Arthur Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde (1967)

"Bonnie and Clyde is a milestone in the history of American movies, a work of truth and brilliance. It is also pitilessly cruel, filled with sympathy, nauseating, funny, heartbreaking, and astonishingly beautiful. If it does not seem that those words should be strung together, perhaps that is because movies do not very often reflect the full range of human life."

-Roger Ebert

Bonnie and Clyde is just one of those movies that comes along and shakes things up. Although it first premiered as a B-rated movie and was only shown in a few drive-in and alternative theaters, the movie rose above the concerns associated with it and quickly rose to immense status and critical acclaim, grossing over 50 million dollars.

It easily could have been a sappy, forgettable love story about a misunderstood couple who try desperately to rebel against a society that ultimately will put them down for good. But while Bonnie and Clyde does portray love, its portrayal is brutally honest, and the relationship between Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow is juxtaposed with scenes of melancholy, doubt, humor, and appalling violence. Two young lovers who brutally riddle people with bullets and rob banks may seem like quite a bizarre happening, but the combination of two such opposite concepts is really quite honest commentary on the many contradictory layers of American society.

Peter Politis
Film Club

One of the great things about a film series is that one gets the chance to compare multiple works by film-makers. In Bonnie and Clyde, we have the opportunity to consider the growing talent of Robert Towne. Towne is not acknowledged in the film credits, but it is widely known that he contributed to the final script. In February, the Academy Film Series will screen Roman Polanski’s Chinatown (1974), perhaps Towne’s most famous (and credited) script. When you watch it, reflect on Bonnie and Clyde and ask yourself whether you can hear any similarities in the writing.

What does that mean? We tend to focus on the surface of the dialogue when we first think about screenwriting, but a little deeper we find an opportunity to consider naturalistic speech vs prosaic speech, the meaninglessness of speech that supports action vs the glory of language that transcends action, or the role of language in shaping and defining human experience. Listen to Towne. What does his writing tell us about the characters? About the time the movie was written? About the movie’s tone? What philosophy does it suggest?

You probably know Towne even if you’re not the kind of person who can rattle off how many Academy Award nominations every movie in 1974 garnered. Towne wrote Brian DePalma’s Mission: Impossible and John Woo’s Mission: Impossible II. The world is full of connections. Try to make some; go to Towne.

Randall Findlay
Film Club Adviser

Ricky Lau's Mr. Vampire (1985)

Zac: Hi, I'm Zac Lutz, co-President of the SPA Film Club.

RF: I'm Randall Findlay, adviser of the SPA Film Club.

Zac: And we're here to discuss Mr. Vampire, a 1980s Hong Kong martial arts vampire comedy horror flick starring Ching-Ying Lam, who has made over 90 martial arts films including Gui Meng Jao, Mi Zong Cheng Long, and Huang Fei-hong Xi Lie Zhi Yi Dai Shi.

RF: Wow. I didn't know you spoke Chinese. What's Mr. Vampire about?

Zac: Mr. Vampire is a movie that is both exciting and funny while still trying to be nothing but itself, something that seems increasingly rare in modern film. It is about a man, who is a sort of vampire-expert priest guy in charge of the morgue and who sports an aggressive uni-brow. It's also about his two assistants, whose names are strangely very American. The two assistants are quite easy to relate to, as they keep on trying to do their work right, but constantly mess up or fool around, and yet the morgue master guy keeps them around for some reason.

RF: Man, you're right about that uni-brow. I see that the sequel to this movie, and there are five, is entitled One-Eyebrow Priest. And he's a great martial arts master. But he does leave a lot be desired when it comes to hiring employees. The whole plot in Mr. Vampire is moved along by the incompetence of the people who work for him.

Zac: In a way, this seems to be a sort of underlying idea, that despite the comically bumbling nature of the assistants, the morgue master guy still sees how they try so hard to please him, and most of the time they manage to do things right. All of the characters in Mr. Vampire work together very well, and their relationships to one another are definitely believable.

RF: It is interesting that you would say that. After all, the genre of this film is fantasy. I mean, hopping vampires, seductive ghosts, bumbling servants who release zombies because they're screwing around rather than doing their job! Realism is a noun I wouldn't have applied to this film, or the others in the same genre, like Sammo Hung's Close Encounters of the Spooky Kind.

Zac: As far as that goes, there aren't really any parts that seem cheesily unrealistic except for the ghost lady who shows up a bit later and a bit randomly.

RF: Point taken. I remember the first time I saw the film. I saw the vampires hopping, and I started laughing out loud. I thought it was so funny. But at the same time, it's a little creepy. How would you rate this film?

Zac: The vampires themselves are actually fairly menacing, and their stiff hopping seems quite natural as far as how a dead person might move. Overall, the story is easy to follow, although the beginning is a bit confusing, as well as the introduction of the ghost lady, and some of the translations are rather abrupt.

RF: Speaking of abrupt, that's all the time we have. Enjoy the film!

Zac Lutz and R. Findlay
Film Club