Wanda

WANDA         A-
USA  (102 mi)  1970  d:  Barbara Loden 

She’s trapped and she will never, ever get out of it, and there are millions like her. 
—Barbara Loden in an interview with The New York Times

If you don't want anything you won't have anything, and if you don't have anything, you're nothing. You may as well be dead. You’re not even a citizen of the United States.      

—Norman Dennis (Michael Higgins)               

Released 6-months after Five Easy Pieces (1970), this film flew completely under the radar, as it didn’t and still doesn’t have the same kind of financing, made for a fraction of the budget, without featuring any big name stars, and told in a much more cinematically austere manner.  In fact, this style of film is reverentially slow and ultimately joyless, completely differentiated from what mainstream audiences will ever see, as you’ll have to look to find this one playing in art houses.  The film does seem to have something of a revival after forty years, where filmmaker John Waters included it in his annual selection for the 2012 Maryland Film Festival taking place in Baltimore.  It’s a scathingly lonesome piece of filmmaking written and directed by Barbara Loden, who also stars in the film. While she’s the wife of Elia Kazan, who began as the scantily clad sidekick on The Ernie Kovacs Show who got a pie in her face and was sawed in half, then starred as Warren Beatty’s promiscuous sister in SPLENDOR IN THE GRASS (1961), as well as a fictionalized version of Marilyn Monroe in Kazan's Broadway stage production of After the Fall (1964), written by Monroe’s former husband, Arthur Miller, actually winning the Tony Award for Best Actress, this is the only feature film she ever directed, making two short films several years later, but this is her own project all the way.  Shot on 16 mm and blown up on 35 mm, it’s a blisteringly real film with little to no background information that follows the exploits of Wanda Goronski, having deserted her husband and two children, sleeping instead on her sister’s couch right next to the immense grounds of a Pennsylvania coal mining plant.  These introductory shots of Wanda, all in white, walking across a coal-filled, black industrial landscape is reminiscent of Haskell Wexler following Verna Bloom, the lady in the yellow dress, through the huge crowds and various clashes of demonstrators with police in Medium Cool (1969).  Shot and edited by Nicholas T. Proferes in an innovative, cinéma vérité, slice of life style, this is a peculiarly bleak film, one of the very few American films directed by a woman to be theatrically released at the time, along with Allison Anders, Shirley Clarke, Elaine May, Joan Micklin, and documentarist Barbara Kopple.  

Winner of the Pasinetti Award at the Venice Film Festival in 1970, the film was critically recognized, but barely seen for decades, supposedly inspired by a story Loden read in the newspaper about a woman thanking a judge for sentencing her to twenty years in prison.  It’s an unflinching portrait of a woman with no ambition and low self-esteem, whose very character is personified by no personal drive whatsoever.  Early on, she’s late for a court appearance, showing up with curlers in her hair, seemingly indifferent about the court taking her two children away from her, where she indicates they’re better off with their father.  The rest of the film vindicates the wisdom of that decision, spending her time in bars getting picked up by people she knows nothing about and who definitely want to know nothing about her.  It’s as unflattering a portrait of a woman as you’ll find, yet the film is told in a tender and sympathetic manner, often with long takes, hand-held camerawork, minimal editing, and the gritty authenticity of location shooting, where Wanda barely speaks, but has no harmful intentions, yet she’s routinely taken advantage of, something she’s evidently used to.  After a series of pick ups, she happens to drift into a bar after closing, where the impatience of the bartender is revealed to be a stick up in progress, with the real bartender tied up on the floor behind the bar.  Without realizing the circumstances, seeing it as just another pick up, she tags along with this guy, identified as Norman Dennis (Michael Higgins), who brings her along in his car, which happens to be stolen.  His volatile temper and tyrannical behavior is a contrast to Wanda’s quiet ambivalence, where she’s barely aware of life outside the coal mines.  The film makes an abrupt turn and quickly veers into a road movie, where Wanda realizes the guy she’s hooked up with is a small-time crook, stealing from cars and robbing gas stations along the way.  While he continually berates her and orders her around, she behaves like she’s finally connected to somebody, like this could amount to something.       

