Her delicious red lips pout, she sulks, charming, it’s Faye Dunaway, Bonnie. Well-established hat, natural class, looks pretty proud, his six-shot sheath is Warren Beatty, Clyde. Bonnie & Clyde what, the mythical, nominally known to all. Bonnie is tired of her daily routine and normal life in the open country. Suffice to say that when the beautiful Clyde, touting her reputation as a bank robber crosses her path, she is excited by a possible life outside standards alongside him. This is the plot, two improvised gangsters who do not want harm to anyone, public enemies in spite of themselves. Suddenly, their story is one of the spearheads of the film, it makes them endearing, they have a certain nobility, never stealing money from a poor old man. They also have their human side. On the contrary, the police are real jackals, eager for glory for catching the two famous bandits, ready for all the dirty shots possible and imaginable.

It was at the heart of the deep economic crisis that hit the United States in 1930 that the couple emerged. Bonnie Parker lives in a small town in Texas. First class and film buff, she spends her days writing poetry and dreams elsewhere. Attracted by bad guys, she leaves school and marries at 16 with a young man who quickly ends up behind bars. Although they will never divorce (Bonnie was still wearing her wedding ring when she was shot by law enforcement in 1934), their idyll only lasts three years. While returning to live with her mother, she meets Clyde Barrow by chance. He is just 21 years old, she is 20. They are young, lost and beautiful, they will quickly fall in love. Clyde was born like her in a small Texas town but grew up in a much poorer peasant family. His first arrest, he got it at age 17 for a car theft. Shortly after meeting Bonnie, he is also incarcerated. After killing for the first time (his co-detainee who was trying to rape him), he escapes and rejoins Bonnie. Together, they decide to leave everything and lead a life of outlaw, wandering through the mischief in the central-south of the country.

David Newman and Robert Benton, scriptwriters of the film, grew up with this story. When the historian John Toland devotes a biography to them The Dillinger Days in 1963, they decide to take inspiration from it to write their first film. Unknown and fans of the New Wave, they propose it to François Truffaut. The French director is very fond of the screenplay but has to decline the offer to deal with his adaptation project of Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451. He advises them, however, to address Jean-Luc Godard who will also move away from the project after having quarreled with potential producers. The script scares most production houses, especially because of her vision of a three-way love affair between Bonnie, Clyde and their CW driver, which is at the center of the project, making a perfect story for the director of Jules and Jim (1961). Truffaut then meets Warren Beatty in Paris and makes him read the scenario by promising him that he will adore.In search of a film able to revive his career and to break his too smooth image of cover boy, the actor is enthusiastic and decides to produce the film. Only the name of the director remains to be determined. After the refusals of George Stevens, William Wyler, John Schlesinger and Sydney Pollack, it is Arthur Penn, at the time also at the bottom of the wave after the failure of Mickey One (1965) and the complicated post-production of his latest film, The Merciless Pursuit (1966), which inherits the project.

Based on the true story of Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow, Bonnie and Clyde could very well have never seen the light of day. Written by two novice screenwriters, worn by a stalled actor, associated with an unrecognized actress, and directed by a director who had just been fired from editing his latest film, Bonnie and Clyde finally gave birth to a filmmaker. Timeless work, a film that, both in its form influenced by the New Wave and his vision of anarchist youth, carefree and passionate, has forever revolutionized the American cinema. Bonnie and Clyde” radically changed the face of American cinema by opposing classical studio cinema aesthetics and narration as equally spirited and modern as the other and placed under the influence of the New Wave. Curiously, ‘Bonny and Clyde’ moves between comedy and drama – details highlighted by the use of the exceptional soundtrack by Charles Strouse, or by episodes such as the debut of Gene Wilder in a somewhat anarchic way. Inheritance of European directors that Penn admired so much. He even dared to use natural lighting at certain times, something that put Burnett Guffey on his nerves, accustomed to more classical methods. All in all, Guffey won his second Oscar for this movie. The success in using natural lighting goes through sequences as vital as Bonnie (Dunaway) fleeing through the countryside with Clyde chasing her. The clouds, real, that hover over them work as a warning of what will come later. This sequence, in which Bonnie wants to see her mother because she misses her, formally clashes precisely with the meeting with her mother, who has a certain dreamlike point. The effect was achieved by putting a simple mosquito net on the camera.

The prodigious montage of Dede Allen, which laid the foundations for what would come in later years, is another key to the quality of ‘Bonnie and Clyde’, marking a powerful difference between the rhythm of the film and the internal rhythm of certain sequences, especially those of shootings. In this regard, the ambush and final shooting of the couple of criminals should be noted. Until that moment they remain together, the assembly, next to the thunderous noise of the shots, separates them.

The most morbid and interesting detail of the film is that it unites sex and violence. Faye Dunaway comes out practically naked in her first appearance, that of courtship with Clyde, who tries to steal her mother’s car. In the script, Clyde was expected to be bisexual, something Penn opposed to empathizing with the viewer. However, details are suggested in this regard with the other couple that accompanies them, played by some fabulous Gene Hackman and Estelle Parsons, which would be done with an Oscar. The detail of bisexuality was changed by impotence, marking another morbid detail in a relationship that from the beginning is destined to fail. The hysteria in the violence used, in which the characters shout and shout, works as a substitute for a sex they cannot practice, a love that they cannot consume. It is part of the poetry that the film shows, an energetic portrait of an America sunk in depression, made in another vital period, in which the cinema changed to forced marches.

Against all expectations and while the studio cinema is in agony since the failure of Cleopatra Joseph L. Mankiewicz (1963), the film is a huge success. Although a conservative America sees it as a glorification of violence, it brings 20 times its budget to the United States with a total of more than 50 million dollars at the box office. In France, it reaches almost 2 million spectators. This makes this movie conventional and unconventional, since it raised millions of dollars with unknown actors. Two years before Easy Rider and the same year as The Winner, he laid the foundation of New Hollywood. This current influenced by the New French Wave breaks the taboos of the American code of censorship and contrasts with the studio cinema by offering sex, violence, counter-culture and drugs unpublished representations.

A movie similar to this one would be the highwaymen directed by John Lee Hancock. John continues to tell essential stories of American mythomania after ‘To meet Mr. Banks’ (2013) or ‘The founder’ (2016). Now he presents us ‘Final Ambush’ (The Highwaymen) under a methodical and perfectly structured script by John Fusco. Here the story adapts to the road-movie style that seeks to tell the other side of the myth of Bonnie & Clyde. That one that gave the Marshals that went after them through an infinity of states of South America… All until arriving to draw up the plan for the “final ambush” of the title. The film is stripped of all the mystique that surrounded Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker. Attention to how the face of both is not revealed until the shocking final encounter, a success on the part of screenwriter and director. The two thus move away comparisons of the iconic performances of Warren Beatty & Faye Dunaway in the homonym ‘Bonnie & Clyde’ (Arthur Penn, 1967). Highlights here the precise and thorough libretto by John Fusco. A script written for nine years before entering production.

Sources:

Crowther, Bosley. “Run, Bonnie and Clyde; Run, Bonnie.” The New York Times, The New York Times, 3 Sept. 1967
Ebert, Roger. “Bonnie and Clyde Movie Review (1967): Roger Ebert.” RogerEbert.com, Warren Beatty, 25 Sept. 1967
Editors, The. “It’s About Us: The Legacy Of.” RogerEbert.com
Bernstein, Matthew. “Perfecting the New Gangster: Writing ‘Bonnie and Clyde.’” Film Quarterly, University of California Press, 1 July 2000