Bonnie Parker was just a girl in her twenties, waiting for something bigger and more exciting to sweep her away from the drudgery of working as a waitress in some middle-of-nowhere town. I’ve seen this premise before, and I’m sure a lot of you have as well. Yet I’ve never seen a film dispense with this premise as quickly as Bonnie and Clyde does.
The film opens as Bonnie (Faye Dunaway) meets Clyde Barrow (Warren Beatty), a rogue who just got out of prison for armed robbery. After flirting a bit, they go on their first robbery — and the film is only eight minutes in! After seeing so many retro films with sluggish pacing, I find it refreshing to finally see an older movie that moves so quickly.
Of course, that’s not to say that there aren’t some slower moments. Most of them come with the arrival of Clyde’s brother, Buck (Gene Hackman) and his wife, Blanche (Estelle Parsons). The latter character is the real problem, as she is a shrill, annoying and totally worthless character. That would be bad enough, except that the film spends a lot of screen time into establishing Blanche as nothing but a prissy screaming brat, constantly at loggerheads with Bonnie, yet they can’t get rid of her because she’s family. Or maybe it just felt like a lot of screen time because of how much I hated this character. I don’t know.
In any case, I found the movie’s other characters to be very enjoyable. Gene Hackman turns in a great supporting performance as an affable rogue who’s always got a joke ready (though he doesn’t seem to know any others). Michael J. Pollard was also very impressive as C.W. Moss, the Barrow gang’s resident mechanic. This character starts out as a weakling, but he develops into a strong and confident individual, and that growth was very interesting to see. Gene Wilder even gets a notable one-scene role, in which the Barrow gang steals his car and Wilder responds by doing what he does best: Neurotic rage, seasoned with crazy.
Last and foremost, there’s Beatty and Dunaway. Beatty absolutely knocks this role out of the park, delivering a charming rascal with an enormous chip on his shoulder. And as for Faye Dunaway… holy smoke. I’ve seen Dunaway in a couple of femme fatale roles before, but this is something else. She delivers a character brimming over with joie de vivre and sex appeal. Seriously, the camera in this film absolutely loves her. It also helps that our two leads have absolutely smoldering chemistry, though it’s obvious that whatever they had was never going to last. Bonnie, after all, was primarily interested in bank robbing as a means to an end, where Clyde can only see the robbing as an end in itself. Not that she doesn’t enjoy the crime sprees, but Bonnie would much rather live a life of fun, excitement and lovemaking without having to spend every second running from the law. Clyde only ever wanted to run the lawmen ragged and Bonnie only ever wanted to follow him, so the two were destined to go down together in a hail of gunfire.
Yet of all these exceptional actors bringing this gang of misfit rascals to vivid life and making them sympathetic, the only one who got an Academy Award was Estelle Parsons. Sometimes, I just don’t get the Oscars.
The cinematography also got an Oscar and rightly so. The film looks amazing, with car chases and shootouts that were wonderfully staged. However, the editing does get a touch wonky at times, such as the car chase that’s terribly intercut with witness reports of a recent bank robbery. There are also a couple of scenes — most notably the film’s very first — in which the camera has to go very far out of its way to avoid anything sexually explicit. I can understand the impulse, but these scenes and their unnecessary close-ups looked way more uncomfortable and awkward than the alternative of just showing some nudity.
It’s not like the movie could’ve been more controversial, anyhow. This film caught a lot of flak in its day for supposedly glorifying murders and its easy to see why. This film is a very romanticized narrative that plays pretty fast and loose with historical accuracy, and there are several scenes in which blood flows freely. The ending is perhaps the most notorious, and for good reason. That last scene was brilliantly staged, with editing that perfectly captured our leads’ last few thoughts and held on their bullet-riddled bodies for just the right amount of time.
Unfortunately, I still don’t feel that the film quite stuck the landing. After the movie confirms the deaths of Bonnie and Clyde, it just lingers on the scene for a couple of worthless seconds before cutting to black. The ending is a strange paradox in that it was either too long or not long enough. If the movie was going to end with Bonnie and Clyde getting shot to pieces, then it should have ended with the powerful visual of them getting shot to pieces. If it was going to go longer, it should have wrapped up a few story threads involving the surviving characters or given us a text epilogue. Instead, we get something in between the two that accomplishes nothing. It’s awkward, plain and simple.
Nevertheless, I very much enjoyed Bonnie and Clyde. The film was very well-made, aside from a few technical hiccups, and Blanche was the only horrible annoyance in a cast of enjoyable characters played by wonderful actors. Despite a few lulls here and there, this was a very exciting picture, loaded with action and centered around a romance powered by phenomenal chemistry. This is one to check out.