The Wanda we see onscreen is the picture of oppression and powerlessness, hardly anyone’s idea of a hero, a quiet and mousy character who never raises her voice, who rarely speaks if not spoken to, and the kind of person who is largely ignored by society.  Coming from the coal belt, she’s uneducated, has no work skills, and is not in a position to change her life on her own.  When guys pick her up, they don’t want to talk to her, just have sex and be done with her afterwards, usually leaving her alone on the side of the road.  For the price of a few beers and maybe a cheap meal, that’s all she gets out of it, certainly not money or love.  Mr. Dennis whisking her out of town for God knows where is probably the biggest adventure in her life and she has no way of knowing how it will play out anymore than she knows where he’s taking her.  Apparently as they were shooting a scene in an open field where Dennis is laying low drinking whisky out of the bottle, some locals were flying their remote controlled model airplanes, where Loden quickly had to integrate the planes into the scene, adding a certain improvised poetry to the moment, as it’s the first suggested expression of freedom or flying away from all her troubles.  One of the more peculiar scenes is Mr. Dennis visiting his own father in a makeshift Tower of Babel, surrounded by Biblical expressions, where the public pays for guided tours through the underground catacombs.  The religious music that plays is rather stunning, as otherwise there’s only the use of natural sound.  The father realizes the path of his son is a road filled with sin and wants no part of him, while Wanda soon finds herself involved in a kidnapping scheme to rob a bank in Scranton.  While her instincts are clearly to have nothing to do with it, as morally she knows it’s wrong, she also doesn’t want Dennis to leave her, so she’ll help him if he needs her, the first spark of something she finally cares about.  As pathetic as it sounds, this is as close to a relationship as she’s likely ever had, even by a guy that robs banks, mentally and physically abuses her, and crudely orders her around.  This uncompromising portrait is not altogether sympathetic, as Wanda seemingly has no free will of her own, yet she’s caught up in a world beyond her control, hopelessly without any means to improve her condition, reminiscent of the exploits of Antoine Doinel in The 400 Blows (Les quatre cents coups) (1959), a 13-year old child that is already craftier and more educated than Wanda will ever be.  The real heartbreak of this film is that in the half century since the Truffaut film, life hasn’t gotten any better for the Wanda’s in the world, where the freeze-frame at the end reveals how she remains frozen in time. 

Now considered a landmark in American independent filmmaking, what’s unique from this period is the scarcity of American films centered on a working class female character, especially one depicting such a grimy working class milieu.  While the film is a cyclical story of a drifter who leaves her family, has meaningless one-night stands, becomes the hostage of a petty crook, ultimately becoming his mistress and accomplice in crime, only to find herself alone and drifting again at the end, perhaps none the wiser.  Unlike Kerouac’s On the Road, for instance, a book where men took to the road as a means of liberation and transcendence from the dull factory jobs and boring routines of working class America in the postwar 40’s and 50’s, the price one had to pay for the American Dream, there is no joy or liberation whatsoever in Wanda’s dour journey.  Rather than feature the exuberance of the road adventure, Loden’s portrait couldn’t be more poignantly understated and relentlessly downbeat.  Designed to counteract the mythical Hollywood portrayal of a romantic outlaw couple on the run, as represented by the hugely successful Bonnie and Clyde (1967), this film undermines any hint of romanticism with a dull and unrelenting passivity from Wanda, a lead character that gets brutally slapped across the face, who has for years become numb to the surrounding world around her.  This unflinching look into an unseen lower stratum of American women who find themselves similarly drifting through life, aimless and alone, is all the more tragically powerful by being told in such an everyday, matter of fact manner.  At the end, standing alone outside a loud and boisterous bar, once again penniless and spiritually void, there’s a peculiar recognition of that sunken, crestfallen look that feels like a holdover from the Depression days, where another woman instinctively seems to understand and invites her inside.  This subtle gesture acknowledges a sisterly kinship for what it means to be alone, on the outside looking in.  According to Bérénice Reynaud For Wanda, from Senses of Cinema, October 2002, a regular contributor to Cahiers du Cinéma magazine since the mid-1980’s, “Wanda's historical importance [is that] Loden wanted to suggest, from the vantage point of her own experience, what it meant to be a damaged, alienated woman – not to fashion a ‘new woman’ or a positive heroine.”  

