Bonnie and Clyde were played by Fay Dunaway and Warren Beatty. They played such amazing roles in this violent intoxicating 1967 movie.  A blonde beauty who saw a handsome young man looking at her mother’s car changed her life forever.  In only one day Bonnie met Clyde and decided to drive across the country and rob places.  Clyde who had recently got out of prison for armed robbery and Bonnie who worked at a cafe. Clyde offered her what seemed like a lifetime of endless love but in reality, it would become a lifetime on the run.

Bonnie and Clyde was a conventional movie because the famous couple died in 1934 and the movie wasn’t made too far after.  30 years may seem pretty old but if you were at an age to remember than it would be enough to make a lot of money and get a large audience.  People want to know what happened, they want to see behind the scenes of these newspaper reports we read.  Take for example the movie Snowden, although we may think this movie is not anywhere similar to Bonnie in Clyde, it is quite similar.  In the movie Snowden, a young man reveals that the government has been listening to everything we say and seeing everything we do. What is similar between these two movies is they were both popular movies because it had to do with knowing what happened.  We read everything in the news and newspaper but when a movie comes out that shows the criminal’s story we become very curious.  We got to see his side of the story and get validation of what he did and why it was the right thing for him to do.

Before I watched the movie I did had my doubts about the validation of why Bonnie and Clyde kill.  In the new movie of Bonnie and Clyde called The Highway Men, I saw how so many people covered up for these criminals and how people in regular society praised them as heroes.  How were they, heroes? They killed innocent people and they had fun doing it.  My thoughts were all over the place because I didn’t see validation and I didn’t agree.  I recently watched an interview with the original director Arthur Penn and it changed my thoughts about the movie.  After watching the 1967 movie of Bonnie and Clyde I didn’t see validation, there was no specific dialog that specified the exact reason why they decided to kill people and rob places.  In the first 30 minutes of the movie they decided to rob places, there was nowhere or anything specific until they met a man at an abandoned house.  As they woke up Clyde wanted to show Bonnie how to shoot and a man stopped to look at the house.  He explained that the bank took their house and they had to leave but he wanted to take one more look.  After this scene, they decided to be bank robbers.  I concluded it was because the banks were taking people’s houses but I didn’t feel as though it was a good enough reason to validate their killing. After watching this interview he specified he put that scene in there to show the times about the depression.  He also wanted people to see that the houses were being taken by the bank, yet the banks were going bankrupt themselves. I didn’t realize this until Penn explained these scenes in more detail.  I can’t say I completely agree with the killing but I can see why people praised them about robbing the banks.

I believe if I re-watched this movie I would definitely see the real reasonings for everything they did.  I thought Highway Men explained Bonnie and Clyde in a great way but after watching this movie I don’t think Highway Men represented Bonnie and Clyde as they should’ve. They made them seem like complete murderers and I know they did kill people but they were not going out of their way to kill random people.

Towards the end of the movie, I noticed the only time they actually killed many people is when the cops would drive to where they were staying and start shooting.  The robbery jobs they did in the movie they never intentionally killed a random person.  Halfway in the movie when the Barrow Gang did a robbery Clyde asked a man if the money on the counter was his and the older gentleman said yes and Clyde didn’t take his money he actually told him to keep his money and go.  This scene reassured me that they were never criminals but true heroes.