the Bonnie and Clyde legend presents a radical love story where a crude female sexual desire and an awkward male expectation for completeness nicely meet and build a ruthless gang of criminals; it is bold, exciting and compelling, in large part thanks to the passion both Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway invest in their brazen performances and the fiery alchemy between them.
The titles appear in-between series of file images, black and white shots on the lives of Bonnie and Clyde, complete with short biographical notices: the film asserts the historical origin of the narrative and reminds the audience how deeply etched in the archives and memories of the nation they were. Their historical background is essential to appreciate this place in history: this was the era of the Great Depression which sent impoverished farmers and their folks on the roads to find a job, people doomed to eat the grapes of wrath. Clyde’s insistence that robbing banks was only fair play as banks could rob decent folks and his knack at escaping law may well have turned the victims of the economic crisis on his side, associating the Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker gang with that mythic figure of a gentle robber Robin Hood was. The film bolsters this point through the dialogues between Clyde and two farmers, one visiting his foreclosed farm, just as Clyde’s affair with Bonnie has started, and the other as he was caught in one of the gang’s heist at the apex of the criminals’ career.
The film smartly underlines the complex, ambiguous, even troublesome aspects of this surprising fame: Clyde would be amused but later angry at the striking ability of the journalists to attribute to his gang many heists in places they have never visited, as evidenced by the film as it tracks their path across Texas and the neighboring states. This fame rises the risk of getting noticed and fuels the fears of the common people as well as the police, who are well aware of the sharpshooting skills of Clyde and the ruthlessness of his sidekicks, including Buck: that plays a part in the choice of using massive firepower and aggressive tactics various law enforcers involved in the chase increasingly make. But the gang becomes acutely sensitive to this dubious fame and really like it, even play with the media attention it involves, with Bonnie clearly enjoying both the fun and the impact of it. As it happens, one of her boldest ideas proves disastrous, as the mockery she makes of a sheriff turns the man, Frank Hamer, into a relentless and ruthless enemy who would prevail.
The support of poor people is movingly conveyed, with a scene showing how the badly wounded Clyde and Bonnie, who have lost Buck, shot dead, and Blanche, arrested, are led by C. W. Moss to a camp of vagrant jobless and then helped by them and with the family reunion between Bonnie and her relatives, a strangely magical sequence shot in a hazy, warm light, a kind of paradise lost but recovered where Bonnie’s anxieties can be appeased. But these signs of solidarity fail to keep their promises: the family reunion ends with Bonnie’s mother raising doubts about her future while the ride of C. W. Moss ends in his father’s house, a seemingly safe shelter but the host would rather side with the law. This is a vision that at the same time exploits a legendary, idealistic interpretation of the facts and points to the flaws, mistakes and the absurdity that go with it.
The final minutes of the film assert in a brutal, uncompromising way the power of the law and the triumph of good over evil. The bad people are eliminated by honest agents of the commonwealth, prevented from committing new robberies and new murders and punished for those already made. But the leader of the executioners was plainly acting out of personal revenge; he directs a huge, oversized firepower against two persons who were not holding a gun and had no bad intention; actually they had been lured into a trap that had nothing to do with a regular police operation as were the cases of previous clashes between the police and the gangsters. The shooting is an impressively graphic, bloody, shocking end for the Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow relationship as the film shows us to be: the amazing adventure of a couple reaching harmony and of sleek criminals grappling with the world’s disharmony. This end is so savage that it right away contradicts the operation’s necessity and purpose, a final ambiguity that belies the relative sympathy director Arthur Penn and his team, starting by top producer and lead actor Beatty, have for one of the most famous couples in the history of crime.