Four from ‘67: BONNIE AND CLYDE Live On

Today marks the end of this quick-ish series on four famous movies from the year 1967 that I had somehow managed to have never seen until now.  It was a list that was a little difficult to put together since, given the fact I hadn’t seen any of them before, I wasn’t able to form any intentional thematic cohesion ahead of time.  I vaguely ordered them in terms of the movies’ cultural clout, but beyond that, any sort of commonalities would end up being accidental.

Well, a through-line ended up accidentally emerging anyway, as I started noticing during last week’s COOL HAND LUKE.  It seemed to me that the 1967 Paul Newman classic, the all-star wartime epic THE DIRTY DOZEN and the seminal Mike Nichols film THE GRADUATE all centered their focus on outcasts and alienation.  Such was life in 1967 America, as Vietnam started chewing up a whole generation of young men and spitting them back out, a slew of political assassinations eroding a presumed stability in government, and a new style of Hollywood filmmaking quickly starting to push out the old way. 

As it turns out, the order in which I watched and wrote about these movies also provided a bit of an escalation in how challenging it could potentially be to identify and relate to the titular outsider(s).  THE GRADUATE’s Benjamin Braddock is a pretty easy character for the average film lover to wrap their heads around; the experience of a recent college grad finding himself completely adrift as to what he’s supposed to be doing now is a fairly universal one (or at least it used to be).  THE DIRTY DOZEN provides us a cadre of condemned prisoners, but presented in the context of a good old-fashioned war epic.   COOL HAND LUKE takes this one step further, by presenting us a prisoner who, in his own way, is also condemned.  This time, however, he’s intensely relatable, making the injustices he suffers hit that much closer to home.

Now, with BONNIE AND CLYDE, we’re presented with a group of real lost souls, ones who decide to conduct themselves like a bunch of scumbags.  But…given the real-life economic circumstances in which their villainy arose from, are we able to sympathize anyway?  Should we?  Are we making a mistake by trying?  Maybe that’s only up to us to decide.

BONNIE AND CLYDE (1967)

Directed by: Arthur Penn

Starring: Faye Dunaway, Warren Beatty, Gene Hackman, Michael J. Pollard

Written by: David Newman, Robert Benton

Released: August 13, 1967

Length: 111 minutes

BONNIE AND CLYDE tells the real-life story of…well, Bonnie and Clyde, a pair of real-life Depression-era gangsters who committed a series of bank robberies, kidnappings and murders all across the Central United States. Their exploits made headlines around the country and, until the brutalness of their crimes were laid bare, they were even considered kind of cool by the public at large, with pictures of their cigar-chomping, pistol-toting personas being slapped across newspapers, igniting the public’s imagination at a time when distractions were crucial.

Even after their eventual deaths at the hands of police, the “idea” of Bonnie and Clyde remains ever popular.  Hell, when I was a teenager, no less a power couple than Jay-Z and Beyonce released a song called “‘03 Bonnie and Clyde”, with lyrics asserting that, between the two of them, nothing can ever get in their way.  Nobody can ever stop them.  The romanticism of this is obvious: what greater show of love, what bigger rush can there be than robbing a bank and running from a hailstorm of police bullets?

The 1967 film adaptation of their exploits (Bonnie and Clyde, not Jay-Z and Beyonce) undoubtedly contributed to this romanticism, maybe even fetishism, of the “criminal power couple” idea.  BONNIE AND CLYDE is not a movie known for its strict adherence to the facts, but that probably plays in its favor.  It’s a flick that thankfully gets straight to the point; after a pair of brief title cards giving us a brief backstory of both titular characters that gives us everything we need to know.  By 1931, Clyde had already served two years in prison for robbery.  By that time, Bonnie had worked in a cafe.

Both characters seem to be productive of the dire environment they, along with millions of Americans, found themselves in.  Bonnie is a bored small-town waitress with little resource of being anything more.  Clyde is a guy who clearly seems to have read the economic room early on and has decided to take matters into his own hands, even if it means jail time every so often.  So when the two meet one fateful afternoon, as Bonnie catches the charming Clyde trying to steal her mother’s car?  How could anyone doubt there’d be an explosion?