Five Easy Pieces

FIVE EASY PIECES           A                      

USA  (98 mi)  1970  d:  Bob Rafelson

You don’t sit down and say, “I’m feeling alienated today, I think I’ll make a movie about alienation.”         —Bob Rafelson (director)

Shot while Nixon was secretly bombing Cambodia in the winter of 1969 – 70 and released in September 1970, the same year as the Kent State shootings, 100,00 people marched on Washington D.C. protesting the war, and the Beatles released Let It Be.  A 60’s counterculture film, Counterculture of the 1960s, one that reflects the mood of rebellion and alienation during the Vietnam war era, one of the first to be viewed by mainstream audiences portraying the dissatisfaction of an anti-hero while also using a new indie style in American cinema, where the minimalist approach in telling a story is a different way of expressing itself, a complete turn away from the action and Hollywood glamorization which shoots for overkill, like PATTON (1970) which won the Best Picture and George C. Scott the Best Actor (which he refused to accept) at the Academy Awards that year.  Perhaps the industry wasn’t ready yet to recognize and herald in a new era in filmmaking driven by naturalistic performances, but the film, screenplay, and two acting performances were nominated for Academy Awards and certainly left its mark with pitch perfect direction and a moody self reflection that continues to challenge the collective consciousness of the nation.  It remains a classic example of dropping out of society, as seen today in the films of Kelly Reichardt like Old Joy (2006) and Wendy and Lucy (2008), where disenchantment with the system overall may not lead to any specific new answers, but it does send one in search of new directions.  Shot by the brilliant Hungarian cinematographer László Kovács, a lover of naturalist landscapes and fresh off his work in Easy Rider (1969), his use of differing location shots exquisitely depicts the central character’s state of mind, as it moves from the oil fields of Bakersfield, California to the scenic Pacific coast highway to the upper class exclusivity of the San Juan Islands in Puget Sound, Washington. 

Displaying an array of skills we only see early in his career, Jack Nicholson gives the performance of his career in Bobby Eroica Dupree, a brooding outsider layered in an understated and downbeat realism that borders on miserablism and discontent, a gifted classical piano student who left his upper class background and traded it in for a life on the road, working the hot and back breaking work as a rigger on the oil rigs, living in a trailer, spending his time drinking beer in cheap bars and motels and bowling alleys while living with his girl Rayette, Tammy Wynette stand-in Karen Black in one of her more superb roles as a pretty but dim-witted waitress with a mouth that won’t quit, where at one point he tells her “If you wouldn't open your mouth, everything would be just fine.”  She smothers him with her undying love, while he prefers to keep a safe distance, making no commitments which he obtains through male cruelty and infidelity, regularly spending nights away from Rayette and sleeping with whatever comes around, which includes Sally Struthers in one memorable scene.  When his co-worker on the rigs, Elton (Billy Green Bush) lets it slip that Rayette is pregnant, Bobby flips out in a full tantrum, pissed that his life is suddenly in full view for others to pass judgment upon, especially since he went to such trouble to disappear to the ends of the earth where no one would find him. 

Around this same time he visits his sister making a classical recording in Los Angeles and learns that their father has had several strokes and can no longer speak, where she urges him to visit, perhaps for the last time.  Initially walking out the door without her, Bobby repents in anger and disgust when he realizes he must ask Rayette to come along, which turns into the comic sequences of the film, acerbically written by Carole Eastman under the name Adrien Joyce at the time (the entire film is really a connection of extremely well written sequences), as they pick up two lesbian hitchhikers, one of whom (Helena Kallianiotes) constantly chatters away about how the world is filthy and fucked up and a waste of time to live in, like a Travis Bickel monologue from Taxi Driver (1976), endlessly griping and complaining for the duration of the trip, a marathon of annoyance that is a marvel of comic invention Crap and more crap and more crap - YouTube  (1:23).  During this segment they stop at a local diner where Nicholson does his infamous chicken sandwich request to a befuddled waitress (Lorna Thayer), hold the chicken, all in an attempt to get a side order of toast which was not on the menu Five Easy Pieces Diner Scene - YouTube (1:53).  When his sarcasm gets them kicked out, his iconic reputation for being a wise ass was solidified. 

