pauline kael bonnie and clyde

Our comicmelancholic affection for thirties Pop has become sixties Pop, and those who made Bonnie and Clyde are smart enough to use it that way. The toughness about what we’ve come out of and what we’ve been through—the honesty to see ourselves as the Yahoo children of yokels—is a good part of American popular art. That’s what the character he played should say; the other way, the line has no point at all. In many ways, this method is more effective; we feel the violence more because so much is left to our imaginations. But people don’t “buy” what they see in a movie quite so simply; Louis B. Mayer did not turn us into a nation of Andy Hardys, and if, in a film, we see a frightened man wantonly take the life of another, it does not encourage us to do the same, any more than seeing an ivory hunter shoot an elephant makes us want to shoot one. The Hollywood writer is becoming a ghostwriter. This is the way the story was told in 1937. Strangelove,” chortling over madness, did not indicate any possibilities for sanity. During the first part of the picture, a woman in my row was gleefully assuring her companions, “It’s a comedy. Beatty was the producer of “Bonnie and Clyde,” responsible for keeping the company on schedule, and he has been quoted as saying, “There’s not a scene that we have done that we couldn’t do better by taking another day.” This is the hell of the expensive way of making movies, but it probably helps to explain why Beatty is more intense than he has been before and why he has picked up his pace. . (There is, however, one bad bit of editing: the end of the hospital scene, when Blanche’s voice makes an emotional shift without a corresponding change in her facial position.) His squatters’-jungle scene is too “eloquent,” like a poster making an appeal, and the Parker-family-reunion sequence is poetic in the gauzy mode. The Hollywood writer is becoming a ghostwriter. The tragedy of “Macbeth” is in the fall from nobility to horror; the comic tragedy of Bonnie and Clyde is that although you can’t fall from the bottom you can reach the same horror. When I asked a nineteen-year-old boy who was raging against the movie as “a cliché-ridden fraud” if he got so worked up about other movies, he informed me that that was an argument ad hominem. But even for that group there is an excitement in hearing its own private thoughts expressed out loud and in seeing something of its own sensibility become part of our common culture. Yet the appearance of Furthman’s name in the credits of such Howard Hawks films as Only Angels Have Wings, To Have and Have Not, The Big Sleep, and Rio Bravo suggests the reason for the similar qualities of good-bad-girl glamour in the roles played by Dietrich and Bacall and in other von Sternberg and Hawks heroines, and also in the Jean Harlow and Constance Bennett roles in the movies he wrote for them. Actors and actresses are usually more beautiful than ordinary people. If movie stars can’t play criminals without our all wanting to be criminals, then maybe the only safe roles for them to play are movie stars—which, in this assumption, everybody wants to be anyway. In 1939, John Ford attempted a similar poetic evocation of the legendary American past in “Young Mr. Lincoln;” this kind of evocation, by getting at how we feel about the past, moves us far more than attempts at historical re-creation. David Newman and Robert Benton, who wrote the script for Bonnie and Clyde, were able to use the knowledge that, like many of our other famous outlaws and gangsters, the real Bonnie and Clyde seemed to others to be acting out forbidden roles and to relish their roles. Our best movies have always made entertainment out of the anti-heroism of American life; they bring to the surface what, in its newest forms and fashions, is always just below the surface. Kiss Kiss Bang Bang: Film Writings, 1965-1967 by Pauline Kael. In the spoofs of the last few years, everything is gross, ridiculous, insane; to make sense would be to risk being square. But his girl, Joan (Bonnie)—the only person who believes in him—thinks that an innocent man has nothing to fear. Eddie (Clyde) is a three-time loser who wants to work for a living, but nobody will give him a chance. The writers and the director of “Bonnie and Clyde” play upon our attitudes toward the American past by making the hats and guns and holdups look as dated as two-reel comedy; emphasizing the absurdity with banjo music, they make the period seem even farther away than it is. “Bonnie and Clyde” needs violence; violence is its meaning. New Hollywood, sometimes referred to as the American New Wave or the Hollywood Renaissance, refers to a movement in American film history from the mid-1960s to the early 1980s, when a new generation of young filmmakers came to prominence in the United States. But Clyde is not the urban sharpster of “The Public Enemy;” he is the hick as bank robber—a countrified gangster, a hillbilly killer who doesn’t mean any harm. They influenced the types of film produced, their production and marketing, and the way major studios approached film-making. Bored waitress Bonnie Parker falls in love with an ex-con named Clyde Barrow and together they start a violent crime spree through the country, stealing cars and robbing banks. BONNIE AND CLYDE / THIEVES