 Starring: Warren Beatty, Faye Dunaway, Gene Hackman, Estelle Parsons
Director: Arthur Penn
Year Of Release: 1967
Plot: Clyde Barrow is an armed robber who meets young waitress Bonnie Parker when he’s trying to steal her grandmother’s car. After she dares him to rob a shop, they go on the run and soon become a notorious pair of bank robbers, blazing a trail of crime across Texas. They then team up with Clyde’s brother and his wife, and become even more famous, however the police are on their trail and tragedy lurks around the corner. |
Nowadays Bonnie & Clyde is seen as a massively important movie in modern film history. When it was released in 1967, Hollywood was panicking because the things they’d done for the past 50 years weren’t working anymore. Audiences were dwindling as they increasingly got fed up with a diet of old style epics, musicals and comedies, the star system was dead and many studios were on the verge of bankruptcy, but Bonnie & Clyde helped show them the way forward.
Many see the film as the beginning of the ‘new Hollywood’, when what had previously been seen as the avant garde surged into Hollywood and overhauled the system with different, often more gritty movies, which brought audiences back to cinemas. Bonnie & Clyde, along with 1969’s Easy Rider, showed Hollywood there was money to be made out of the counterculture and different, more unusual ways of making movies.
They paved the way for the likes of Francis Ford Coppola and Martin Scorsese (Coppola was already a director by the time Bonnie & Clyde came out, but making decidedly old Hollywood movies, such as Fred Astaire’s final musical, Finian’s Rainbow), and started a great period of experimentation that completely changed the movie business forever. It’s a fascinating period in film history, and I’d absolutely recommend everyone read Peter Biskind’s book, ‘Easy Riders, Raging Bulls’, which gives a far better overview of the New Hollywood phenomenon than I ever could. It’s one of the best film books ever written, and reads almost like a thriller full of danger, backstabbing and betrayal, so go read it now.
Bonnie & Clyde was designed to be different than what had gone before. Warren Beatty used his star power to get creative control and a small budget (which highly favoured him, because Warner had little faith in the film, so gave him 40% of the gross rather than paying him anything upfront, assuming they were just paying for a small vanity project and wouldn’t have to pay him much on the backend). Beatty, who was greatly enamoured with the French New Wave, tried to secure Francois Truffaut and then Jean-Luc Godard for the movie, however Truffaut dropped out to make Fahrenheit 451 and Godard’s involvement didn’t work out either.
Beatty then turned to Arthur Penn, who he’d worked with on Mickey One, and together they created a new, French New Wave inspired look for the movie. The end of rigid film censorship meant they could be more violent than before, and it’s thought to be the first film where you see both a gun being shot and it hitting the victim in the same shot (previously you could show a gun being fired and then cut to someone reeling from being hit, but you couldn’t have both, or the moment of impact, in the same frame). The end of the film is also seen as a watershed for on-screen violence in American film.
The way it was shot was different too, bringing a more fluid style, unusual shots, deliberately choppy editing and a contemporary visual look to the movie. The story also flipped how things were normally done on the head, by turning the bad guys into the good guys. While Bonnie & Clyde may not say armed robbery is a good thing, it does present the criminals as a group sticking two fingers up at a rigid society and living their lives free from a system that wants to dictate their existence to them (it’s even suggest their crime spree is almost because it’s their only option in the decaying Depression hit America, if they want to be true to themselves and feel free).
When the authorities track them down, it’s presented not as them getting their just desserts but society coming in to crush them. It really is a counterculture film and a very different type of movie than Hollywood had previously made. There may have been antiheroes before, but this was one of the first movies to side more with the views of the criminals than the guardians of society trying to maintain the status quo.
However the really interesting thing is that while Bonnie & Clyde is now considered a classic, it initially got such a meagre release that it was in danger of not being seen by anyone and therefore disappearing into obscurity. Not understanding what they had, Warner considered the film a minor b-movie and only released it to drive-ins and lesser cinemas in the US. At first this move seemed justified, as many mainstream critics deplored the film and saw it as a sign of the continuing degradation of Hollywood and the growing spectre of extreme violence in movies.
Initially Bonnie & Clyde played in a few theatres and didn’t make much money. However, back then cinema wasn’t like it is today. Rather than going to cinemas all across the US at once, movies tended to travel around, going to new areas over successive months (some films still get limited initial releases and then expand if the distributors smell success, but they rarely get several months to build word of mouth as they travel round the country, as in the old days). However over the first few weeks of its release, Bonnie & Clyde started to be championed by counterculture critics, and young people started showing up at screenings.
This made Warner sit up and take notice, as it was young people more than any other section of the audience that they were having trouble attracting in the late 60s, and finding films that would appeal to them was seen as the Holy Grail in turning the studios fortunes around. Realising that maybe they’d misjudged the movie, the studio took the very unusual step of re-releasing Bonnie & Clyde on the mainstream circuit and giving it a major push. This turned the movie into a massive hit, as audiences flocked to see something that genuinely felt fresh and different.
The real proof of how well embraced the film was following its second release, is that despite the early mainstream critical mauling, Bonnie & Clyde was nominated for 10 Oscars, including all of the main categories, and won two. However if Warner hadn’t rethought their strategy and taken the very unusual step of giving the film a completely new release and a massive push, the likelihood is, Bonnie & Clyde would have disappeared into obscurity and had none of the effects mentioned above.
What this makes me wonder is that if things were so touch and go for Bonnie & Clyde, how many other great films haven’t had a studio willing to admit they’d made a mistake with their release strategy, and so they’ve simply disappeared into obscurity, never to be seen again? There must be literally thousands of wonderful films that have slipped through the net due to the people releasing it not knowing what they’d got.
This probably happens even more today than it was in the past, as while in 1967 the strategy of moving films around the US give them a chance to build a head of steam and see whether there was interest, nowadays a film has only got a very short amount of time to prove itself. Often, even if a film is only in limited release, if it doesn’t show strong numbers in its first weekend, its fate is pretty much sealed.
The only upside is that at least we now have DVD, so some films that didn’t get much love in cinemas can find success there. For example both Donnie Darko and The Shawshank Redemption failed badly at US cinemas, but following success elsewhere in the world (with Donnie Darko it was the UK that saved the film), they became huge hits on their home entertainment releases. However this is by no means a foolproof guarantee that good films will always get the love they deserve, which is a real shame.
Thankfully though, Bonnie & Clyde fought its way through its brush with obscurity and is now an unabashed classic. As it’s a wonderful movie, we can be thankful that Warner was willing to realise it needed to rethink how it marketed and released the film, which has ensured that it’s now got the praise it deserves.
TIM ISAAC
PREVIOUS: Bones - Seasons 1-3 - Or, what's so entertaining about murder?
NEXT: Born To Be Bad - Or, the last days of classic Hollywood's loose women, and why this film should’ve been completely forgotten
CLICK HERE to see the index of 909 films and TV shows the Movie-A-Day Project will be covering
CLICK HERE to find out more about the idea behind The Movie-A-Day Project
CLICK HERE to follow Movie_A_Day on Twitter