By the time they get to Puget Sound, Bobby parks his girl in some cheap motel while he goes to visit his family, calling in every few days to report nothing’s happening, while in reality, he gets the hots for Susan Ansbach, a young pianist who is studying music and also engaged to his brother Carl.  In little time the audience gets a sense of what Bobby was running away from, as this little den of secluded artists is really a picture of family dysfunction, superbly exposed by the roving eye of the camera which catches every meticulous detail.  When Rayette shows up unannounced after a week or so with the subtlety of a Mack truck, it turns out to be a hilarious contrast in social class, each more contemptible than the other, where it’s difficult to tell which one he’s ashamed of the most, his family or Rayette.  In the end, of course, nothing compares to the loathing he feels for himself.  Nicholson does have a brilliant monologue alone with his father Jack Nicholson: Five Easy Pieces ("Life You Don't ... - YouTube (3:15), where he attempts to make some sense out of his messed up life, where he continually fouls things up so bad that he has to run away from his own stupid mistakes, a haunting scene that actually includes tears, perhaps the only Jack Nicholson scene on record to do so.  When he makes his escape, it comes in the most unexpected fashion, a moody, existential moment where he takes stock of his life, all shot in a masterful style of picturesque quiet and understatement Five Easy Pieces (8/8) Movie CLIP - I'm Fine (1970 ... YouTube (2:12).

Not Fade Away

NOT FADE AWAY           B+  
USA  (112 mi)  2012  d:  David Chase             Official site

They say good things come in small packages, and this is the latest from The Sopranos (1999 – 2007) writer/director David Chase, where you’d expect plenty of advance publicity, but this little film flies under the radar.  Set in the early 60’s paralleling a well-known story of when childhood friends Keith Richards and Mick Jagger met at a railway station in 1960, where the Muddy Waters and Chuck Berry records Jagger was carrying caught Richard’s eye, claiming he could already play some of those tunes on the guitar, and thus a band (with the help of fellow artist Brian Jones) named The Rolling Stones was born.  Narrated at both the beginning and end by an unseen young girl (who turns out to be the lead character’s barely seen younger sister, Meg Guzulescu), she suggests this story concerns another band that no one’s ever heard of, similarly formed about the same time.  This eerie voice is reminiscent of the rich, descriptive detail described by a collective Greek chorus narrative in the 1993 novel The Virgin Suicides, which turns out to be neighborhood boys recalling a family of gorgeously attractive young girls across the street during the 1970’s.  Much like the director’s own life, this story concerns a group of young teenage boys from suburban New Jersey in the 1960’s, led by Douglas (John Magaro), the drummer and eventual lead singer of a rock band that he forms with a couple friends, temperamental lead guitarist Eugene (Jack Huston) and childhood best friend Wells (Will Brill), playing covers of bands admired by the Stones, giving this movie a killer soundtrack assembled by E Street Band member Steven Van Zandt.  While all these guys talk about is music and their band, just waiting for the day when they get discovered, building their lives for that inevitability, they also all vie for the attention of a beautiful young girl who takes an interest in their music, Grace (Bella Heathcote), who adds a luminous Marianne Faithfull aura of mystique.  What’s apparent from the outset is this is about more than the music, which is heard continuously throughout the film, becoming a strangely evocative period piece of the early 60’s.

Of interest, this film tells the story with jagged edges, as it never advances in a straight line, providing novelesque detail to what amounts to a short story, always adding more than the viewer needs, giving the film a poetic lyricism, becoming less about their individual lives and more about the time they’re living in.  If viewers get hung up on the narrative of what’s happening, which includes plenty of plot meanderings, they may miss much of the period embellishment that is an essential ingredient to the film, actually becoming the central focus of the film, beautifully capturing the era’s conflicting attitudes.  The band continuously gets bogged down in minor disputes and disagreements, eventually having to deal with the melodramatic, self-destructive outbursts of Eugene, where they are continuously in a state of flux, always becoming something they have yet to achieve.  Meanwhile, life goes on, where Douglas’s Dad, none other than James Gandolfini (priceless, as always), gives him plenty of generation gap grief, “my son dresses like a queer,” where Dad’s upset by his Dylanesque hair and artsy fartsy plans, none of which pay the bills, waiting for him to get real and develop a legitimate career instead of throwing his life away on a stupid dream that will never amount to anything.  But Douglas is a product of the times, keying into the bohemian subculture where art and music have a mystical ability to transcend ordinary, everyday routines.  In this way, the film is a kissing cousin to Olivier Assayas’s similarly autobiographical account of his own turbulent life in the 60’s, Something in the Air (Après mai) (2012), though a few years before the Parisian student demonstrations in May ’68.  One of the more amusing scenes is witnessing Douglas and Grace in a movie theater watching Antonioni’s BLOW-UP (1966), where Douglas is struck by lengthy scenes of silence in a public park where “nothing is happening” and there are no musical cues to evoke mood.  Grace, however, has the good sense to recognize that “the trees are the music.”    

