They rob banks

Tonight's Wednesday Night at the Movies open thread on Bonnie and Clyde is now open right HERE!

Rick Perlstein, author of Nixonland, has joined the discussion from a bar on the North Side of Chicago.

Comments

[sfmike]

Just read the thread over at New Critics, decided not to register anywhere new, but did want to say, there were basically two extremely revolutionary films made in the 1960s: "Bonnie and Clyde" and "The Battle of Algiers," both of which are standing the test of time quite brilliantly.

They both used the entire history of film up until that moment in their own ways. In "Bonnie and Clyde," it's "They Drive By Night, "Grapes of Wrath" and every Warner Brothers gangster movie ever made, except there was an extremely subversive difference. We were meant to be horrified by these criminal's ultra-violent deaths, and we were. Nothing had ever been seen quite like this, the sheer brutality of shooting up people full of lead with blood flying everywhere. It's a Hollywood staple now, but it was, strangely, new then. And for all the commenters who remarked that Faye Dunaway was "mannered" or "acting-out," she was the real reason the film became transscendent. This was a nobody becoming a goddess right in front of our cinematic eyes, in a specifically thirties movie star way, and the impact of that performance mixed in with the subversiveness of the direction and the screenplay can hardly be described. What's strangest for me now is that when the movie came out, the Depression felt like a century ago in terms of real time, but it was only 35 years previous, a simple generation earlier.