Word: clydes
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...studio heads have discovered, there is not a single cinema audience today but several. There is-and perhaps always will be-an audience for banality and bathos. But a segment of the public wants the intellectually demanding, emotionally fulfilling kind of film exemplified by Bonnie and Clyde. By now, television has all but taken over Hollywood's former function of providing placebo entertainment. Movie attendance among the middle-aged is down; yet box-office receipts are up-partly because cinema has become the favorite art form of the young...
Undeniably, part of the scandal and success of Bonnie and Clyde stems from its creative use of what has always been a good box-office draw: violence. But what matters most about Bonnie and Clyde is the new freedom of its style, expressed not so much by camera trickery as by its yoking of disparate elements into a coherent artistic whole-the creation of unity from in congruity. Blending humor and horror, it draws the audience in sympathy toward its antiheroes. It is, at the same time, a commentary on the mindless daily violence of the American...
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...