Bonnie and Clyde

Bonnie and Clyde (1967) is set in Depression era Texas. A waitress meets a thief, they start robbing banks, and they become famous. The film keeps violence and comedy interlocked and then changes register entirely in its final scene. Its great innovation was showing what bullets do. Squibs were used to depict hits on the body at a scale nobody had seen; until then people in Hollywood fell over without bleeding. It was also criticised for opening the door to the violence that followed. Warren Beatty starred and produced, taking forty percent of the profit and allocating ten percent to director Arthur Penn. When Warner Bros. failed to promote it he threatened to sue and forced a general release. The result astonished the studio. What happened on the critical side changed film criticism itself. Bosley Crowther of The New York Times called it a cheap piece of bald faced slapstick, a position so far from the public that the paper ended his employment. Pauline Kael wrote a long defence in The New Yorker, and it earned her the staff critic's job there. It cost 2.5 million dollars and grossed 70 million worldwide. It runs 111 minutes. Good for: the beginning of New Hollywood, crime narrative, and film history. Less good for: the real Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow were far less charming than this, and most of the people they killed are absent from the film. The tonal shifts are abrupt and the final scene is still shocking.