Bonnie And Clyde

2 Pages 563 Words

Hollywood has had a long history of rewriting the record of anti-social and even criminal characters (Billy the Kid, Al Capone et al) by glossing over their backgrounds of crime and glamorizing their deeds. Usually, this whitewashing of history was done for financial reasons since the paying public was more likely to plunk down ticket money if they felt that these glitzed up criminals were less of a hard core miscreant and more the product of a broken home or an uncaring society.
Director Arthur Penn in Bonnie and Clyde continued this tradition but to it added the splicing of a 1960’s style morality based on a youth-oriented anti-establishment credo to the harsh dustbowl morality that still resonated in the minds of the over 40 crowd. The result was a film that appealed to hippies who saw Bonnie and Clyde as a gun-toting rock band (hence the banjo music) and the veterans of the depression who could see in the targeted banks a hated symbol of the heartlessness of a system that could foreclose on a lifetime of dreams.
Clyde Barrow (Warren Beatty) and Bonnie Parker (Faye Dunaway) were, in real life, neither attractive nor very likable people. Barrow had no qualms about killing. His gun moll, Bonnie Parker, was much less a factor than Faye Dunaway in controlling his hair-trigger temper. Beatty's Clyde Barrow was a decent, if sexually impotent sort, who the movie implies used his misplaced testosterone as the reason for his crime sprees. Dunaway's Bonnie Parker is seen as a woman who is looking for more in a man than a dinner as a prelude for sex. When she discovers Clyde's impotency, she learns that she can rechannel that pent-up energy in a way that could give her vicarious thrills: a life of crime. Together they carve a swath through the west, announcing to one astonished onlooker, 'We rob banks.' And rob banks they do, all to the banging twangs of banjo music, which imply that their acts have the tacit approval not only of the pr...