Word: clydes
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Ghoulish Curio. The story has its basis in fact. Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker were two veal-faced wrongos who rode out of Texas during the Depression, killing and plundering for fun and profit. The constabulary bushwacked them in May 1934 near Arcadia, La., firing a thousand rounds into the fugitives and their 1934 Ford De Luxe, which 18 years later was still touring auto showrooms as a ghoulish curio. On their own turf, Bonnie and Clyde passed from the front page into folklore; elsewhere, they were relegated to Sunday-supplement features, colorful figures of the gangland...
Bonnie, played by Faye Dunaway, is first glimpsed naked, a sensual Erskine Caldwell backwoods beauty imprisoned by her hot, airless room. Clyde, the jaunty, vacant car thief, played by Warren Beatty, offers her passage out of the Dust Bowl, with his gun as her ticket. To her dismay, she discovers that he is impotent. "Your advertising is just dandy," sneers Bonnie, after their first no-love session. "Folks'd never guess you don't have a thing to sell." Yet Clyde does have a salable commodity: movement in a time of inertia, elation in the midst of depression...
...Although Clyde is a murderous ex-convict and Bonnie is his willing, amoral moll, they are essentially innocents: violence is something they can neither comprehend nor manage, and their dreams are always of settling down somewhere when hard times are over. When the two take up their aimless career as thieves, they try to see themselves as striking back at the haves on behalf of the have-nots-although there is no hint of ideology or social protest in their actions...
...time they are cheered on by starving drifters who vicariously enjoy the cocky resume: "I'm Clyde Barrow, and this is Miss Bonnie Parker. We rob banks." In an episode at once poignant and wonderfully funny, Clyde lends his .45 to a Texas-gothic farmer, who shoots his deserted farmhouse, repossessed by the bank. They speed away from their jobs in a succession of stolen cars-their Ford coupes, Essex tourer and Marmon Saloon are virtually living members of the cast. The sound track adds a further fillip to the humor; the exuberant banjo picking of Earl Scruggs playing...
...Though the boys throw stones at the frogs in sport," wrote an ancient Greek poet," the frogs do not die in sport but in earnest." The Barrow gang -Bonnie and Clyde, his brother Buck and wife Blanche, their goofy, moonfaced driver, C. W. Moss-proves the truth of that maxim with its targets. At first, the shots are scattered in the air, like careless shouts. Then one lands point-blank in the face of a bank clerk. Blood hurts onto the screen, and from that instant, the audience is torn between horror and glee...