BONNIE AND CLYDE chronicles their crime spree, as well as their steady collection of “family members”.  Some of them are literal family; Gene Hackman shines as Clyde’s brother, a surprisingly warm and welcome presence, given the circumstances.  Although he seems to take to the new family business, his preacher’s daughter wife Blanche finds it all a little harder to swallow, never really getting along with Bonnie.  Turns out not everyone from boring, normal backgrounds fall in love with the criminal lifestyle.

Other members of the crew are found family, primarily gas station attendant C.W. Moss, who sort of assumes the role of Bonnie and Clyde’s not-too-bright son.  Almost immediately upon hitting the road with the duo, he botches a bank robbery, leading Clyde to have to kill a police officer, an escalation in criminality that sets the rest of the movie in motion.  A couple named Eugene Grizzard and Velma Davis oh-so-briefly ride with the crew after they steal Grizzard’s car, until getting ditched on the side of the road when it’s revealed he works as an undertaker.

That Eugene Grizzard section, by the way, is probably my favorite of the whole film, if only because he’s played by Gene Wilder, in what constituted his film debut (to be followed the same year with THE PRODUCERS).  I saw his name in the credits at the beginning, and I admit to being kind of intrigued.  Would he be doing his famous neurotic guy routine?  If so, how at odds would that be with this fairly serious, gritty crime story?  It turns out the answers were, in order: “Yep!” and “Not at all!”  It’s a pretty funny scene, with Grizzard getting exponentially more nervous as he and Velma chase the gang down, get followed (“Step on it, Velma.  Step on it, Velma.  STEP ON IT, VELMA!”, get caught, then end up in the backseat of the famous Bonnie and Clyde car.  We even learn a little bit about Bonnie as a result of this scene, with her immediately flipping out at the reveal that Grizzard is an undertaker.  Although she doesn’t quite explain her fear here, it’s not hard to assume Grizzard serves as a reminder of where this dalliance is likely leading. 

The other major relationship in the movie besides Bonnie and Clyde is “Bonnie and Clyde and the media”, more specifically Clyde.  One of the most fascinating things about him is that, yes, he’s handsome and rogueishly charming (in the way only young Warren Beatty could be), but he’s also intensely calculating.  Once they realize their robberies are starting to draw headlines, to the point of being recognized by their victims, Clyde gets pretty performative.  He even makes a big show about not taking the money from a patron who withdrew his own cash bundle.  The idea of a bank robber who’s only interested in taking cash from the evil institutions (“the man”) makes for a great story, especially during the Great Depression.  Hell, I’d probably be rooting this guy on if I were living in the dust bowl.

But, therein lies the rub.  Because Clyde’s flair for the theatrics is a little at odds with the man inside.  Clyde’s a guy who famously refuses sex from Bonnie, in a scene that has been the subject of much interpretation over the decades.  Is he impotent?  Asexual?  Secretly hiding homosexual feelings?  Well, we can only guess; for what it’s worth, the real Bonnie and Clyde apparently had no issues on this front.  I took the fictional Clyde’s rejection of the fictional Bonnie as a sign that, for as much as he loves the adoration of the masses, he can’t bear to get that connected to another human being.  For as many people as there are crammed in that car, he’s as alone as the day he was born.

Oh, and there’s the fact that he’s, like, you know, killed people.  For however you want to frame the morality of robbing banks, or even (if you want to go there) the morality of killing police, it gets hard to justify really rooting for him when you consider that there’s no real tangible good that results from their robberies.  It’s not like they redistribute the money or anything, they just take it.  Yes, killing a cop resulted from an accident, but they weren’t supposed to be there in the first place.  This isn’t a COOL HAND LUKE situation, where the crime feels petty compared to the punishment.  Dying in a hail of gunfire feels pretty fitting for Clyde.