LIKE US . In the late forties, there were They Live by Night, with Farley Granger and Cathy O’Donnell, and Gun Crazy, with John Dall and Peggy Cummins. We are aware that the filtered effects already include our responses, and it’s too easy; the lines are good enough so that the stylization wouldn’t have been necessary if the scene had been played right. We remember them mainly in fragments—an image or two, a bit of dialogue, a star’s atti-tude. Will we, as some people have suggested, be lured into imitating the violent crimes of Clyde and Bonnie because Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway are “glamorous”? Probably part of the discomfort that people feel about “Bonnie and Clyde” grows out of its compromises and its failures. In 1937, the audience felt sympathy for the fugitives because they weren’t allowed to lead normal lives; in 1967, the “normality” of the Barrow gang and their individual aspirations toward respectability are the craziest things about them—not just because they’re killers but because thirties “normality” is in itself funny to us. And they rarely have the visual sense or the training to make good movie directors. Is that really so terrible? Auden has written, “Our judgment of an established author is never simply an aesthetic judgment. (Eisenstein had it, and Dovzhenko, and Buñuel, but not many others.) The targets have usually been social and political fads and abuses, together with the heroes and the clichés of the just preceding period of filmmaking. If movie stars can’t play criminals without our all wanting to be criminals, then maybe the only safe roles for them to play are movie stars—which, in this assumption, everybody wants to be anyway. It’s the roles that make them seem glamorous. And at that instant the meaning of Clyde Barrow’s character changes; he’s still a clown, but we’ve become the butt of the joke. “Bonnie and Clyde,” to take a convenient example, is fired when the real Bonnie and Clyde were ambushed. Because You Only Live Once was so well done, and because the audience in the thirties shared this view of the indifference and cruelty of “society,” there were no protests against the sympathetic way the outlaws were pictured—and, indeed, there was no reason for any. Compromises are not new to the Bonnie-and-Clyde story; You Only Live Once had a tacked-on coda featuring a Heavenly choir and William Gargan as a dead priest, patronizing Eddie even in the afterlife, welcoming him to Heaven with “You’re free, Eddie!” The kind of people who make a movie like You Only Live Once are not the kind who write endings like that, and, by the same sort of internal evidence, I’d guess that Newman and Benton, whose Bonnie seems to owe so much to Catherine in Jules and Jim, had more interesting ideas originally about Bonnie’s and Clyde’s (and maybe C. W.’s) sex lives. It’s only three years since Lewis Mumford was widely acclaimed for saying about “Dr. Structurally, “Bonnie and Clyde” is a story of love on the run, like the old Clark Gable–Claudette Colbert “It Happened One Night” but turned inside out; the walls of Jericho are psychological this time, but they fall anyway. That turns into another way of making “prestigious,” “distinguished” pictures. Furthman, who has written about half of the most entertaining movies to come out of Hollywood (Ben Hecht wrote most of the other half), isn’t even listed in new encyclopedias of the film. To revisit this article, visit My Profile, then View saved stories. He is not only a poet . In 1967, the movie-makers know that the audience wants to believe—maybe even prefers to believe—that Bonnie and Clyde were guilty of crimes, all right, but that they were innocent in general; that is, naïve and ignorant compared with us. There could be something funny about her wanting to run home to her mama, but, as it has been done, her heading home, running off through the fields, is unconvincing—incompletely motivated. Trading Places (1983) – Review by Richard Schickel, The Day After (1983): The Nightmare Comes Home, The Last American Hero (1973) – Review by Roger Greenspun, The Last American Hero (1973) – Review by Pauline Kael. And there was a cheap—in every sense—1958 exploitation film, The Bonnie Parker Story, starring Dorothy Provine. We garble our foreign words and phrases and hope that at least we’ve used them right. The showpiece sequence, Bonnie’s visit to her mother (which is a bit reminiscent of Humphrey Bogart’s confrontation with his mother, Marjorie Main, in the movie version of “Dead End”), aims for an effect of alienation, but that effect is confused by all the other things attempted in the sequence: the poetic echoes of childhood (which also echo the child sliding down the hill in “Jules and Jim”) and a general attempt to create a frieze from our national past—a poetry of poverty. by Pauline Kael. Too many people—including some movie reviewers—want the law to take over the job of movie criticism; perhaps what they really want is for their own criticisms to have the force of law. If this way of holding more than one attitude toward life is already familiar to us—if we recognize the make-believe robbers whose toy guns produce real blood, and the Keystone cops who shoot them dead, from Truffaut’s “Shoot the Piano Player” and Godard’s gangster pictures, “Breathless” and “Band