Bonnie and Clyde: the shape of things to come
In November 2008 Kimmie and I changed our regular Saturday-night DVD viewing. Having till that point watched movies in series picked by me with themes like "romantic comedies" or "movies of the 80s", we decided to embark on a more ambitious project. Thus was born Paul's History of Cinema Festival: an attempt to see all the best movies ever made, in chronological order, starting with D. W. Griffith's 1915 epic The Birth of a Nation. We wound up fast-forwarding through the last half of that, since it's 187 minutes long—quite a haul for a silent drama. We were also startled to find the movie to be about the heroic origin of the Ku Klux Klan, a theme so politically incorrect today that I couldn't help enjoying it.
It's three years on and we've stepped up the pace by watching not one but two movies a week, on Saturday and Sunday nights. We've made it to 1967. I've been meaning to start blogging about them, and now finally I will. First up: last night's feature, Bonnie and Clyde, directed by Arthur Penn and starring Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway. I thought it was pretty good, and wound up rating it 8/10 on the Internet Movie Database (IMDb), but I also decided I wouldn't need to see it again, and therefore rated as a C in my own system, meaning, roughly, "seen it enough, thanks". A rating of B means "willing to see it again"; a rating of A means "top quality, thoroughly excellent".
On Twitter this morning I posted this tweet:
Watched "Bonnie and Clyde" (1967) last night: detached, violent, eerily relevant. My #IMDb rating: 8/10.
The credited writers were David Newman and Robert Benton, but I noticed during the opening credits that Robert Towne had a credit of something like "special assistant to the producer". Now the producer was Warren Beatty himself, and I knew that Towne was—or at that date would become—a major screenwriter; and sure enough, in checking IMDb I found that Towne was an uncredited writer on the show. Putting it together, my guess would be that Beatty brought Towne in to do a rewrite of the script, and was prevented for some reason, possibly contractual, from giving him a writing credit. That's just a guess. In looking at Towne's IMDb profile I see that he did a lot of uncredited work.
The writing was quite good and the movie itself well made. For me the story did not have the tension that it should have, but built along the lines of acquiring more members of the gang, making bigger bank heists, and getting into progressively more ferocious shootouts with the law, until finally they're betrayed and led into an ambush in which the lawmen don't stint on machine-gun rounds. Exit one pair of good-looking bank robbers from the earthly plane.
The adjective detached from this morning's tweet refers to Arthur Penn's directorial style, which I'd noticed a couple of months ago while watching The Miracle Worker, the film version of the award-winning Broadway play that he had also directed. There seems to be a clean, architectural coolness to his style. There is a feeling of watching movement or violence or passion, and the director is watching it with you. His style feels calm, unhurried, and objective, as well as aesthetic and mature. There's a feeling of head rather than heart, and that tends to be uninvolving.
Next: violent. The movie is that, and I seem to recall (I was 8 years old when it was released) that it was notorious for that and gained a "restricted" rating for violence alone (there is no sex or nudity in the show). There is lots of shooting and some blood, but in all the violence seems kind of antiseptic. The most graphic and moving instance of violence is late in the movie when Bonnie and Clyde are both shot in an ambush (not the climactic one). There is some sense of the terrible suffering inflicted by these people and these weapons, but very soon afterwards the two attractive characters are sporting light, clean slings and all is soon well again. People are shot in the movie, people die, but there is a sense that it's merely for story, and not so much a matter of human suffering.
Finally: eerily relevant. For me one of the most powerful scenes in the film was early on, before the recently united Bonnie and Clyde have begun their crime spree. They've spent the night in an abandoned house, and are startled in the morning when a stranger, a farmer, suddenly catches them by surprise. Clyde pulls a gun on the stranger, who turns out to be no other than the former owner of the house. He has pulled up in his truck with his family to give the place one last look, for, as a sign nailed over the front declares, the place has been repossessed by the bank, and they are leaving, maybe, like the Joads in The Grapes of Wrath, for California. For it is 1932 and the Great Depression is on them, whether people know it yet or not.
Clyde, who's taken a couple of shots at the bank's sign, offers his gun to the farmer to take a shot. The farmer, diffident and stoic, at first declines, but then, urged by Clyde, accepts and takes a single shot at the sign. He shyly enjoys it, and calls over a black farmhand to also take one—which he does. Having thus revenged themselves harmlessly on the bank, they get back in the truck and drive away.
This scene was a wonderful and original creation, well written, well acted, and well directed. But it moved me for a further reason, and changed the way I viewed the rest of the film. That vacant, derelict house, with the foreclosure sign nailed over its front window, was a picture of America again today. And the forces that created that depression, and dispossessed simple people of their homes, could turn a shy, God-fearing farmer briefly into a gun-wielding outlaw. And they were the same forces that created Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker, young poor people, barely employable, with few prospects and an inchoate feeling of social wrong. They could never earn nice cars, but they could steal them; they could never live like bankers, but they could steal some—a little—of the bankers' money. Inequitable economic forces acting slowly over a long time destroyed the social contract, and two symptoms of the resulting disease are Bonnie and Clyde.
Those inequitable economic forces have now been acting for a still longer time. The symptoms are erupting around us, and growing worse. Bonnie and Clyde is not a story about the past; it is about the present and the future. In pursuing their career of lawless, heedless greed the Bonnies and Clydes are not rebelling against the authorities of their society, they are following their example.
