Bonnie and Clyde (1967): The Bloody Love Story That Blew Up Old Hollywood

It starts with a pair of red lips. Faye Dunaway's Bonnie Parker fills the screen in extreme close-up, then drifts naked around a tiny bedroom in the Texas heat, bored enough to punch the bed frame. She looks out the window, sees a stranger trying to steal her mama's car, and hollers at him. Minutes later she's strolling a dusty main street with Warren Beatty's Clyde Barrow, flirting with a man who has just shown her his gun. Nobody in 1967 had seen an American movie open quite like that, and nobody had seen one end the way this one does.

Bonnie and Clyde is the film where Hollywood's old rules visibly snap. It's a gangster picture that plays like screwball comedy until it turns into a horror movie, made by a studio that tried to bury it and then watched it become one of its biggest hits ever. When people say "New Hollywood," this is usually where they start counting.

Why It's a Masterpiece

Its genius is in the whiplash. Arthur Penn pulls you into the fun first: Flatt and Scruggs' "Foggy Mountain Breakdown" twangs over the getaways, and Michael J. Pollard's grinning gas-station kid C.W. Moss hops in the moment Bonnie tells him what they do for a living. Then, during one jaunty escape, a bank employee jumps onto the running board and Clyde shoots him in the face through the window glass, in close-up. You laughed a second ago, and now you have to live with that.

Roger Ebert, just 25, called the film "a milestone in the history of American movies" in his 1967 review, arguing that most movie violence was bloodless: people got shot without suffering. Here they suffer. First, though, they play checkers and read their press clippings out loud. You like these people, which is exactly why the violence lands.

The acting does a lot of that work. Gene Hackman's Buck Barrow greets his little brother with whoops and play-punches because the two of them have nothing to say to each other. Estelle Parsons' Blanche, a preacher's daughter who wandered into a shootout, screams her way through every gunfight. That scream won her an Oscar. Beatty plays Clyde as a showman happier posing for photos than being touched, and Dunaway, in the role that made her a star, gives Bonnie a hunger that's almost painful: a car thief looks to her like an exit.

Behind the Scenes

The script came from two Esquire magazine writers, Robert Benton and David Newman, who were in love with the French New Wave. According to TCM, they wrote late at night with "Foggy Mountain Breakdown" playing, and they sent the finished script to François Truffaut first. He passed and suggested Jean-Luc Godard, who also said no. Truffaut pointed Beatty to the script, and Beatty, tired of seeing his roles shrink on other people's films, optioned it for $7,500 to produce himself.

Warner Bros. didn't have much faith in it. TCM reports that Beatty got it made by taking a small salary in exchange for 40 percent of the gross, a deal that ended up making him very rich. When a discouraged Penn wavered about directing, Beatty brought in a young writer named Robert Towne to rework the script. Towne cut the original script's three-way relationship between Bonnie, Clyde and C.W. and made Clyde impotent instead. He also gave Bonnie's mother the line that ends the family reunion with a chill: "You try to live three miles from me, and you won't live long, honey." His screen credit reads "Special Consultant," which film historian David Thomson, quoted in Senses of Cinema, called a unique credit.

When Beatty and Penn screened it for Jack L. Warner, he called it "the longest two hours and ten minutes I ever spent." Even after a Montreal festival premiere that, per TCM, earned the stars 14 curtain calls, management planned to dump it quietly. Then the reviews landed. Bosley Crowther of The New York Times attacked the film three separate times. Newsweek's Joe Morgenstern panned it, then took the review back in the next issue. Time eventually put the film on its cover. Pauline Kael's 9,000-word rave, rejected by The New Republic, ran in The New Yorker instead and launched her long tenure there.

Beatty then pushed Warner Bros. into an unprecedented re-release. It reopened the day it picked up 10 Oscar nominations, and some theaters took in ten times their first-run grosses. By the end of 1968 it was the second-highest-grossing film in Warner Bros. history, behind only My Fair Lady. Parsons and cinematographer Burnett Guffey took home Oscars, and in 1992 the Library of Congress added the film to the National Film Registry.

Hidden Details You Might Have Missed

• That's Gene Wilder. The nervous undertaker the gang kidnaps for a joyride is Wilder in his first film role. Towne moved the scene to just before Bonnie visits her mother: once the young man names his profession, the laughter dies and Bonnie wants to go home.
• The cloud was an accident. During the scene where Clyde finds Bonnie after she runs off into a wheat field, a cloud drifted over the sun and darkened Dunaway's face. Penn kept the take as a hint of where she's headed.
• The look was a fight. Dunaway wanted Bonnie in slacks so she could run to the getaway car. Costume designer Theadora Van Runkle pushed for long skirts and a beret instead, and the "Bonnie and Clyde look" became a fashion craze.
• The family reunion is a dream on purpose. Penn modeled much of the film on Walker Evans' Depression photographs, but for Bonnie's visit with her family he switched to slow motion and hazy light, so the picnic feels half-remembered.
• The censors lost. Per TCM, Production Code chief Geoffrey Shurlock fought to cut the teller's shooting, the opening's hint of nudity and a suggestion of oral sex, and lost. Senses of Cinema counts the film among those thought to have pushed the industry into adopting its rating system in 1968.

The Director's Genius Moment

Spoiler warning: This section describes the film's ending in detail.

The script called for the ambush to be shown as a series of still images, with screams and machine-gun fire on the soundtrack. Penn wanted something else. In a DGA Quarterly interview, he said that if the two were simply butchered, it would be "just the story of a couple of gangsters." He wanted some trace of their romance to survive their deaths.

So he set up three high-speed cameras side by side, each running at a different speed with a different lens, plus a fourth at normal speed. One ran at well over 100 frames per second. It took six takes over three days, with the car patched, repainted and rewired between each. Beatty and Dunaway were wired with dozens of squibs. Instead of yelling "Action," Penn had Beatty hold a pear and squeeze it on cue so the effects crew knew when to fire. Dunaway's right leg was tied to the emergency brake, so she could fling herself sideways without falling out of the car. They wore white so every bullet hit would show.

C.W.'s father waves them down beside a stalled truck. Pigeons burst out of a bush, and the camera swish-pans after them. Clyde looks at Bonnie, Bonnie looks at Clyde, and the cuts get shorter and shorter, because, as Penn put it, they're out of time. Then the speeds start to mix, normal and slowed, the bodies jerking and floating at once. Penn called what he wanted "a piece of visual music." The shooters step out, the camera drifts past a single bullet hole in the rear window, and the movie simply stops. No epilogue, no explanation. Countless slow-motion shootouts since have echoed that minute.

Another Way to See It

The real Bonnie and Clyde were never this good-looking, and that's part of the point. The movie isn't really about 1934. It's about 1967, and for parts of the counterculture these Depression outlaws became rebel icons. Ebert put it best in the last line of his review, often quoted since: "It had to be set sometime. But it was made now and it's about us."

But look at how often the Barrow Gang is posing for photos, mailing poems to newspapers and reading about themselves. Bonnie's ballad gets printed, and it means more to Clyde than any robbery ever did. This is a movie about two people who want to be famous more than rich, made, as Ebert noted at the time, when the news treated mass murder almost casually. Kael caught the mixed tone: "If there is such a thing as an American tragedy, it must be funny." Played that way, the ending works as their last photo op, only this time they don't get to pose.

Should You Watch It?

Yes, and watch it like it's 1967. Let the banjo fool you; laugh when C.W. parallel-parks the getaway car. The film wants you relaxed. Some slapstick has dated, and the ending has been copied so often you may think you know it. You don't, until you've seen Penn's version. If you want to know why 1970s American movies feel the way they do, start here.