Word: clydes
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...reconciler of a thousand contradictions, a Swiftian kick in the pants. Director Arthur Penn is fascinated with America too, but critically. He has upended myths of the Old West (The Left-Handed Gun, Little Big Man) and found desperate excitement on the fringes of 20th century Americana (Bonnie and Clyde, Alice's Restaurant). As collaborators, these two artists might produce high-arcing dramatic sparks, or maybe just rub each other the wrong way. In Four Friends, a picaresque panorama of life in the turbulent 1960s, they seem to have done a little of both. The film is ambitious, messy...
...charge Beatty with vanity and egomania, and a little misleading. He is actually Hollywood's softest, most self-effacing romantic romantic actor. Even playing macho-tough, as in Bonnie and Clyde or McCabe and Mrs. Miller, he's careful to show the boyish vulnerability underneath. Small-scale and unaggressive, he can't sustain a picture alone, so he surrounds himself with high-voltage actors and situations, and he counts on the audience to look to him for relief. In John Reed, Beatty found a figure ideally suited to his own quiet narcissism--a modern saint, political innocent and martyr...
...that violence in the mass media was in part responsible for juvenile delinquency. He called television "a school for violence," and commenting on movies, he wrote, "If I should meet an unruly youngster in a dark alley. I prefer it to be one who has not seen Bonnie and Clyde." Wertham's campaign in the 1950s against comic books forced that industry to tone down crime and horror...
...place. When the fellow he had chosen to illustrate the book remarked that neither of them knew a thing about Harvard, Reed cried: "Hell, we'll find out doing the thing!" Beatty has shown himself equally fearless. Hell, he found out about producing movies by making Bonnie and Clyde, about writing them by co-authoring Shampoo, about directing them by sharing that job on Heaven Can Wait-and with each try won an Oscar nomination. But none of these films prepares one for his achievement here. It is as if he had the taken Reed's credo...
...these two bikers, donning his old high school football helmet, and seeing the world for the first time through red eyes. Nicholson got the role as a fluke because Rip Torn dropped out; he finally got a break, after having lost the part of C.W. Moss in Bonnie and Clyde because he looked too much like star Warren Beauty. What made Hansen so effective (and earned Nicholson an Oscar nomination) was his innocence and honest dreaming, contrasted with the others. When the two hippies get blown away at the end, sure, you hate the hicks for doing...