Word: clydes
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Yelling Thirties. Benton and Newman were not the first to see the cinematic potential of Bonnie and Clyde. Back in 1937 the gangster couple inspired Fritz Lang's You Only Live Once, a fictionalized treatment of a man ruined by a prison sentence, starring Henry Fonda and Sylvia Sydney. As recently as 1958, The Bonnie Parker Story starred Dorothy Provine, a veteran of TV's Roaring Twenties turned into a Yelling Thirties girl...
None of these earlier reincarnations bore much relation to the true Bonnie and Clyde story, and they did not bother Benton and Newman. Frankly imitating the juxtaposition of dulcet tragedy and saline comedy that characterizes the work of France's François Truffaut, the two writers decided to write a script for him-even though they had never met him. In their original version, Clyde was a homosexual; he and Bonnie shared the favors of C. W. Moss in a weird menage a trois. At the time, Truffaut was working on Farenheit 451, but he took a week...
...York City, liked their work enough to wait out the original producers' option, then bought the property for $75,000, intending to produce as well as direct under a contract with Warner Bros. Sister Shirley was to star as Bonnie. Eventually, he decided that he ought to play Clyde, which meant that Shirley had to go; after all, the picture featured more than enough gore and transgressions without seeming to add incest to injury...
...torrent of controversy that would follow the film. "A huge waiter came in," he recalls, "and said to me, 'Hey Warren, 'at trew yew gone play Clahd Barra? Sheee! I knowed Clahd Barra, and he wuz much better lookin' than yew are.' " As it happens, Clyde Barrow was not much better looking than Mr. Hyde.* The encounter was simply an initial indication that Texas folk heroes are never to be taken lightly-and that the story of Bonnie and Clyde had the power to shock and disturb anyone anywhere, from the simple to the most sophisticated...
...have shocked audiences, but it brought them to the box office in record numbers. Bonnie and Clyde also stirred up a battle among movie critics that seemed to be almost as violent as the film itself. Bosley Crowther of the New York Times was so offended by it that he reviewed it-negatively-three times. "This blending of farce with brutal killings is as pointless as it is lacking in taste," he wrote. TIME'S review made the mistake of comparing the fictional and real Bonnie and Clyde, a totally irrelevant exercise. Newsweek panned the film, but the following...