"Bonnie And Clyde", without question, falls into the frresher-than-ever category......50 years ago, it astounded audiences, confounded and flummoxed old school movie critics and earned nothing but contempt from its studio's mogul, Jack Warner......
50 years later, it's still an iconic landmark in American cinema........and it's still more finely put together than a whole slew of recently acclaimed films we've sat through....
As they often yell at the start of concerts.....put your hands together for a few of movie's MVPs......
Faye Dunaway Take a glance at her when she's silent in scenes that showcase the other cast members......you can spot Bonnie Parker's seething anger and restless impatience.....an unsettled, unhappy soul.....(and not just from Clyde's impotence either).....A brilliant, electric performance.....
Dede Allen The film's masterful film editor.......whose signature dynamic assembly of images was as recognizable a style as any lauded movie director's..... (decades later, Allen would perform the amazing feat of taking countless hours of director John Hughes footage and turning it into "The Breakfast Club")
Burnett Guffey The film's veteran Director of Photography/////amd yes, certainly an unlikely creative participant in a movie so defiantly un-Hollywood. Guffey and director Arthur Penn famously clashed throughout the making of the film.......(Guffey favored sharp, bright Technicolor, Penn wanted darker, moodier imagery) Guffey's visuals prevailed, with the one exception of Bonnie's family reunion sequence, deliberately shot in a gauzy, nostalgic haze. The overall slickness and sheen of Guffey's camerawork may have led, in the BQ's humble opinion, to the ability of film to take everyone by surprise........it looked like standard, high gloss Warner Brothers product.....until you started watching it and realized it was something far more....
"We rob banks....".. We couldn't help but shake our head and smile at the continued, immediate timelessness of this sequence.......50 years later, we're as much a nation fiercely divided between the Haves and Have-Nots as the wounded, Depression era America depicted in the film. In 2017, we live in a society where Wells Fargo's criminality far exceeds the Barrows gang's........
Arthur Penn Producer-star Warren Beatty first courted French New Wave directors to take the reigns of "Bonnie And Clyde"......but in Penn, he got the best of both worlds......the nervous, edgy energy of the new European filmmaking married to the high theatrics and precision craft of American studio cinema......
This film's excellence makes its anniversary date superfluous to us........in any decade, it remains forever and alwaysa 5 star (*****) FIND OF FINDS......
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