Bonnie and Clyde (1967)

"Bonnie and Clyde" was the French New Wave come to Hollywood.  Or rather, Hollywood taking bits of the French New Wave and repackaging them for mass appeal.  And judging by its reception, box office, and now-classic status, it worked, though more as an exercise in calculated trendsetting than a step forward in cinematic expression.

Produced and pretty much brought to screen by star Warren Beatty, the film  tells the well-known story of Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow, two Depression era outlaws who shot to fame after the release of captured photographs showing them cavorting and posing with their wares (and in Bonnie's case a famous cigar) during their multi-state crime spree.  In the hands of director Arthur Penn, it became a glamorous, seriocomic adventure with some heavy-handed psychpop thrown in (got phallic symbol?), wrapped up in Godardian and Truffault-like flourishes.  Nevermind the two French auteurs were feuding.

The film announces its intentions from the very beginning.  Faye Dunaway as Bonnie pouts boredly in her bedroom waiting for just the right gangster to come and take her away.  The scene is all hand helds and jump cuts, but when Clyde shows up and Bonnie dresses and rushes down to meet him, the film returns us to the comfort of traditional Hollywood narrative – movie star closeups, conventional editing, static camera work.  This stylistic give and take is repeated throughout, but with the New Wave aesthetic never gaining preeminence.  It's just window dressing meant to advertise a coolness and flatter its audience as in-the-know.

One area the film does innovate is with its narrative jump cutting.  It doesn't waste much time with setup, the screenwriting equivalent of an establishing shot.  Instead, it cuts right to the action, like when Clyde announces to a foreclosure victim, "We rob banks," and the film cuts mid-sequence to them robbing a bank.  This abrupt change of pace, fast-paced cutting in the storyline, is the film's most compelling feature and was probably the main reason behind its success with audiences.  Boring it ain't.

Another attempt at something new was the violence.  This was bloodier than anything Hollywood had ever served up.  We never saw squibs used to simulate exploding bullet wounds before.  The gunshots were louder.  Changes of tone more abrupt.  You'd think it would make it all the more shocking, but it was just the opposite.  "Bonnie and Clyde" wasn't the forerunner of a cinema more conscious of brutality and the reality of its consequences.  Instead it foretold John Yoo's balletic violence, violence as beauty, or Tarantino's violence as irony, in addition to countless action flicks with body counts (and squib counts) to numerous to tabulate.

The violence in "Bonnie and Clyde" was commercial.  It was to get people talking, but it failed to achieve an artistic statement because it could never separate itself from the undeniable glamor of the film.  And if you think undeniable is a lazy word, look at Beatty and Dunaway again.  The point is, where the violence complemented the old-style, Hollywood glamor is where the film fails itself.  The violence served the glamor of its stars, never undercutting it.  Bonnie and Clyde were portrayed as always likable with charisma in spades.  Especially with the police portrayed as mostly faceless cutouts, there was no question who we'd root for.  Penn and company left no room for it.

Inevitably, talk of "Bonnie and Clyde" leads to the subject of antiheroes, but these aren't antiheroes in the sense of those so prevalent in '40s noir.  Dunaway's and Beatty's Bonnie and Clyde are a glossy reproduction.  No effort is given to explore their dark sides, and dark sides they had.  They didn't just kill cops.  They killed plenty of civilians, too.  There was some effort to explore a psychosexual theme with Clyde's impotence, but it was played merely as a contrasting symbolism rather than a serious informing of a character and his motives.  There was also an effort to draw on motives of class struggle, with Clyde saying repeatedly, "I ain't against them," after almost getting his head torn off by an employee in a robbery.  This comes across as something tacked on to, again, increase his likability factor, but the injustices of the Depression are only a backdrop to serve the character.  He isn't born of this backdrop as Edward G. Robinson's Rico Bandello was of the backdrop in "Little Caesar" or James Cagney's Tom Powers was of the setting in "Public Enemy."  Clyde was still Warren Beatty from Hollywood.

So what's the takeaway?  Is this about the seduction of Hollywood's star machine?  Is it a meta message about pushing violence forward purely for visual appeal and to satisfy an audience's thirst for the aesthetical new?  If the goal of the film was to shake things up and offer Hollywood a new toolkit they knew would succeed at the box office, then it was a success.  But if the goal was to confront audiences with violence in a way that made them question their previous perceptions and the way Hollywood uses violence for entertainment, then it's a missed opportunity.  Even in the final death scene, Bonnie and Clyde's bodies are riddled with bullets in romantic slow motion, the film passing up a final chance to confront the audience with brutal reality, instead clinging to the old Dream Factory mindset, a new Dream Factory but a Dream Factory nonetheless.

Late in the film, Bonnie wistfully states, "When we started out, I thought we were going somewhere.  But this is it.  We're just goin'."  Kind of like this film artistically.