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Posted: |
Oct 16, 2017 - 12:20 AM
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By: |
Bob DiMucci
(Member)
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BONNIE AND CLYDE, which opened the 1967 Montreal Film Festival, became one of the most hotly debated films of its time. Following Bosley Crowther’s two negative reviews in The New York Times (Montreal and N.Y.C.), the next three Sunday editions of the Times printed numerous pro and con reactions from its readers, plus two additional pieces by Crowther. Variety devoted two full pages to the “brouhaha” (August 30, 1967). Hollis Alpert discussed both the picture and Mr. Crowther in a full page Saturday Review article (September 23rd), and Newsweek critic Joseph Morgenstern reappraised the film and changed his initial pan to a highly favorable review (August 28th).
Some review excerpts:
“[BONNIE AND CLYDE] is a cheap piece of baldfaced slapstick comedy that treats the hideous depredations of the sleazy moronic pair as though they were as full of fun and frolic as the jazz age cut-ups in THOROUGHLY MODERN MILLIE. … Such ridiculous, camp-tinctured travesties of the kind of people these desperados were and of the way people lived in the dusty Southwest back in those barren years might be passed off as candidly commercial movie comedy, nothing more, if the film weren't reddened with blotches of violence of the most grisly sort. … The blending of farce and brutal killings is as pointless as it is lacking in taste, since it makes no valid commentary upon the already travestied truth. And it leaves an astonished critic wondering just what purpose Mr. Penn and Mr. Beatty think they serve with this strangely antique, sentimental claptrap.”
Bosley Crowther, The New York Times, (8/14/67)
“With BONNIE AND CYDE, Warren Beatty and Arthur Penn firmly establish themselves as one of the most excitingly creative teams in American moviemaking. In their second joint effort (their first, MICKEY ONE, is still a bit ahead of its audience), the young producer-actor and his director have dealt with an American folk legend in almost ballad form and triumphed. … Naturalism—in characters and background—is the mark of this film in its technical perfections. Saturated in time and place, we are left with the universality of the theme and its particular contemporary relevance. And this is the triumph of BONNIE AND CLYDE.”
Judith Crist, Vogue, (9/15/67)
“BONNIE AND CLYDE incongruously couples comedy with crime. Conceptually, the film leaves much to be desired, because killings and the backdrop of the Depression are scarcely material for a bundle of laughs. … It’s a picture with conflicting moods, racing from crime to comedy, and intermingling genuinely moving love scenes between Faye Dunaway as Bonnie and Warren Beatty as Clyde. These are sensitive and well executed scenes, yet made all the more incongruous against the almost slapstick approach of much of the picture. … This inconsistency of direction is the most obvious fault of BONNIE AND CLUDE, which has some good ingredients, although they are not meshed together well. … Arthur Penn’s direction is uneven, at times catching a brooding, arresting quality, but often changing pace at a tempo that is jarring.”
“Daku”, Variety, (8/9/67)
“Producer Beatty and director Arthur Penn have elected to tell their tale of bullets and blood in a strange and purposeless mingling of fact and claptrap that teeters uneasily on the brink of burlesque. Like Bonnie and Clyde themselves, the film rides off in all directions and ends up full of holes. … The real fault with BONNIE AND CLYDE is its sheer, tasteless aimlessness. … Repeated bursts of country-style music punctuating the bandits’ grisly ventures and a sentimental interlude with Bonnie’s old Maw photographed through a hazy filter, aim at irony and miss by a mile. And this, if you please, was the U.S. entry in this year’s Montreal Film Festival.”
Time, (8/25/67)
"BONNIE AND CLYDE is a milestone in the history of American movies, a work of truth and brilliance. It is also pitilessly cruel, filled with sympathy, nauseating, funny, heartbreaking, and astonishingly beautiful. If it does not seem that those words should be strung together, perhaps that is because movies do not very often reflect the full range of human life. … This is pretty clearly the best American film of the year. It is also a landmark. Years from now it is quite possible that BONNIE AND CLYDE will be seen as the definitive film of the 1960s, showing with sadness, humor and unforgiving detail what one society had come to. The fact that the story is set 35 years ago doesn't mean a thing. It had to be set sometime. But it was made now and it's about us.
Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times, (9/25/67)
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Posted: |
Oct 16, 2017 - 5:36 AM
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By: |
Rameau
(Member)
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A classic & it still works a treat, of course as history it's bunk, but if you want history, read a book, all films stray away from the facts. An interesting note, Buck was shot dead & Blanche was captured, & in the film it looks like she's blind, with the dressing on her eyes as she's questioned in the cell, but...she was only blind in one eye & was paroled after only six years, I think she was only 58 when the film was released...I wonder if she went & saw it?
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Thanks Bob for posting those review excerpts and the information concerning this film's release. I enjoyed reading those immensely.
I saw Bonnie and Clyde when it was first released theatrically (I was 12 years old), and was exhilarated. Subsequently, I returned several times to that same theatre in Hollywood and was again unaccompanied by an adult, surprised to be able to see it repeatedly on my own. Even though my prior film viewing experience was extremely limited, I could tell even then that this was a whole new, more personal approach to cinematic storytelling. And not just for the film's violent content and shifts of tone, but for its radically unconventional cinematic narrative. Those older films I was feverishly consuming on television normally emphasised their moral boundaries even if their characters acted outside them. These earlier movies took pains to explain why their characters behaved the way they did, even the gangster films made earlier whose stories shared the same time period. Bonnie and Clyde threw away all that exposition. This was about the "here and now", a bold re-invention of, and focus on, what was happening, rather than "why". Those cinema enthusiasts there to witness the change, were thunderstruck by its filmmakers' new "devil may care" language, even those who, unlike myself, "didn't approve". I only found out later how influenced by Godard's cinéma-vérité style the film was, but I suspected even as a kid, this rebellious and visceral type of storytelling was as "breathless" as anything (including Godard's film), that had come before, or would later for a long time.
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