Flip through the latest issue of Gulf Weekly.
Bonnie and Clyde
Year: 1967
Director: Arthur Penn
Writer: David Newman
Cast: Warren Beatty, Faye Dunaway, Gene Hackman
Rating: M
Runtime: 111mins
Bonnie and Clyde is a milestone in the history of American movies, a work of truth and brilliance. It is also pitilessly cruel, filled with sympathy, nauseating, funny, heartbreaking, and astonishingly beautiful. If it does not seem that those words should be strung together, perhaps that is because movies do not very often reflect the full range of human life.
The lives in this case belonged, briefly, to Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker. They were two nobodies who got their pictures in the paper by robbing banks and killing people. They weren’t very good at the bank robbery part of it, but they were fairly good at killing people and absolutely first-class at getting their pictures in the paper.
Under Arthur Penn’s direction, this is a film aimed squarely and unforgivingly at the time we are living in. It is intended, horrifyingly, as entertainment. And so it will be taken.
The performances throughout are flawless. Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway, in the title roles, surpass anything they have done on the screen.