of Outsiders”—it’s because the young French directors discovered the poetry of crime in American life (from our movies) and showed the Americans how to put it on the screen in a new, “existential” way. Now Arthur Penn, working with a script heavily influenced—one might almost say inspired—by Truffaut’s “Shoot the Piano Player,” unfortunately imitates Truffaut’s artistry instead of going back to its tough American sources. The movies may set styles in dress or lovemaking, they may advertise cars or beverages, but art is not examples for imitation—that is not what a work of art does for us—though that is what guardians of morality think art is and what they want it to be and why they think a good movie is one that sets “healthy,” “cheerful” examples of behavior, like a giant all-purpose commercial for the American way of life. The editing of this movie is, however, the best editing in an American movie in a long time, and one may assume that Penn deserves credit for it along with the editor, Dede Allen. The material on this site may not be reproduced, distributed, transmitted, cached or otherwise used, except with the prior written permission of Condé Nast. The mother’s slap—the seal of the awareness of horror—says that even children must learn that some things that look funny are not only funny. (They do commit holdups, but only to get gas or groceries or medicine.) But Arthur Penn is not a writer-director like Bergman or Fellini, both of whom began as writers, and who (even though Fellini employs several collaborators) compose their spiritual autobiographies step by step on film. As we hear the lines, we can detect the intentions even when the intentions are not quite carried out. “The last American hero” never goes soft, and maybe that’s why the picture felt so realistic to me; it wasn’t until I reread the Wolfe piece that I realized what a turnaround it was. It is, however, a tribute to his performance that one singles this failure out. In the late forties, there were “They Live by Night,” with Farley Granger and Cathy O’Donnell, and “Gun Crazy,” with John Dall and Peggy Cummins. In interviews, Penn makes high, dull sounds—more like a politician than a movie director. Actors before Brando did not mumble and scratch and show their sweat; dramatists before Tennessee Williams did not make explicit a particular substratum of American erotic fantasy; movie directors before Orson Welles did not dramatize the techniques of filmmaking; directors before Richard Lester did not lay out the whole movie as cleverly as the opening credits; actresses before Marilyn Monroe did not make an asset of their ineptitude by turning faltering misreadings into an appealing style. Strangelove” opened a new movie era. His business sense may have improved his timing. And it is indeed. And at that instant the meaning of Clyde Barrow’s character changes; he’s still a clown, but we’ve become the butt of the joke. In “You Only Live Once,” the outlaws existed in the same present as the audience, and there was (and still is, I’m sure) nothing funny about them; in “Bonnie and Clyde” that audience is in the movie, transformed into the poor people, the Depression people, of legend—with faces and poses out of Dorothea Lange and Walker Evans and “Let Us Now Praise Famous Men.” In 1937, the audience felt sympathy for the fugitives because they weren’t allowed to lead normal lives; in 1967, the “normality” of the Barrow gang and their individual aspirations toward respectability are the craziest things about them—not just because they’re killers but because thirties “normality” is in itself funny to us. A new generation enjoyed seeing the world as insane; they literally learned to stop worrying and love the bomb. And it is indeed. When, during a comically botched-up getaway, a man is shot in the face, the image is obviously based on one of the most famous sequences in Eisenstein’s Potemkin, and the startled face is used the same way it was in Potemkin—to convey in an instant how someone who just happens to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, the irrelevant “innocent” bystander, can get it full in the face. The famous picture of Bonnie in the same clothes but looking ugly squinting into the sun, with a foot on the car, a gun on her hip, and a cigar in her mouth, is obviously a joke—her caricature of herself as a gun moll. In many ways, this method is more effective; we feel the violence more because so much is left to our imaginations. Garbo could be all women in love because, being more beautiful than life, she could more beautifully express emotions. Why should we be deprived of the pleasure of beauty? Double Feature! Penn is a little clumsy and rather too fancy; he’s too much interested in being cinematically creative and artistic to know when to trust the script. Some did champion the movie, including leading voices like Roger Ebert and Pauline Kael. But his girl, Joan (Bonnie)—the only person who believes in him—thinks that an innocent man has nothing to fear. (Imagine anyone getting away from a bank holdup in a tin Lizzie like that!) Would having criminals played by dwarfs or fatties discourage crime? Her attitude toward her mother is too loving. George Lucas’s “Star Wars,” Marguerite Duras’s “Truck,” and Robert M. Young’s “Short Eyes.”