Tone

I will be completely honest when I say that Arthur Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde surprised me from beginning to end. At the beginning of the film, Bonnie shows off a lot of skin that I believe would have been quite scandalous in the 1960s. Still nude, Bonnie goes to her window and sees Clyde who is attempting to steal her mother’s car. She confronts Clyde and they end up going to town together on her way to work. They quickly develop what looks to be a good friendship and Bonnie joins Clyde on his bank robbing extravaganza.

I enjoyed how whenever they were making a getaway the movie would always have an upbeat banjo sounding song in the background. The music, in turn, changed what should have been stressful getaway scenes into comedic and overall hilarious moments of the film.

I quickly discovered that both Bonnie and Clyde seem to have a Robin Hood complex. They don’t steal from the people and seem to be relatively kind to most individuals. On the other hand, they enjoy stealing from banks immensely and don’t like associating with the individuals who work for them. This is demonstrated when they kick a man by the name of Eugene Grizzard out of the car after finding out he is an ‘Undertaker’.

Later on Bonnie gets to visit her family where after Clyde suggests to Bonnie’s mother that Bonnie could live close to her mother she replies with, “You try to live three miles from me and you won’t live long honey. You best keep running Clyde Barrow and you know it.” This statement from Bonnie’s mother gave me a feeling that Bonnie and Clyde’s stories would not have a happy ending. My feelings turned out to be correct when C.W. (a member of their gang) takes an injured Bonnie and Clyde to his father and his father snitches on them. Bonnie and Clyde both end up getting shot to death in a very sudden, short, and shocking scene.

History

There is a wide range of opinions on the reception of Bonnie and Clyde. Some proclaim that Bonnie and Clyde is the beginning of a new era while others call it tasteless.

In a review by Roger Ebert written in 1967, he claims that “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.” The film was expertly produced with amazing character development and character personality. Bonnie and Clyde may have not been very talented when it came to robbing banks but they were skilled in killing and escaping. Unlike in most films of that era, Bonnie and Clyde show graphic violence of people getting blown to bits after being shot. The film does not hide the suffering or the real damage that bullets make on the body which Roger Ebert praises.

In addition, Roger Ebert claims,

In “Bonnie and Clyde,” however, real people die. Before they die they suffer, horribly. Before they suffer they laugh, and play checkers, and make love, or try to. These become people we know, and when they die it is not at all pleasant to be in the audience.

Arthur Penn had the audience get to know both Bonnie and Clyde in order to connect to them as people. This made the deaths of Bonnie and Clyde much more shocking and horrifying. Instead of seeing two robbers and killers getting killed we saw two people we grew to like killed.

Discord

While Roger Ebert’s review praises both Arthur Penn and Bonnie and Clyde there are other reviewers who do not feel the same. In another review called Cinema: Low-Down Hoedown it is claimed that “The real fault with Bonnie and Clyde is its sheer, tasteless aimlessness.” They state that Bonnie and Clyde does not have a purpose. The reviewer also claims that the film’s director Arthur Penn attempts to “aim at irony”  but fails.

The reviewer then states that

Barrow fancied himself something of a latterday Robin Hood, robbing only banks that were foreclosing on poor farmers and eventually turning into a kind of folk hero.

While the reviewer mocks Barrow’s Robin Hood complex that was actually something I admired throughout the entire film. I found that it gave the Barrow Gang a deeper personality. Especially when they had a sense of morals that they stuck to.

Overall I would recommend Bonnie and Clyde to anyone who has at least a bit of taste for violence. This film truly is what Robert Ebert claims it to be, a milestone in the history of American movies.