Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow are an infamous couple, known for their heist of banks and murders in the 1930’s. Clyde is an ex-convict who is out on parole, when he meets Bonnie and two automatically click and run away together to fall in love. During their adventures they commit a number of bank heists that result in deaths of many people. They are both pushed forward by their love for one another, lack of economic mobility and longing for public attention from news papers. Bonnie and Clyde were eventually shot and killed while on the run in the State of Texas.
Bonnie and Clyde is a conventional film that explores a well-known and already popular story. The artistic expression in this film is hard to pinpoint, the nature of the story inhibits a large aspect of cruelty. From robbing banks to shooting innocent people that get in their way, Bonnie and Clyde do not exactly pose a picture-perfect image of the 1930’s life. However, the historic relevance of the 1930’s was a dark and tumultuous period due to the great depression. The majority of Americans did not have food to eat or work to earn wages, so there was really no picture-perfect couple in the early 1930’s.
The great depression is something that adds a great deal of sorrow and destitution to the film. Bonnie and Clyde seem to be making a living in what was a period when most people could not. Roger Ebert states that this film encompasses a full range of human emotion because of the spirit and love between Bonnie and Clyde, but also the historical context of what life was like. It is almost as if Bonnie and Clyde decided that they did not care to live long in the state in which our country was in. Can you blame them? Pauline Kael writes in the New Yorker (1967), “Just how contemporary in feeling “Bonnie and Clyde” is may be indicated by contrasting it with ‘You Only Live Once’.” Bonnie and Clyde explore an entire range of emotions from infatuation to love to fear and eventually death. These organically occurring emotions were made very present in the film, which added to its ambiance of “star struck criminals.”
Consider the under-developed, great-depression era, dust-bowl that the State of Texas was in the 1930’s – Bonnie and Clyde seemed to live life like they did not want to live in reality. Pauline Kael wrote an article in 1967 about how riveting the story is and how the “audience was alive to it.” However, there is something to be said for the fact that this story is already developed and already enticing to any American. The true artistic ability is how director, Arthur Penn, decided to capture not only the emotional aspects that Bonnie and Clyde were going through, but intertwining those feelings into the era of the 1930’s. The banks they wanted to rob were closed down, the houses they stayed in had been foreclosed on and the scenery was destitute.
This film captures everything that a viewer would want. As Ebert writes,”’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.” Ebert could not have said it better. All of these feelings that come from vastly different places in the film are what makes an already popular story, into an equally comparable film. Without the combination of love, hate, sympathy, and humor, this film would not do the true emotions justice.
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