Category: New Hollywood Cinema

Arthur Penn and the Lasting Influence of Bonnie and Clyde

Arthur Penn, the Academy Award nominated director of Bonnie and Clyde and Alice’s Restaurant, died last night at the age of 88.

Bonnie and Clyde is considered to be one of the greatest American films, at the forefront of the New Hollywood Cinema. The film’s bloody and violent closing sequence shocked audiences and marked a definitive end of the studio system.

As one article puts it: “In Mr. Penn’s hands, [Bonnie and Clyde] became something even more dangerous and innovative — a sympathetic portrait of two barely articulate criminals, played by Mr. Beatty and a newcomer, Faye Dunaway, that disconcertingly mixed sex, violence and hayseed comedy, set to a bouncy bluegrass score by Lester Flatt and Earl Scruggs. Not only was the film sexually explicit in ways unseen in Hollywood since the imposition of the Production Code in 1934 — when Bonnie stroked Clyde’s gun, the symbolism was unmistakable — it was violent in ways that had never been seen before. Audiences gasped when a comic bank robbery climaxed with Clyde’s shooting a bank teller in the face, and were stunned when this attractive outlaw couple died in a torrent of bullets, their bodies twitching in slow motion as their clothes turned red with blood.”

Bonnie and Clyde is without a doubt Penn’s greatest contribution to American cinema and its influence is constantly felt to this day.

Bonnie and Clyde is a film I addressed frequently throughout the course of my research on post-9/11 American independent cinema last year. Bonnie and Clyde, as well as The Searchers and Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, influenced director Courtney Hunt throughout her inception of Frozen River.

Knowing this, the relationship between Ray Eddy and Lila Littlewolf, the female protagonists and unlikely illegal immigrant smuggling duo carries a greater depth as it develops throughout the film. Like Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow, these women are outlaws united by and for a greater cause. While Bonnie and Clyde were outlaws mostly out of boredom, Ray and Lila were united by their maternal suffering. They smuggle illegal immigrants to provide for their children after being abandoned by their husbands and patriarchal society. Their actions play out like a wild west showdown, complete with gun fights, chases in the woods, and the ultimate maternal sacrifice by one of the women. The frozen tundra of upstate New York-Canadian border region contributes to the film’s frequent wild west characteristics.

Frozen River was nominated for two Academy Awards and it is by far one of the best independent films released in recent years. It is films such as Frozen River, which are relevant to today’s current political issues and have a level of unmatched artistry, where we see the unparalleled legacy of Arthur Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde.

How Bonnie and Clyde Changed Everything

The following excerpt is from tomorrow’s New York Times. It looks at how the unprecedented violence depicted in Bonnie and Clyde changed cinema.


Two Outlaws, Blasting Holes in the Screen
By A. O. Scott
Published: August 12, 2007

The story of Bonnie and Clyde has been told so many times that it has acquired the patina of legend. It’s the kind of historical fable that circulates to explain how the world once was and how it came to be the way it is now: a morality tale in which the wild energies of youth defeat the stale certainties of age, and freedom triumphs over repression.

I’m not talking about the adventures of the actual Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker, who robbed and shot their way through Texas, Oklahoma and adjacent states in the bad old days of the Great Depression. Their exploits have been chronicled in books, ballads and motion pictures, never more famously than in the movie named after them, which first opened in New York 40 years ago this month. The notoriety of Bonnie and Clyde, directed by Arthur Penn from a long-gestating script by David Newman and Robert Benton and produced by Warren Beatty, who also played Clyde, has long since eclipsed that of its real-life models.

The ups and downs of the movie’s early fortunes have become a touchstone and a parable, a crucial episode in the entwined histories of Hollywood, American film criticism and postmodern popular culture. Bonnie and Clyde was a scandal and a sensation largely because it seemed to introduce a new kind of violence into movies. Its brutality was raw and immediate, yet at the same time its scenes of mayhem were choreographed with a formal panache that was almost gleeful.

Their horror was undercut by jaunty, rambunctious humor and by the skittering banjo music of the soundtrack. The final shootout, in which Mr. Beatty and Faye Dunaway’s bodies twitch and writhe amid a storm of gunfire (not long after their characters have successfully made love for the first time), was both awful and ecstatic, an orgy of blood and bullets. The filmmakers seemed less interested in the moral weight of violence than in its aesthetic impact. The killings were alluring and gruesome; that the movie was so much fun may well have been the most disturbing thing about it.

[…]

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The article goes on to examine violence in today’s cinema. It’s quite an interesting read. You can find the complete article here.