Dunaway Week: Bonnie and Clyde

Welcome to Dunaway Week as we look through Faye’s collection of greats and maybe to see her range of emotions as she plays a poor and bored small-town girl that manages to link up with a small-time thief getting up in their necks in trouble.   In the capable hands of director Arthur Penn (The Miracle Worker, The Chase, Flesh and Blood, Little Big Man, Night Moves and Target) a director known to break through the cinema taboos showing sex and violence in an A List film.   So clean up them gats, keep the jalopy fueled and devil may care what the authorities say.  This is Bonnie and Clyde.

Bet this could sell some Coke.

C.W. Moss: I spent a spoiler… I spent *A YEAR* in reformatory!

Bonnie Parker: Whooee! A man with a record!

With what is considered ground breaking film brings us into the middle of the Great Depression, Connie Parker (Faye Dunaway of Hurry Sundown The Happening, The Thomas Crown Affair, Little Big Man and Midnight Crossing) leaving her restaurant bored to tears as a waitress find a young man named Clyde Barrow (Warren Beatty of The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis, Lilith, Shampoo, Heaven Can Wait, Reds and Bugsy) trying to still her mother’s Ford Coupe and rather than ratting him out she joins him in a drive off and presents the idea being Clyde’s stickup partner.  They manage to pull off some holdups but in spite of the efforts brought a thrill but didn’t exactly make the greenbacks.

You eyeballin' me?

As the daring duo crime spree is getting into high gear they join up with a gas pump man C.W. Moss (character actor Michael J Pollard of The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis, Window on Main Street, Summer Magic, Caprice, Roxanne, Scrooged and Tango & Cash) and later attempt to link up with Clyde’s brother Buck (Gene Hackman of Ride with Terror, Lilith, First to Fight, Marooned, The French Connection, The Poseidon Adventure and Superman) and his mousey wife Blanche (Estelle Parsons of Rachel,Rachel, Don’t Drink the Water, Watermelon Man, I Walk the Line and Two People) join the insanity but the duo’s bank robberies get violent and more than a few tellers had been shot creating a level of notoriety, local law enforcement, a Texas Ranger Frank Hamer (Denver Pyle of Gunsmoke, Hog Wild, Welcome to L.A., The Life and Times of Grizzly Adams, The Dukes of Hazzard and Maverick) are hot on their trail.

I had just a few goofs on the film itself.   Bonnie’s hairdo was more prevalent to 1960’s rather than the 1930s.  I noticed the mystery of Blanche’s disappearing and reappearing donut between shots but my favorite of continuity issue was CW’s replenishing hamburger.  Now admittedly that is fairly petty observations.  The violence of the movie is worthy of that of the Wild Bunch but the overall tone of the film makes it light and funny with Bonnie’s extensionality poetry and Clyde’s snide ambivalence and almost philosophical standing on life was intriguing.  This film of course broke some serious ground to giving mild sexual content and a fair amount violence and even a level of gore that it did show a newer level of realism to it.

A snake gave me this apple...want some?