onnie Parker and Clyde Barrow the criminals were considered minor hoodlums whose notoriety far outweighed their criminal prowess.
Bonnie and Clyde the movie was taken as nothing short of a cinematic revolution in 1967. Or as once noted by some film historian whose name now slips my mind, it was a revelation in that it suddenly brought American movies to where European cinema had been for a decade, if not longer. (Indeed, the entire project was originally pitched to François Truffaut, who instead chose to helm
Fahrenheit 451.) But
Bonnie and Clyde probably owed less debt to the jazzy, violent works from across the pond than to the jangled social experience at home.
Stylistically, Arthur Penn's crime epic doesn't do anything that hadn't already been seen in any number of runty, skuzzy teen epics, all of which firmly established the paragons of good (i.e. "The Law") as being the new antagonists. More violent content had already been committed to film—admittedly not so often in Oscar-nominated blockbuster territory, but certainly in some of the films by Roger Corman and Herschell Gordon Lewis. Even the film's beatsick emotional tone, treating death and destruction against a Dust Bowl backdrop previously defined by the works of John Steinbeck, was presaged by Stanley Kubrick's
Dr. Strangelove, which sort of bested everything that could've ever imaginably followed in the questionable-taste department by turning nuclear winter into humanity's final glorious sunrise.
What
Bonnie and Clyde added to this mix of preexisting ingredients was all but spelled out in the love-childish tagline: "They're young. They're in love. And they kill people." So while Dub Taylor, Estelle Parsons, and a tightly-coiled Gene Wilder (in his movie debut) all carried on in service of the proud Paranoid Age tradition of Looney Tunes caricature (buttressed by that incessant bluegrass chase music), Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway pouted and sulked and looked all around fabulous at the center, resulting in an oddly self-absorbed bit of slapstick romantic fatalism, in every imaginable way a counterpart to the movie it most often gets lumped together with,
The Graduate. (That
Bonnie And Clyde couldn't bridge the generation gap probably had a lot less to do with the film's violence than it did the film's seeming indifference to the class implications of the pair's criminal acts.)
If
Bonnie And Clyde's blood and guts seem a tad more digestible now than the watery pools, aquariums, and fountains of
The Graduate, it could perhaps be because surface beauty and reckless violence committed with the name of retribution taken in vain are much closer to our current experience than a smug but excoriating dissection of the central soullessness of the American post-adolescent psyche. And though
Bonnie And Clyde may have been conceived as a proto-European hybrid and
The Graduate a California thoroughbred, the violent hemorrhage that closes the Depression-era/Vietnam-era touchstone makes as good a case as anything in filmed entertainment that American mass media operates in the declarative.
Not too many movies that weren't released just last summer get the hi-def treatment, but
Bonnie and Clyde now joins the likes of
Casablanca,
The Searchers, and, um,
Forbidden Planet as one of the few Blu-rayed movies that actually predate VHS. But it actually looks pretty fantastic in just plain old DVD, with unforgivingly-sepia skin tones and a vibrantly brown-hued representation of the drought-blighted Midwest. Bonus points for just sticking with the original mono soundtrack, though it's not exactly reference quality.
Considering the standards Warner Home Video have set for themselves with their other AFI-friendly releases like
Casablanca and
Citizen Kane, this two-disc set is about as rich as the string of bankrupt savings and loans Bonnie and Clyde run up against. I mean, isn't a commentary track sort of a requirement on these sort of special editions at this point? Instead, we get one hour's worth of "making of" retrospectives (courtesy Laurent Bouzereau) and another hour's worth of the true-life story of Bonnie and Clyde courtesy the History Channel. Both are solid and do more than enough to bolster the reputation of both the film and its central characters, but for some reason, it's the eight uninterrupted minutes of Warren Beatty going through costume tests like the hot piece of ass he knew he was that seems most in line with the movie itself.
If
Bonnie and Clyde doesn't seem to carry the heft expected of a film of its standing, the pillowy lips of its two leads make up the difference.
