Bonnie and Clyde

At an AFI event, Quentin Tarantino once described Bonnie and Clyde as the beginning of the 1970s era of American cinema. Even though the movie released a few years before the ‘70s, it arguably ushered in that ten to fifteen year period associated with ’70s Hollywood; known for unconventional stories, wildly inventive filmmaking that took cues from the French New Wave, and for establishing the modern concept of the auteur director. However secure its place in film history may be, Bonnie and Clyde is not faultless as a movie.

The first noteworthy thing about the movie, within the context of when it was made, is its willingness to touch on racier subjects. The movie opens with a nude Bonnie, though all her most titillating bits remain artfully hidden, rolling around her bed and futzing about her room as she avoids her inevitable need to get up, get dressed, and go to her boring dead-end job. Later, when she meets Clyde, her arousal at his bad boy image is much less subtle than would have been found in a similar movie from just a decade prior. Clyde’s difficulties with sex on both an emotional and physical level, and the frankness with which they are discussed, are also rare to nonexistent in mainstream American films of previous eras.

Beyond the sex, the film is markedly more violent than movies that came before. While guns have been as omnipresent in American movies as they are in American culture, the movie made waves for its disinterest in abstracting or obscuring the realities of its shoot outs. It was the director, Arthur Penn’s, stated goal to depict the violence in Bonnie and Clyde accurately. This was accomplished by making these scenes full of, as Penn put it, violence in “terrible, frightening volume(s)” It also made liberal use of blood splatter and squibs, which previously had not been particularly popular with filmmakers, adding a level of viscera to the movie that was both shocking and fresh.

The editing in Bonnie and Clyde makes some bold choices as well. It discards the establishing shot, medium two shot, close-up, reverse close-up formula for scene construction that had been dominant in Hollywood up until this point. Even the works of inventive masters, such as Hitchcock’s Vertigo, adhered to this formula tightly. Bonnie and Clyde, on the other hand, employs time skips, quick cuts, reaction shots where there would normally be action shots, and other tricks that are extremely familiar to a modern audience but were virtually unheard of in America at the time.

All this is very interesting from a historical angle, but is the film good? For the most part, yes. The narrative drive of the film is really compelling. The movie is paced well, never feeling too slow or like it’s dragging. It knows how to balance its scenes of quiet character development against those of bombastic gunfights. It’s ability to breathe fresh life into the gangster genre can not be overstated. It basically established the criminal gang on the run story in American cinema and you can see its influence, both in structure and in filmmaking technique, in basically every subsequent take on that archetype from The Wild Bunch to Young Guns. As such, it still feels modern in many ways, despite its age.

The two things I think detract from the movie are some of the characterizations, which at times feel a little… off, and some of the technical choices, which feel a little unpolished.

Bonnie and Clyde both have unusual sexual characteristics. Bonnie seems to be aroused by danger, especially when there is violence or threats of violence. Clyde struggles to get aroused by anything. These psycho-sexual issues are not handled in the most consistent way. In the beginning of the movie, Bonnie’s arousal after dangerous behavior is shown as a main motivator of her decision making. It’s the reason she leaves town with Clyde. She feels restless and bored when they are waiting for things to cool off, desperate for that next adrenaline hit. However, as the movie comes to a close, she shifts her position and seems to no longer be turned on by their thrill seeking lifestyle. If this is intended to display a change or realization in the character that she doesn’t enjoy this way of living anymore, as perhaps the scene at her family reunion is intended to show, I think the movie could have done a better job of bringing that transition more to the forefront and developing more of her personal doubts and displeasure heading into the climax of the movie. Otherwise, the sudden disappearance of her danger-based kink doesn’t make sense.

Similarly, Clyde’s sexual issues don’t seem to have any grounding in anything that makes sense. The movie presents Clyde’s inability to get hard not as a physical one, he does not suffer from erectile dysfunction, but a mental one, he just can’t seem to get it up for Bonnie. It also explicitly states that the problem isn’t repressed homosexuality or anything of that ilk. When he finally is able to perform, the reasons why this time is different are tenuous at best. It isn’t fame that does it, they’ve been famous for awhile. It isn’t Bonnie’s act of acceptance or kindness, she has been that way to him all along. It isn’t the danger or violence they just experienced, that’s been their lives for awhile, nor is it the sudden respite from those issues, as this isn’t their first hideaway. Other than the poem Bonnie wrote, nothing has really changed, and Bonnie’s poem is just the manifestation of many of the above, rejected concepts. So what changed in Clyde that brought him from impotence to erection?

Perhaps these issues are a sign of their times. The creative decisions on the movie were made with an awareness of things like psycho-sexual issues and a desire to push boundaries by displaying them on screen… but without a firm grasp on how they function or how to portray them in a realistic way. Given that frank discussions of sex, let alone sexual appetites more complex than missionary position in the dark, were a rarity in society in the 1940s and 50s, maybe they just weren’t ready to handle these topics to the level a modern audience has come to expect.

Similarly, some of the envelope pushing in the technical side of things broke ground in their time but feel a bit clunky now. For example, the opening scene overplays its artistry. Framing Bonnie behind the bars of her bed frame to mimic a jail cell, either as a visual metaphor for how trapped in her life she feels or as a subtle indication towards her future life of crime, is quite clever. However, this is placed in the scene in a really awkward way that makes Faye Dunaway’s performance feel more overacted than it deserves. Only a few seconds later, the camera pushes in to an extreme close up of her eyes, but the camera move is unmotivated and so it feels like a technical flourish for the purpose of showing off rather than pushing character or plot forward. During a gunfight near the end of the movie, rapid editing is used to convey the chaos of the shooting. But for a modern audience, each cut feels a little too short to convey information and a little too long to convey emotion. For the contemporary tastes, shorter cuts sell chaos more effectively while longer cuts are needed to take in the totality of the shot composition. This inadvertently gives some elements of the movie this feeling of being a bit unpolished or amateurish, by modern standards.

Any art that is breaking new ground is going to appear to be making more mistakes than what follows it, because what comes later has the benefit of fixing the mistakes of the original. I think this dynamic may be at play with Bonnie and Clyde. Things have come so far from when it was released, and so much of what was new is now commonplace, that it feels slightly off the mark in some characterizations and some technical aspects. Tastes of modern consumers have evolved thanks, in no small part, to the innovative filmmaking of films like Bonnie and Clyde. As such, I would recommend this movie in the same way I would recommend Citizen Kane. Part of what makes it so interesting is that it represents a sea change in cinematic language, though with a final product that sometimes feels weak when compared to the films it inspired. If that aspect doesn’t interest you, it’s still an OK movie, it just isn’t likely to blow you away.

Would Recommend: If you are interested in a culturally important and artistically significant movie, regardless of its quirks.

Would Not Recommend: If older movies never seem to match your modern tastes.