USA,
1967, 111 min
Shown in 1996
CREDITS
- dir
-
Arthur Penn
- prod
-
Warren Beatty
- scr
-
David Neuman, Robert Benton
- cam
-
Burnett Guffey
- editor
-
Dede Allen
- cast
-
Warren Beatty, Faye Dunaway, Michael Pollard, Gene Hackman, Estella Parsons
-
COMMENTS
Arthur Penn appeared in person to receive the 1996 Akira Kurosawa Award.
Bonnie and Clyde was so stirring and important in its day that maybe now it is taken for granted. A celebration of the career of Arthur Penn is the ideal opportunity for rediscovering the stunning vitality of the picture. In so many ways, Bonnie and Clyde is the interaction of opposed forces—a venture initiated by American writers for Truffaut or Godard that ended up as Warren Beatty’s debut production for Warner Brothers; a story from the early 1930s that caught the anger and the libertarian wildness of 1967; a genre gangster film that becomes a lyrical, albeit fatal, exercise in self-expression; and a movie formed by violence that is romantic, sexy and hilarious. What makes it Penn’s film is the concentration on a kind of animal liveliness. Time and again the screen makes us feel things—the listless heat of the day when Bonnie and Clyde meet; the intimate understanding that lets him change her hair style; the friction of Bonnie’s kiss against a Texas Ranger mustache; the amazed delight of C.W. Moss when he realizes who has stopped at his filling station and is ready to carry him away; the relentless noise of Blanche and the abrasive effect it has on Bonnie; the shy swagger of Clyde’s limp; the ebullient rowdiness of Gene Hackman’s Buck. If these gangsters are confusingly lovable creatures, it is because Penn’s vision of so many small signs of life. It is only proper that such an approach leads to one of film’s most sensual death scenes.
—David Thomson
FACTOID #134
The 1986 San Francisco International’s Discovering Mike Leigh was the director’s first retrospective in the U.S. According to the San Francisco Examiner, Festival Artistic Director Peter Scarlet compared the then-unknown Leigh to Yasujiro Ozu before his work had achieved international recognition; while the latter director had been considered ’too Japanese’ for global audiences, Leigh was considered ’too British.’
