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Contents this page were published in the September/October, 1997 edition of the Washington Free Press.
WFP, 1463 E. Republican #178, Seattle, WA -USA, 98112. -- WAfreepress@gmail.com
Copyright © 1997 WFP Collective, Inc.
FILM REVIEWS
AND CALENDAR
by Paul D. Goetz
Free Press staff writer
In the slums of Dallas, Texas, in January of 1930, a hotheaded 20-year-old thief in hiding from the law met a lonely 19-year-old waitress looking for thrills and romance. They fell passionately in love. Both sought deliverance from their impoverished backgrounds, both had a defiance for authority. After serving time on a brutal prison farm, the thief returned to Dallas in February of 1932. Hardened and marked as an ex-con, he was unable to hold a job because of his record. He and his girl were soon robbing banks and leaving a trail of blood across five Southwestern states. They continued to elude hundreds of law enforcement personnel for nearly two years before they were finally brought down in a hail of bullets on May 23, 1934.
Though Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker would be responsible for the deaths of 12 people, the public eagerly clamored for every bit of news during their spree. They couldn't have guessed, however, how deep the public's fascination would run. Thousands attended their funerals at which many people tried to get a piece of them, even attempting to cut off their ears. Nor could they have guessed that they would become legends and be exploited in numerous books, movies, and television shows throughout the century.
They knew they had captured the nation's imagination as evidenced by the many photos they took that show them playing to the public as gangster and gun moll, and by Bonnie's self-dramatizing valedictory ballad published in newspapers at the time. In turn, the media devoured them, sensationalizing their story further by giving them credit for crimes they did not commit.
Why the fascination? Certainly, the Depression made them folk heroes. For many poverty-stricken, bank-hating Southwestern farmers, Clyde seemed to have taken the role of a modern day Robin Hood. The fact that they killed mostly lawmen was not lost on the public. Then, too, there is the fascination with those who flirt with death, whose lives contrast with the dutiful routine of our own. We must acknowledge that, like children playing cops and robbers, or circus-goers disappointed when the acrobats use a net, we need the visceral, though vicarious, charge that comes with rubbing shoulders with danger. But our fascination also points to a powerful archetype imbedded in our collective unconscious - that of the cynical, independent, authority-challenging individual born in violent revolution and sustained by violent westward expansion.
Whatever the reason, the public's complicity with their legend has continued to this day. Adolescents, long a target of the movie studios, and traditionally contemptuous of authority, eager for sexual experimentation, and always ready to entertain the idea of side-stepping induction into the ranks of the work force, have fallen for nearly every revamping of the pair's story. This was never more true than 30 years ago when director Arthur Penn's Bonnie and Clyde opened and went on to become a sensation in the wake of the Summer of Love as the Viet Nam War raged.
However, here was a film that had much more going for it than studio calculation. I was a 14-year-old when I saw it, and to me it had more vitality in any one frame than any entire movie I had ever seen. The other two rural crime films I saw that year, Cool Hand Luke and In the Heat of the Night, seemed positively archaic by comparison. Bonnie and Clyde was funny, sexy (despite Clyde's impotence that kept the two from coupling until near the end), and charged with danger (its ultra-violence came out of nowhere in orgiastic spasms). But even then I sensed the intelligence behind the danger.
The film's violence provoked multiple responses. Bonnie and Clyde had killed, yes, and at times they had done so with little or no remorse, but the overriding concern of Penn and his screenwriters David Newman and Robert Benton was a portrait of an American family propelled, cemented, and ultimately destroyed by that violence. Penn had inspired empathetic, full-bodied performances from his entire cast, especially from his two stars, Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway. These factors made it difficult to cheer the bloody retribution that ended their lives. Violence itself, out-sized and shocking as it always is in real life, became the bad guy.
Penn and his writers were also well-aware of the implications of myth-making. The visual and audio references to movies, photography, historical archives, and the news media in the film are numerous and intentional. They allude to how the record we make of our lives is immediately turned into myth, and how reality feeds on that myth to create more myth.
