"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
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