But you…still kind of like him anyway.  Because he’s Warren Beatty.  He looks cool.  He knows how to play to an audience, including you.  And, in that moment, you get why America remains infatuated with him and the girl by his side.  They look great with their hats and their tommy guns.  They’re kind of doing what you secretly wish you could be doing; hitting the road, taking what you want and getting your face in the newspapers for your trouble.  After all, isn’t this what the rich do, both then and now?  Isn’t this what they always do? It makes you want to take the risk of dying in a hail of gunfire in the name of being cool.

Speaking of the hail of gunfire, it’s worth touching on one of the controversial aspects of BONNIE AND CLYDE: its violence.  This is another one of those things where you kinda need to put your “1967” glasses on.  For anyone raised on Dateline, 24, or the SAW movies, there’s nothing in BONNIE AND CLYDE that reads as particularly scandalous.  But there is a frank brutality and suddenness to its gunplay.  There’s not a lot of poetry or romance to it.  People just kind of die all of a sudden, whether it be a hapless cop or Clyde’s brother.  There’s a kinetic energy to the editing of the action, the type that (in my opinion) would get co-opted for years to come, and would get turbocharged once MTV got unleashed on the public.  The final ambush in particular would go on to heavily inspire a similar scene in THE GODFATHER, Sonny Corleone going down in a flurry of brutal silver the same way that Clyde and Bonnie do.

On the topic of Bonnie, it seems only right that I highlight her and Faye Dunaway the same way I did her male counterpart.  She’s obviously one of those legendary Hollywood figures whose reputation precedes her, a name you would somehow know even if you had never seen a movie before.  So it’s exciting to catch her at what is basically the beginning of her film career.  BONNIE AND CLYDE came at the end of a busy year for Dunaway, her first two movies (THE HAPPENING and HURRY SUNDOWN) also releasing the same year.  This one skyrocketed her to stardom, earning her a Best Actress nomination at that year’s Oscars, one she didn’t win.

(Surprisingly, only one actor won an Academy Award for their performance in BONNIE AND CLYDE: Estelle Parsons for playing Blanche!  As always, the Oscars are mostly a guessing game.)

Dunaway does a fine job at illustrating what can be so sweeping and grand about a life of crime, the exact same emotions that make the real-life pair so compelling all these decades later.  Hitting the road with some guy you’ve just met to go rob banks and defy the law seems incomprehensible for those with prospects on the horizon, with safety nets and the possibility of prosperity.  But, for those whose destinies appear to be set and cast?  With society appearing to crumble all around you?  Why wouldn’t you, especially when “some guy” is as handsome and alluring as Beatty?  Imagine that rush, that charge?

There’s a flip side.  That charge, that surge ends up being addicting, and Dunaway nails the other side of that kind of addiction: the need to keep going.  Thus, Bonnie’s gradual change from small-town waitress to a woman gleefully torturing captured cops on the side of the road, all to keep that buzz of fame (after all, the bigger the heists and moments, the bigger the headlines).  And to keep that allure of being in Clyde’s aura.  Since he’s not a romantic, and doesn’t actually want to sleep with her, there doesn’t appear to be any other way to keep in his world than to keep the party going, under any means necessary.

That’s the central tragedy, I think; Bonnie and Clyde live in a world where they happily drive down a road to nowhere, where few other options seem to exist, de-incentivizing the concept of living a moral and honest life.  That world is, of course, the one we currently live in.  Yes, BONNIE AND CLYDE is a period piece, set during the Great Depression.  And current times aren’t quite that bad.  But…it’s not good, right?  You feel people getting desperate, and resentment against the rich and powerful is growing; Luigi Mangione is almost certainly a criminal, but scan through Reddit sometime to get an idea of where the court of current public opinion lies.

And, of course, the world felt like it was falling apart in 1967 as well, so it doesn’t totally surprise me that it was a hit at the box office (earning 70 mil against a 2 mil budget). It doesn’t surprise that BONNIE AND CLYDE helped nudge Hollywood towards something more immediate and true, at least for a while.   It also, sadly, doesn’t surprise me that there doesn’t seem to be any sort of similar nudge coming in our current time. The banks have basically bought all the movies, so I don’t really see a way for a similar revolution to budge.

Still…the idea of Bonnie and Clyde endure. They’re not really people to look up or be inspired by. But we do anyway. Can you blame us?