Viking Night: Bonnie and Clyde
By Bruce Hall
October 25, 2011
BoxOfficeProphets.com

This could also be from Dick Tracy.
The funny thing about being a nihilist is that the one thing you always end up missing is stability. It’s one of life’s general truths, but nowhere is it more applicable than the criminal arts. When you live without any rules, it’s that very lack of structure and discipline that usually does you in. As if to prove this, legendary gangsters Bonnie and Clyde saw their brief careers come to an end when they ran out of options and had to start looking for help - just another pair of fools who ran out of luck because they didn’t have a plan. And their story might have been forgotten by now, the same as every other bumbling, small time crook. But the idea of self-destructive, star crossed lovers is as old as the art of storytelling itself. It’s sheer coincidence that by the late '60s, a fatalistic new way of filmmaking was looking for a foothold in the US. It found purchase in the short, marginal lives of two incompetent thieves whose love would become as legendary as their lawlessness.

It’s hard to imagine today, but prior to Arthur Penn’s bloody-sexy spectacle, this depression era Romeo and Juliet had largely been lost in time. Clyde Barrow was a baby faced punk, perpetually in and out of jail by the time he was a teenager. Bonnie Parker was a bright but naive country girl who waited tables, all the while yearning for a life of intrigue and adventure. For both it was love at first sight, and Bonnie left home to join Clyde on his anarchist exploits. Neither was prepared for the wages of violence, treating their time on the road like an extended vacation. She wrote poetry and dabbled in photography. He threw money around like a sultan and indulged his Napoleon complex. Each grappled with their own childish ignorance, struggling to stay one step ahead of the law as the dragnet closed in. In a country wracked by economic collapse, some viewed them as heroes, fighting back against a corrupt system. In reality they were just a couple of dumb hicks, in way over their heads.

Unfortunately, life on the run wasn’t nearly as glamorous and fun as they expected, or as the newspapers often portrayed it. Bonnie and Clyde were pretty lousy bank robbers, so they lived hand to mouth, rarely sleeping in the same place for long. This, of course, made it harder to plan their escapades. And you know what they say about robbing banks - if you fail to plan, then plan to fail. And fail they did. So as their expenses outpaced their income, they became increasingly desperate - which forced them to reach out to relatives. And when the cops know you’re that desperate, they know to look for you in all those old familiar places. In this situation, it’s pretty much game over because no matter how you live your life, death is the one rule we all end up having to follow.

So why the history lesson, you’re probably asking? After all, I dropped out of college three times, and have no business trying to educate anyone. Just like Bonnie and Clyde, I should probably have a degree in futility. But the point is that these kids were more than just a couple of morons who thought they could outsmart death. They were a fascinating, modern day case study in Shakespearean violence, only their story lacked any semblance of romance or redemptive parable. And it made them the perfect candidate for a playfully lurid, viscerally potent crime drama. The film intentionally mimics the so called French New Wave style, which (in a nutshell) emphasizes visual excitement and gut level thrills, often over actual substance. That’s probably why the film takes some pretty massive liberties with historical fact. I would argue, however, that the primary function of a film like this is to entertain, not to teach. As with many period films, the revision actually clarifies the narrative. Unambiguous things are easier to sell, and the folly of youth is pretty unambiguous.

While we’re on the subject...Warren Beatty is a little too suave for a pimple faced country bumpkin, but the distortion helps more than it hurts Clyde Barrow was a child, quickly overwhelmed by his own homicidal hype. On the other side of it, to this day Faye Dunaway looks like she just stepped out of a perfume ad. It’s tempting to dismiss this but if you’ve ever seen a good picture of Parker, it makes perfect sense. Bonnie was truly a fish out of water - a pretty girl, and a hell of a lot smarter than the schmucks she ran with. In a perfect world, she might have been the only member of the gang to actually make something of herself. But despite her relative intelligence, history tells us Bonnie felt there was no practical use for it in the real world. She turned to the pen to record her thoughts, and in doing so scrawled her own epitaph.

She was certainly an average writer, but her words are less naive than her actions, and they paradoxically underscore the wistful way she viewed the chaos around her. And the film those words inspired is no less erratic.

Bonnie and Clyde is one of the first films in which gun play is elevated into an art. So the shootouts depicted here are a bit like watching an old football game - oddly familiar yet somehow rudimentary. There’s a clumsy, manufactured humor to them that highlights the ineptitude of the characters and blunts their brutality in a darkly disconcerting way. Video games did not exist in 1967, but you wouldn’t be far off in calling this Grand Theft Auto: Great Depression. There’s nothing funny about murder, but in this case it’s hard not to understand how silly it is that these kids ever thought they could be professional criminals. Like the imagination of an under educated teen, the movie is all sporadic bursts of violence and sexual innuendo, sandwiched between lulls of introspection and levity. It’s a chaotic tone that some might find frustrating, but it’s hard to deny there’s a certain sense of realism to it.

The rest of the cast helps. Gene Wilder makes his screen debut as a hapless civilian, briefly caught up in the action. The fact that he is a human puppy is what makes it so funny to see him surrounded by such mayhem. Gene Hackman (who I believe is in every movie made between 1971 and 2001) appears as Clyde’s dopey brother Buck. His roguish intensity amps up the bedlam and makes for one of his earliest standout roles. No doubt there’s an artificial sheen on the cast that makes it seem as though the characters were fully aware they’d be famous one day. It adds an edgy sarcasm to the story that makes Bonnie and Clyde seem more like a sarcastic joke than a serious narrative. And in the end (we all know how it ends, don’t we?) the first thing you feel is the shock emptiness and futility - just as you should.

No attempt is made to justify or explain why the Barrow Gang does what they do. Somewhere along the line a bunch of kids took a wrong turn and never found their way back, and that’s just the way it is. Just as in life, the endgame seems inevitable. Just as in life, it’s equal parts funny, tragic and pointless. Bonnie and Clyde plays off like a brutally seductive, meandering road trip where you get to dig your own grave at the end. That’s exactly what it is, but the payoff is in the execution and the experience and not in the end result, because the end is never in doubt.

Maybe that’s the lesson. Sometimes life imitates art, and sometimes art imitates life. For better or worse, Bonnie and Clyde became a pop culture sensation and without meaning to, changed the course of movies forever. Their story will never be forgotten, and sex and violence on screen will never again be the same.

Maybe those two idiots really DID accomplish something, after all.