Early in the film, the band, produced and assisted by Van Zandt (who interestingly also plays Silvio Dante, the behind-the-scenes consigliere to the Soprano family), spends plenty of time playing covers of familiar radio music, always searching for that ever elusive music contract, where by the time they finally discover an agent, Brad Garrett, he lays it out straight, giving them the facts of life, suggesting the music business is “10% inspiration and 90% perspiration,” instructing them to pay their dues and develop a loyal fanbase in local bar scenes, much like the Beatles did in Hamburg, Germany or the Ramones in New York’s CBGB.  But in the changing times, Douglas wants to get away from Jersey with Grace and head to Los Angeles, parting company with the band.  Once that part of the story ends, the final sequences are among the more poetically ambiguous of any film seen this year, as their coming-of age lives simply evolve.  The transition from East coast to West coast is mesmerizing, especially the sadness etched on his Dad’s face watching his own dreams drive away in the form of his son, where in LA he may as well be a stranger in a strange land, as the West coast has a rapidly developing counterculture movement while he’s still dressing with the straight crowd wearing sport jackets.  Having always defined himself as an artist fronting a band, he suddenly finds himself without a purpose or meaning in life, stripped naked, just a solitary soul, where there may be hundreds of thousands or more just like him, discovering he’s not so unique.  This revelation is chilling, but one that personifies the 60’s, where the Baby Boomer’s sober up and come of age only to discover they’re just like everybody else, defined by their own mediocrity and routine.  There’s a beautifully written scene where Douglas is aimlessly hitchhiking into the unknown, with no particular destination, a Jack Nicholson moment right out of FIVE EASY PIECES (1970), and someone dressed like one of the mimes in Antonioni’s BLOW-UP stops to pick him up, but he’s not yet ready to go there, into the empty spaces between what’s real and what’s only imagined, into the quiet rustle of Antonioni’s trees.  It’s an open question whether cinema can replace music as the new obsession in Douglas’s life, or drugs, or the protest movement, becoming something of an unanswered reverie expressed only through a curious final abstraction. 

‘Not Fade Away’ Soundtrack Track Listing

‘There Was a Time’ – James Brown
‘Tell Me’ – the Rolling Stones
‘Ride On Baby’ – the Twylight Zones*
‘Bo Diddley’ – Bo Diddley
‘Bo Diddley’ – the Twylight Zones*
‘Subterranean Homesick Blues’ – the Twylight Zones*
‘Parachute Woman’ – the Rolling Stones
‘Go Now’ – the Moody Blues
‘Time Is on My Side’ – the Twylight Zones*
‘Dust My Broom’ – Elmore James
‘I Ain’t Gonna Eat Out My Heart’ – the Rascals
‘Good Morning Blues’ – Leadbelly
‘Train Kept A Rollin’’ – Johnny Burnette & the Rock N’ Roll Trio
‘Train Kept A Rollin’’ – the Twylight Zones*
‘Pretty Ballerina’ – the Left Banke
‘Down So Low’ – Mother Earth
‘Itchycoo Park’ – the Small Faces
‘Me and the Devil Blues’ – Robert Johnson
‘The St. Valentine’s Day Massacre’ – the Twylight Zones*
‘T.B. Sheets’ – Van Morrison
‘Some Velvet Morning’ – Nancy Sinatra & Lee Hazelwood
‘Bali Ha’i’ (From South Pacific) – Original Motion Picture Cast
‘Road Runner’ – the Sex Pistols
‘Pipeline’ – the Twylight Zones*
‘She Belongs To Me’ – Bob Dylan
Digital Bonus Track: ‘Surgical Supply Jingle’

*Includes seven songs by the fictional band the Twylight Zones, with stars John Magaro and Jack Huston contributing their own vocals to the tracks, which were produced by Steven Van Zandt. The music was performed by Van Zandt and fellow E Street Band members Max Weinberg and Garry Tallent, with their old friend Bobby Bandiera of Southside Johnny and the Asbury Jukes.