. Maybe it’s because Bonnie and Clyde, by making us care about the robber lovers, has put the sting back into death. She was one of the most influential American film critics of her era. Each, in a large way, did something that people had always enjoyed and were often embarrassed or ashamed about enjoying. Still, that woman near me was saying “It’s a comedy” for a little too long, and although this could have been, and probably was, a demonstration of plain old-fashioned insensitivity, it suggests that those who have attuned themselves to the “total” comedy of the last few years may not know when to stop laughing. Only a few years ago, a good director would have suggested the violence obliquely, with reaction shots (like the famous one in “The Golden Coach,” when we see a whole bullfight reflected in Anna Magnani’s face), and death might have been symbolized by a light going out, or stylized, with blood and wounds kept to a minimum. Suddenly, in the last few years, our view of the world has gone beyond “good taste.” Tasteful suggestions of violence would at this point be a more grotesque form of comedy than “Bonnie and Clyde” attempts. He’s in the tradition of the mustachioed heavy who foreclosed mortgages and pursued heroines in turn-of-the-century plays, and this one-dimensional villainy belongs, glaringly, to spoof. ( They Live by Night, produced by John Houseman under the aegis of Dore Schary, and directed by Nicholas Ray, was a very serious and socially significant tragic melodrama, but its attitudes were already dated thirties attitudes: the lovers were very young and pure and frightened and underprivileged; the hardened criminals were sordid; the settings were committedly grim. Penn is far more dependent on the talents of others, and his primary material—what he starts with—does not come out of his own experience. I know this is based on some pretty sneaky psychological suppositions, but I don’t see how else to account for the use only against a good movie of arguments that could be used against almost all movies. But it is in other ways that Penn’s limitations show—in his excessive reliance on meaning-laden closeups, for one. That is to say, they should feel uncomfortable, but this isn’t an argument against the movie. They act too much. The “classic” gangster films showed gang members betraying each other and viciously murdering the renegade who left to join another gang; the gangleader hero no sooner got to the top than he was betrayed by someone he had trusted or someone he had doublecrossed. The romanticism in American movies lies in the cynical tough guy’s independence; the sentimentality lies, traditionally, in the falsified finish when the anti-hero turns hero. But people don’t “buy” what they see in a movie quite so simply; Louis B. Mayer did not turn us into a nation of Andy Hardys, and if, in a film, we set a frightened man wantonly take the life of another, it does not encourage us to do the same, any more than seeing an ivory hunter shoot an elephant makes us want to shoot one. Nevertheless, Penn is a remarkable director when he has something to work with. Beatty’s non-actor’s “bad” timing may he this kind of “genius; ” we seem to he watching him think out his next move. To mark the occasion, a documentary, American Desperadoes: The Story of Bonnie and Clyde (Russell Leven 1999), was released. I resurrect it now on the occasion of the Quad Cinema’s series of films she championed (June 7-20), Losing It at the Movies: Pauline Kael at 100. There’s something new working for the Bonnie-and-Clyde legend now: our nostalgia for the thirties—the unpredictable, contrary affection of the prosperous for poverty, or at least for the artifacts, the tokens, of poverty, for Pop culture seen in the dreariest rural settings, where it truly seems to belong. The history of the movies is being rewritten to disregard facts in favor of celebrating the director as the sole “creative” force. If the popular audience is generally uninterested in the director (unless he is heavily publicized, like de Mille or Hitchcock), the audience that is interested in the art of movies has begun, with many of the critics, to think of movies as a directors’ medium to the point where they tend to ignore the contribution of the writers—and the directors maybe almost obscenely content to omit mention of the writers. It’s the roles that make them seem glamorous. It is a supreme asset for actors and actresses to be beautiful; it gives them greater range and greater possibilities for expressiveness. The joke in the glamour charge is that Faye Dunaway has the magazine-illustration look of countless uninterestingly pretty girls, and Warren Beatty has the kind of high-school good looks that are generally lost fast. Furthman, who has written about half of the most entertaining movies to come out of Hollywood (Ben Hecht wrote most of the other half), isn’t even listed in new encyclopedias of the film. “Bonnie and Clyde” is not a serious melodrama involving us in the plight of the innocent but a movie that assumes—as William Wellman did in 1931 when he made “The Public Enemy,” with James Cagney as a smart, cocky, mean little crook—that we don’t need to pretend we’re interested only in the falsely accused, as if real criminals had no connection with us. Eddie (Clyde) is a three-time loser who wants to work for a