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Bonnie and Clyde
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When
I was a young teenager in suburban Melbourne, I had a small role as the Narrator
in a school play about the glamorous Australian bushranger outlaw/rebel, Ned
Kelly (1854-1880). As Kelly lay dead, mowed down by police, I came on stage for
my one and only moment, to declaim: “The sad, lonely life, and the lonely
ending. One man against all the world in the bush at Glenrowan!”
Bonnie and Clyde also ends with the
murder of its beyond-the-law heroes. “Birds and bullets fly” is the apt DVD
chapter title for this finale: before the bullets, Bonnie Parker (Faye Dunaway)
and Clyde Barrow (Warren Beatty), euphorically happy, are alive to everything
happening around them in the natural world, such as that flock of birds. Little
do they realise that this burst of disturbed nature is a last-second omen, and
that they have been lured to their death by an innocent-looking guy with car
troubles by the roadside.
Many
viewers misremember the murder as a more protracted and extravagant spectacle
than it actually is; the volleys of fire, and the slow-motion that captures the
strangely lyrical paroxysms of Bonnie’s and Clyde’s bodies, are quite
restrained compared to many subsequent films. Due to director Arthur Penn’s
careful play of contrasts – the quick-change in moods, the movement from quiet
to loud – this finale is certainly sudden and shocking.
But
what really clinches the scene is the mute, disquieting ballet that follows.
The cops slowly approach the corpses (which are no longer seen) and, in the
final shot, a car window’s looming bullet-hole seems to fracture the image
itself. The film cuts to black before the chief cop can speak. No comforting
“sad, lonely life” epitaphs here; the event speaks for itself.
In
the 1960s, Penn was considered one of America's greatest filmmakers. In the
‘70s, the course of his career began to wobble. He was eventually reduced to
helming bizarre novelty films (Penn and
Teller Get Killed, 1989) and tele-dramas (The Portrait, 1993) that are lucky to receive even a video release
in some countries. Only twice since the ‘60s – in Night Moves (1975) and Four
Friends (aka Georgia, 1980) – has
his immense artistry, when inspired by good material, seized the day once more.
The
re-release of Bonnie and Clyde reminds us, with a pleasing jolt, what an exciting master Penn once was. From
its first, wild moments of a half-naked Bonnie thrashing around frustrated in
her cramped bedroom, it is a vivid, kinetic, restless testament to
bored-youth-gone-crazy, in the tradition of that B movie masterpiece Gun Crazy (1949).
At
that time, Penn was in an ideal position to synthesize two very different types
of cinema. From such modern-leaning American directors of the 1950s as Elia
Kazan and Nicholas Ray, he absorbed the Method Studio's emphasis on highly
physical acting, a sturdy sense of storytelling structure, and a rock-solid,
realistic sense of historical time and place – especially as all of that
related to the film medium. (In theatre, Penn himself had studied under the
great Michael Chekhov, and later became Artistic Director of the Actors
Studio.)
From
the Nouvelle Vague (Jean-Luc Godard and François Truffaut especially), Penn
imported a fragmented editing style, a Pop Art-inspired visual flair, episodic
narrative, and a fondness for those confronting, split-second switches in mood
displayed in the final sequence evoked above.
The
result, still today, is astonishing. One aspect of Bonnie and Clyde that seems more remarkable now is the evidently high
degree of almost cartoon-like exaggeration in the acting and staging. Long
before Fargo (1995), Penn zeroed in on his characters' oddities of gesture, accent, posture
and behaviour. Entire scenes are based on single details of the way someone
looks, reacts or even breathes. Such overtly comic performers as Gene Wilder,
Estelle Parsons and Michael Pollard blend in perfectly with dramatic players
like Dunaway and Gene Hackman.
In
its time, Bonnie and Clyde was among
the films that prompted great alarm about the exponential increase in “high
impact” screen violence – partly because it refused to censor the sensational,
thrilling aspect of its characters' murderous, anti-social behaviour. Seen now,
however, the movie’s attitude to the violence it depicts appears fully
integrated within a complex social and moral perspective. Penn and his writers
(Robert Benton – who himself became a good director – and David Newman) spend a
great deal of time detailing the milieu of the Depression era. And they offer a
disquieting trajectory from the initial hi-jinx to a sombre, melancholic,
doubt-ridden finale.
But
the most striking element of Bonnie and
Clyde for a contemporary audience is its treatment of sexuality – and
particularly the dysfunctional masculinity of Clyde Barrow. Beatty's ability to
express this character's immense vulnerability and torment is extraordinarily
intimate and touching. Once again, Penn was able to find in this fascinating
figure an intersection of hitherto starkly separate cinematic concerns –
ultra-modern psychology fused with all the glamour and excitement of the
generic gangster hero. The mix is still potent.
© Adrian Martin September 1997 / March 2007 |
