Arthur Penn’s outlaw film still has its shock: it lets you laugh at the getaway and then puts a bullet through a face. Dunaway and Beatty are glorious, Dede Allen’s cutting is the real star, and it likes its killers rather more than it should.
Arthur Penn takes two small-time Texas thieves from the Depression and makes a film that cannot decide whether it is a comedy or a funeral, and does not want to. Bonnie Parker (Faye Dunaway) is a waitress with nothing to do. Clyde Barrow (Warren Beatty) is a boy with a pistol in his trouser pocket and a need to be looked at. Within ten minutes they have robbed a grocer and are gone. We recommend it without much hesitation and with one caveat: it likes these two rather more than it ought.
The moment that got us comes at the end of the first act. C. W. Moss (Michael J. Pollard) is left in the getaway car outside a bank and, because nobody told him not to, parks it in a space. The robbery becomes a farce of reversing and horn-blowing, and we were laughing. Then a clerk jumps on the running board, Clyde fires through the window, and the man’s face comes apart behind the glass. The laugh stuck in our throats. Dede Allen cuts it in a handful of shots and moves on, and that is worse, because the film moves on too.
Allen is the reason this is the film it is. She cuts into scenes after they have started and out before they have finished, so the first hour plays as a run of snapshots, like the photographs it opens on. The getaways are chopped into jolts. Burnett Guffey shoots the country around them flat and hazy, dust roads and pale sky, greens and golds like an old postcard, and against it the stolen cars sit black and shining. Theadora Van Runkle puts Bonnie in berets, long skirts and cardigans, and Clyde in a hat and a good suit. They look like people who expect to be photographed.
Beatty plays Clyde as a show-off who bruises easily, and the film’s boldest decision comes in the first act, in a motel bed, when he tells Bonnie he is no good to her as a lover. Its glamour couple is not a couple in that sense at all, and everything they do afterwards reads as what they do instead. Dunaway is restless, biting her lip, a woman who has decided to be famous and is waiting for the world to catch up. Gene Hackman’s Buck is all backslaps and one dreadful joke he tells more than once. Estelle Parsons plays his wife Blanche at full shriek. Gene Wilder turns up for one sequence as a passenger who did not ask to be one, and it is the funniest stretch of the film.
The people this pair rob and shoot barely exist. The clerks are faces, the farmers turned off their land are a chorus who cheer, and the one lawman with a name, Frank Hamer (Denver Pyle), is there to be humiliated, photographed and laughed at. Blanche is written as a fool so that Bonnie looks cooler beside her, and although Parsons commits to it, it is a mean piece of writing from David Newman and Robert Benton. Charles Strouse is credited with the music, but the sound the film keeps going back to is a banjo, sawing away under the chases as if this were a picnic. We take it the tune is meant to sour as the bodies mount. It sours a little late.
Most critics treat it as the film that let real violence into American cinema, and we are close enough to the consensus not to quarrel. The one dissent we have read says the violence looks tame now. We think the violence was never the shock. The shock was the laugh just before it, and that has not aged. Penn plays the same trick for 111 minutes, faster each time, and by the end we could not tell whether we were meant to be enjoying ourselves.
The last two minutes are the most argued-about in it, and we will not describe them. Watch it with someone who believes old films are slow; Allen does not waste a shot. The 15 certificate is about right. It is not the blood that earns it. It is the laughing.