living, but nobody will give him chance. In contrast, the Barrow gang represent family-style crime. The end of the picture, the rag-doll dance of death as the gun blasts keep the bodies of Bonnie and Clyde in motion, is brilliant. There wouldn’t be the popular excitement there is about outlaws if we didn’t all suspect that—in some cases, at least—gangsters must take pleasure in the profits and glory of a life of crime. Dr. Strangelove opened a new movie era. It is a horror that seems to go on for eternity, and yet it doesn’t last a second beyond what it should. One can read Josef von Sternberg’s autobiography and the text of the latest books on his movies without ever finding the name of Jules Furthman, the writer who worked on nine of his most famous movies (including “Morocco” and “Shanghai Express”). The attempt to make the Texas Ranger an old-time villain doesn’t work. Too many people—including some movie reviewers—want the law to take over the job of movie criticism; perhaps what they really want is for their own criticisms to have the force of law. Twenty-five years later, Francis Ford Coppola thinks it’s a mixed blessing. Being frustrated and moody, she’s not funny enough—neither ordinary, which, in the circumstances, would be comic, nor perverse, which might be rather funny, too. But we are too conscious of the technical means used to achieve this blur, of the attempt at poetry. But he has a gift for violence, and, despite all the violence in movies, a gift for it is rare. In contrast with secret criminals—the furtive embezzlers and other crooks who lead seemingly honest lives—the known outlaws capture the public imagination, because they take chances, and because, often, they enjoy dramatizing their lives. It concludes: That they did capture the public imagination is evidenced by the many movies based on their lives. It may seem like a minor point that Bonnie and Clyde are presented as not mean and sadistic, as having killed only when cornered; but in terms of legend, and particularly movie legend, it’s a major one. Yet when it comes to movies people get nervous about acknowledging that there must be some fun in crime (though the gleam in Cagney’s eye told its own story). The solid intelligence of the writing and Penn’s aura of sensitivity help “Bonnie and Clyde” triumph over many poorly directed scenes: Bonnie posing for the photograph with the Texas Ranger, or—the worst sequence—the Ranger getting information out of Blanche Barrow in the hospital. When I asked a nineteen-year-old boy who was raging against the movie as “a cliché-ridden fraud” if he got so worked up about other movies, he informed me that that was an argument ad hominem. In the past, directors used to say that they were no better than their material. Such people see Bonnie and Clyde as a danger to public morality; they think an audience goes to a play or a movie and takes the actions in it as examples for imitation. We garble our foreign words and phrases and hope that at least we’ve used them right. They’re young… they’re in love… and they kill people. I know this is based on some pretty sneaky psychological suppositions, but I don’t see how else to account for the use only against a good movie of arguments that could be used against almost all movies. Melodramas and gangster movies and comedies were always more our speed than “prestigious,” “distinguished” pictures; the French directors who grew up on American pictures found poetry in our fast action, laconic speech, plain gestures. That they did capture the public imagination is evidenced by the many movies based on their lives. (I think he was also right when he showed violence in his first film, “The Left Handed Gun,” in 1958.) But the whole point of “Bonnie and Clyde” is to rub our noses in it, to make us pay our dues for laughing. What looks ludicrous in this movie isn’t merely ludicrous, and after we have laughed at ignorance and helplessness and emptiness and stupidity and idiotic deviltry, the laughs keep sticking in our throats, because what’s funny isn’t only funny. From her rave of "Bonnie and Clyde" to her dismissal of "Chloe in the Afternoon," here are choice quotes from some of Kael's best reviews. Anyone who goes to big American movies like “Grand Prix” and “The Sand Pebbles” recognizes that movies with scripts like those don’t have a chance to be anything more than exercises in technology, and that this is what is meant by the decadence of American movies. To the law a relief— The issue is always with us, and will always be with us as long as artists find stimulus in historical figures and want to present their versions of them. Our heroes pick up the wrong fork, and the basic figure of fun in the American theatre and American movies is the man who puts on airs. 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Melodrama is called point Blank, and, despite all the violence in movies, a tribute to performance! Banality and conventionality of that fun knows it ’ s eyes—that didn ’ t fit the clean-cut juvenile roles banality. His performance that one singles this failure out that people had always enjoyed were. Men who do what the character isn ’ t comedy since 1964 and “ Dr they ’... Right when he has a gift for it is something that movies must be funny “...

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