Bonnie and Clyde

Released 1967
Stars Warren Beatty, Faye Dunaway, Michael J. Pollard, Gene Hackman, Estelle Parsons, Gene Wilder
Directed by Arthur Penn

The opening scenes are lighthearted, starting with Clyde's bravado after Bonnie catches him trying to steal her mother's car. She senses in him, instantly, the means of her escape from a boring west Texas town. What he essentially supplies--for her, for the hero-worshipping gang member C.W. Moss (Pollard) and for the hungry newspaper readers--is the possibility of glamour in lives of drab poverty. "We're the Barrow Gang," Clyde says, introducing them at the beginning of a bank robbery so they'll be sure to get credit.

"Bonnie and Clyde," made in 1967, was called "the first modern American film" by critic Patrick Goldstein, in an essay on its 30th anniversary. Certainly it felt like that at the time. The movie opened like a slap in the face. American filmgoers had never seen anything like it. In tone and freedom it descended from the French new wave.

The legend of the film's production has become almost as famous as its heroes. Stories are told about how Beatty knelt at the feet of studio boss Jack Warner, begging for the right to make the film. How Warner saw the original cut and hated it. How the movie premiered at the Montreal film festival, and was roasted by Bosley Crowther of the New York Times. How Warner Bros. determined to dump it in a chain of Texas drive-ins, and how Beatty implored the studio to give it a chance. How it opened and quickly closed in the autumn of 1967, panned by the critics, receiving only one ecstatic opening-day newspaper review. (Modesty be damned: It was my own, calling it "a milestone in the history of American movies, a work of truth and brilliance" and predicting "years from now it is quite possible that Bonnie and Clyde will be seen as the definitive film of the 1960s.")

Summary by Roger Ebert