The film Bonnie and Clyde have caught my eyes immediately when I scroll down the dossiers. I believe the last movie I chose influences me. It seems that I like watching road movies. This movie happened to be another excellent road movie and was more excited than the last one that I watched.

Adopted from the real events about Bonnie and Clyde, the movie told a story happened in the Great Depression where the number of unemployment was soaring, and most people were struggling for a living. Clyde has robbed since he saw a family’s house was confiscated by a bank. Then, he decided to rob banks. Bonnie met Clyde when he was stealing her mother’s car, and they fell in love with each other later. They started to run away together with their two relatives. Guns are their best friends, and some audience viewed them as “a dangerous American couple.” The whole movie is full of violence and illegal behaviors. They killed people mercilessly, but they thought they were helping people in need. On the one hand, I believe their actions are immoral; on the other hand, I appreciated their cool activities, because they were having done many things that ordinary people want but have no courage to do.

At the meanwhile, I have read some historical reviews about this movie, and I agree with some of them while harboring different ideas with some of them. In Bonnie and Clyde Movie Review (1967), Roger Ebert, the author, thought highly of this movie, and he regarded this movie as a milestone in American movies’ history. To prove this view, he wrote a list of reasons ranges from its actors to plots, from its influences to achievements. I agree with him on its impact. The film displayed an ending full of violence where the couple was shot by guns, which lasted for 54 seconds. That was so called aestheticization of violence, which was used by Sam Peckinpah in a movie, The Wild Bunch. The aestheticization of violence has profoundly influenced many directors.

Another historical resource I choose was a series of The Bonnie and Clyde’s posters. There were lots of posters the movie had. The most famous poster is that Bonnie and Clyde stood before their car, and both of them hold a gun staring at you straightly. From this poster, I believe they’re very cool. Bonnie has short and blond hair, wearing a hat, which looks clean and neat. Another touching poster in my mind is that the couple remained to laugh with each other in their car while being shot by police. It seems that they know what situation they were in, and  know what ending they would have. I see their calm as well as a little bit of compromise. They were like two graceful dancers when they being shoot outsiders. From those two posters along with others, I find that posters are significant historical evidence. It can reflect the esthetic sense of that time and their thoughts.

The film could only be shown in a limited range of drive-in theaters and other small cinemas when it first came out. Three reasons can explain why it happened. First, it disrupted traditional Gangster Film mode. Second, its theme is so deviant that many critics attacked it. Third, the relatives of those victims murdered by this couple fought against the decoration that the movie made for the couple’s behaviors. As we all know the real Bonnie and Clyde have crucially killed too many people. However, at the Montreal international film festival held in the same year, The Bonnie and Clyde hit the headline, attracting an increasingly growing number of audiences to the cinema. The cost of this film is $2.5 million, but the final box office of it is over $50 million, almost 250 times. The high profits make it to be the most profitable film since 1964’s My Fair Lady, which is another film made by Warner Brothers. The sudden change in people’s attitudes towards this movie has become a significant event in the international film industry. I can see people living in that period were unhappy, depressive and sorrowful. They wanted to find a way to wreak. That’s one of the reasons contributing to its later success.

As the movie is set at the Great Depression, it is inundated with the features of that period. Characters in this movie suffered a lot from this great economic crisis. The suffering those innocent people got has triggered Clyde’s sense of justice. Or, in other words, Clyde thought he had done justified things which will benefit lots of people. Whether his behaviors are right or not, it is a movie deserves watching.