I would suggest that when a movie so clearly conceived as a new version of a legend is attacked as historically inaccurate, it’s because it shakes people a little. There wouldn’t be the popular excitement there is about outlaws if we didn’t all suspect that—in some cases, at least—gangsters must take pleasure in the profits and glory of a life of crime. The quick panic of Bonnie and Clyde looking at each other’s face for the last time is a stunning example of the art of editing. “The Left Handed Gun,” with Paul Newman as an ignorant Billy the Kid in the sex-starved, male-dominated Old West, has the same kind of violent, legendary, nostalgic material as “Bonnie and Clyde;” its script, a rather startling one, was adapted by Leslie Stevens from a Gore Vidal television play. The Depression reminiscences are not used for purposes of social consciousness; hard times are not the reason for the Barrows’ crimes, just the excuse. The accusation that the beauty of movie stars makes the anti-social acts of their characters dangerously attractive is the kind of contrived argument we get from people who are bothered by something and are clutching at straws. (Eisenstein had it, and Dovzhenko, and Buñuel, but not many others.) The end of the picture, the rag-doll dance of death as the gun blasts keep the bodies of Bonnie and Clyde in motion, is brilliant. Structurally, “Bonnie and Clyde” is a story of love on the run, like the old Clark Gable–Claudette Colbert “It Happened One Night” but turned inside out; the walls of Jericho are psychological this time, but they fall anyway. But why didn’t movie critics attack, for example, A Man for All Seasons—which involves material of much more historical importance—for being historically inaccurate? In a sense, it is the absence of sadism—it is the violence without sadism—that throws the audience off balance at “Bonnie and Clyde.” The brutality that comes out of this innocence is far more shocking than the calculated brutalities of mean killers. Why should we be deprived of the pleasure of beauty? Save this story for later. (Sometimes they said it when they weren’t even up to their material.) Yet when it comes to movies people get nervous about acknowledging that there must be some fun in crime (though the gleam in Cagney’s eye told its own story). TOPFILM! But the most important earlier version was Fritz Lang’s “You Only Live Once,” starring Sylvia Sidney as “Joan” and Henry Fonda as “Eddie,” which was made in 1937; this version, which was one of the best American films of the thirties, as “Bonnie and Clyde” is of the sixties, expressed certain feelings of its time, as this film expresses certain feelings of ours. The movies may set styles in dress or lovemaking, they may advertise cars or beverages, but art is not examples for imitation—that is not what a work of art does for us—though that is what guardians of morality think art is and what they want it to be and why they think a good movie is one that sets “healthy,” “cheerful” examples of behavior, like a giant all-purpose commercial for the American way of life. Required fields are marked *. It may, on the contrary, so sensitize us that we get a pang in the gut if we accidentally step on a moth. Garbo’s beauty notwithstanding, her “Anna Christie” did not turn us into whores, her “Mata Hari” did not turn us into spies, her “Anna Karenina” did not make us suicides. That turns into another way of making “prestigious,” “distinguished” pictures. If the popular audience is generally uninterested in the director (unless he is heavily publicized, like deMille or Hitchcock), the audience that is interested in the art of movies has begun, with many of the critics, to think of movies as a directors’ medium to the point where they tend to ignore the contribution of the writers— and the directors may be almost obscenely content to omit mention of the writers. Oscar für die beste Kamera für Burnett Guffrey. (Imagine anyone getting away from a bank holdup in a tin Lizzie like that!) When The New Republic refused to publish her 1967 rave of “Bonnie and Clyde,” she took it to The New Yorker, where it turned the tide in favor of the film and made her career. “Bonnie and Clyde” is not a serious melodrama involving us in the plight of the innocent but a movie that assumes—as William Wellman did in 1931 when he made “The Public Enemy,” with James Cagney as a smart, cocky, mean little crook—that we don’t need to pretend we’re interested only in the falsely accused, as if real criminals had no connection with us. In interviews, Penn makes high, dull sounds—more like a politician than a movie director. He’s in the tradition of the mustachioed heavy who foreclosed mortgages and pursued heroines in turn-of-the-century plays, and this one-dimensional villainy belongs, glaringly, to spoof. Furthermore, in some difficult-todefine way, Faye Dunaway as Bonnie doesn’t keep her distance—that is to say, an actor’s distance—either from the role or from the audience. In the American experience, the miseries of the Depression are funny in the way that the Army is funny to draftees—a shared catastrophe, a levelling, forming part of our common background. ( They Live by Night, produced by John Houseman under the aegis of Dore Schary, and directed by Nicholas Ray, was a very serious and socially significant tragic melodrama, but its attitudes were already dated thirties attitudes: the lovers were very young and pure and frightened and underprivileged; the hardened criminals were sordid; the settings were committedly grim. From her rave of "Bonnie and Clyde" to her dismissal of "Chloe in the Afternoon," here are choice quotes from some of Kael's best reviews. Furthman, who has written about half of the most entertaining movies to come out of Hollywood (Ben Hecht wrote most of the other half), isn’t even listed in new encyclopedias of the film. Our experience as we watch it has some connection with the way we reacted to movies in childhood: with how we came to love them and to feel they were ours—not an art that we learned over the years to appreciate but simply and immediately ours. Once you get on the wrong side of the law, “they” won’t let you get back. He makes the sequence a fancy lyric interlude, like a number in a musical (“Funny Face,” to be exact); it’s too “imaginative”—a literal dust bowl, as thoroughly becalmed as Sleeping Beauty’s garden. If there is such a thing as an American tragedy, it must be funny. The Manchurian Candidate almost succeeded in that, but what was implicitly wild and far out in the material was nevertheless presented on screen as a straight thriller. 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