Bonnie and Clyde

BONNIE AND CLYDE          A                    

USA  (112 mi)  1967  d:  Arthur Penn

You’ve read the story of Jesse James--
Of how he lived and died;
If you’re still in need
Of something to read
Here’s the story of Bonnie and Clyde.

Now Bonnie and Clyde are the Barrow gang.
I’m sure you all have read
How they rob and steal
And those who squeal
Are usually found dying or dead.

There’s lots of untruths to these write-ups;
They’re not so ruthless as that;
Their nature is raw;
They hate the law--
The stool pigeons, spotters, and rats.

They call them cold-blooded killers;
They say they are heartless and mean;
But I say this with pride,
That I once knew Clyde
When he was honest and upright and clean.

But the laws fooled around,
Kept taking him down
And locking him up in a cell,
Till he said to me,
“I’ll never be free,

So I’ll meet a few of them in hell.”

The road was so dimly lighted;
There were no highway signs to guide;
But they made up their minds
If all roads were blind,
They wouldn’t give up till they died.

The road gets dimmer and dimmer;
Sometimes you can hardly see;
But it’s fight, man to man,
And do all you can,
For they know they can never be free.

From heart-break some people have suffered;
From weariness some people have died;
But take it all in all,
Our troubles are small
Till we get like Bonnie and Clyde.

If a policeman is killed in Dallas,
And they have no clue or guide;
If they can’t find a fiend,
They just wipe their slate clean
And hang it on Bonnie and Clyde.

There’s two crimes committed in America
Not accredited to the Barrow mob;
They had no hand
In the kidnap demand,
Nor the Kansas City Depot job.

A newsboy once said to his buddy:
“I wish old Clyde would get jumped;
In these awful hard times
We’d make a few dimes
If five or six cops would get bumped.”

The police haven’t got the report yet,
But Clyde called me up today;
He said, “Don’t start any fights--
We aren’t working nights--
We’re joining the NRA.”

From Irving to West Dallas viaduct
Is known as the Great Divide,
Where the women are kin,
And the men are men,
And they won’t “stool” on Bonnie and Clyde.

If they try to act like citizens
And rent them a nice little flat,
About the third night
They’re invited to fight
By a sub-gun’s rat-tat-tat.

They don’t think they’re too smart or desperate,
They know that the law always wins;
They’ve been shot at before,
But they do not ignore
That death is the wages of sin.

Some day they’ll go down together;
They'll bury them side by side;
To few it’ll be grief--
To the law a relief--
But it’s death for Bonnie and Clyde.

The Story of Bonnie and Clyde, by Bonnie Parker, 1934

BONNIE AND CLYDE, for better or for worse, changed the landscape of American cinema, as it brilliantly mixes sex and violence, caricature with realism, folksy humor with bullets and death, where as soon as the humanist portrayal of the Barrow gang makes one sympathize with them, they'll go on another violent-tinged escape with devastating consequences, where bullets are raw and graphically ugly.  Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway provide a master class in acting as Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker, legendary outlaws from the 30’s, especially Dunaway who may give the performance of her career here, never more vulnerable, and that’s saying something.  From the opening scene where she stands naked at a window looking out at Clyde inspecting her mother’s car, it recalls the opening in Terrence Malick’s BADLANDS (1973), capturing the same cloistered details of small town life where the dangerous outsider status of criminal male behavior is the woman’s only ticket out of town, especially for such a sensuous woman as Bonnie who has to accept the dreariness of nothing ever changing in a dirt poor Texas town and little to hope for during the Depression era of the 30’s.  A charmer and sweet talker like Clyde shows signs of reckless masculinity never before seen in her small, dusty town, where she fondles his gun like a sexual object, which gets him all riled up where he feels the need to show off in front of his young girl and decides to rob the first store he sees, immediately making their escape together where Bonnie couldn’t be more sexually aroused afterwards, so much so that Clyde has to stop the car and pull her off of him.  They literally have to invent the idealized version of themselves that they want to be, and the sound of  “We’re Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker…We rob banks” does the trick.  Using stunningly effective close up shots of the two glamorous leads, including fashion shoots with Faye Dunaway, posing in her beret, toting a pistol in her hand and a cigar in her mouth, they become pin up and poster celebrities for Hollywood magazines, becoming mythical figures in real life as well as on the silver screen.  It’s an interesting idea to hype the image, blending sex and violence, to tell the story about notorious bank robbers who became mythical outlaws, their legend growing even stronger after death. 