Burnett Guffey's consistently fresh and varied cinematography is a textbook example of how to keep an audience absorbed. Certainly, his camera is observant, but often it is a conspirator with the performances in ways that make us participants. Throughout, Dede Allen's innovative editing contributes greatly to the vigor of the film, but his dissection of the complexities of thought and action in the finale remains one of the cinema's greatest editing achievements.
Besides the trivial The Bonnie Parker Story (1958), there were three outstanding entrees prior to Penn's film. Reflective of the time in which it was made, Fritz Lang's seminal You Only Live Once (1937) features Henry Fonda as Eddie, an ex-con who tries to go straight, but who is continually thwarted by the insensitivity and cruelty of society. Sylvia Sidney, as his girl Joan, for a while embodies our naive hope that an innocent man has nothing to fear. In Nicholas Ray's They Live By Night (1949), the sweet misguided lovers are threatened not only by society but by the clearly viperous outlaws in their midst. Like Ray's Rebel Without a Cause, it's another of his portraits of misunderstood, powerless youths attempting to forge the facsimile of a normal life in the face of a callous world. And in Joseph H. Lewis's exciting Gun Crazy (1949), John Dall and Peggy Cummins play a couple with a passion for guns who turn to bank robbery. But it's their moral dilemmas and how these affect their romance that makes us care what happens to them.
For better or worse, however, it is Bonnie and Clyde that remains a watershed for today's filmmakers. It's impossible to imagine the existence of blackly comic films like Quentin Tarantino's Pulp Fiction (1994) and Oliver Stone's Natural Born Killers (1994) if there had been no Bonnie and Clyde. In the ensuing years, the genre has been in steady decline. Only Terrence Malick's masterpiece, Badlands, has the look of an enduring classic. In 1958, 19-year-old Charles Starkweather and 13-year-old Caril Ann Fugate went on a crime spree that left 11 people dead. At the time, Americans were as shocked by their deeds as by their inability to explain or show remorse. Inspired by their story, Badlands is a harrowing and ultimately cautionary portrait of vacuous amorality and dissociative media fascination seen as a spreading national disease. Martin Sheen as Kit and Sissy Spacek as Holly portray the emotionally and culturally bankrupt young people with chilling and deglamorizing nonchalance, while Malick breathtakingly places them in spacious landscapes that remind us they've been spawned in the heartland of America.
As for the others, Martin Scorsese had a go at it with the uninspired Boxcar Bertha in 1968. Leonard Kastle made the trashy, claustrophobic The Honeymoon Killers (1970), while Sam Peckinpah underwhelmed us with The Getaway (1972). Even Robert Altman's Thieves Like Us (1974) added little. In recent years the genre seemed to be gathering considerable steam. Unfortunately, films such as Running Hot (1984), Guncrazy (1992), True Romance (1993), Kalifornia (1993), and a remake of The Getaway (1994) were little more than shallow exploitations. David Lynch's largely incoherent Wild at Heart (1990) nevertheless featured some extremely arresting sequences that nearly stand on their own. There were also two initially interesting, but ultimately needless television movies, Bonnie & Clyde: The True Story (1992), and Murder in the Heartland (1993).
Most of these latter films are cheerfully exploitative. Their makers eschew moralizing, claiming their view is a more honest post-modern response, but the result is often nihilism masquerading as realism. The trend drains the life out of characters, making them little more than cartoonish elements in an exercise in cinematic technology, and has probably reached its nadir with Stone's Natural Born Killers. Largely a self-obsessed exercise in style, Stone hits the barn door of his theme of media exploitation with a howitzer shot of sound and fury, unwittingly becoming the worst example of that which he seeks to satirize.
Filmmakers like Stone and Tarantino who are pushing the stylistic envelope and who don't seem to care whether we give a damn about their characters would do well to look back before pushing forward. Bonnie and Clyde is a funny, violent, stylistically innovative film that refuses to be didactic; its vitality springs from richly-drawn characters with whom we are able to empathize. Without them, it could not possibly be both entertaining and enlightening while contemplating the American experience so profoundly.
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