What’s immediately apparent is the level of violence onscreen, much of it brutal and ugly, where people really are hurt and debilitated, which only escalates with later directors such as Sam Peckinpah who brings a sense of poetry and a final freeze frame to the screen, where there’s plenty of shootouts here with police and people do get killed, which is a system shock following such easy going humor.  Despite the appealing charm of the leading couple, it’s clear what they do for a living is a despicable choice, irrespective of the glamorization, yet they are romanticized through bank robberies, wild shootouts and spectacular car chases in vintage cars, not to mention the illicit romance.  This, then, becomes the theme of the film, as despite reviling crime, outlaw figures can become heroes, as Bonnie & Clyde soon become in American folklore, defying authority, supposedly driven to commit crimes, appealing to the poor because legend had it they only stole the bank’s money, usually small rural banks, and did not take what was in the pockets of the poor farmers.  This appealed to the nation’s growing sense of injustice, blaming the banks for the severe hardships suffered from the economic meltdown of the Depression, as the outlaw gang exerted a good-natured sense of fairplay, as when they capture a Texas Ranger (Denver Pyle) and let him live, sending a humiliating photo to the newspapers with Bonnie Parker draping her hands all over him.  This kind of stuff dazzled the public’s imagination demonstrating the misfit outlaws had personality and a sense of humor.  Soon the Barrow gang expanded to include Michael J. Pollard as C.W. Moss, pitch perfect as a rural gas station attendant who’s got nothing better to do with his life, also Gene Hackman as hillbilly brother Buck Barrow and his shrieking wife Estelle Parsons as Blanche, a preacher’s daughter, but also a reference to the swooning melodramatic anxiety of Tennessee Williams, who despite winning the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress, is perhaps the least impressive from this standout ensemble cast, none of whom were box office stars at this point in their careers. 

Like THE GODFATHER (1972), one of the great crime sagas of all time, the director humanizes the criminals, brings them down to earth where onscreen they seem just like you or me, giving them a folksy quality, especially in the brilliant family sequence where they’re playing with the kids, eating ice cream, rolling them down a sand dune, but also in an eerily quiet moment when C.W. drives up to a hobo camp asking for water, where people slowly gather around the wounded couple bleeding in the back seat of the car and voluntarily offer them food and blankets.  Bonnie Parker sent poems and photographs to the newspapers showing them off as a populist outlaw gang, similar to the Zodiac killer who sent cryptic letters in code to the newspapers as well, the kind of stuff that only adds intrigue to the nature of the crime itself, as it seems to deflect the gross horror of the killings and instead helps perpetuate a mythical image of Bonnie and Clyde as misunderstood, star crossed lovers.  When reality finally catches up to them under a hail of gunfire, Texas lawmen shoot 187 rounds of bullets into them, a hugely exaggerated amount, which is a comment itself on just how much the police reviled this outlaw couple.  By ending the film with this visual imprint of excessive violence, it does bring back into focus just exactly what they did for a living, as they carried a heavy arsenal with them wherever they went, and despite the idealized dime store depictions, these were notorious killers.  The humorous banter between the characters is particularly effective, especially in a scene where they pick up Gene Wilder and his girl friend just for the hell of it after stealing his car, buying hamburgers and telling jokes in the car, but then immediately dump him on the side of the road in the middle of the nowhere several hours later when they discover he’s an undertaker.  This kind of dark humor perfectly suits this film, as it’s a charming, character driven depiction of a short-lived road to destruction.  BONNIE AND CLYDE set the tone, as did Penn’s earlier film Mickey One (1965), for a different style of American film, and not just with violence, but also in the existential realism of the performances, where there’d be no Five Easy Pieces (1970) without the theatrical innovations of Arthur Penn - - a very underrated director who only completed 13 feature length films.