In an interview with Reason magazine to promote his 2008 Nixonland book, Rick Perlstein, the left-wing author and JournoList member, said: “My theory is that Bonnie and Clyde was the most important text of the New Left”:
Reason: You like to mix cultural history with political history. Bonnie and Clyde is one of the central texts in the book.
Perlstein: My theory is that Bonnie and Clyde was the most important text of the New Left, much more important than anything written by Paul Goodman or C. Wright Mills or Regis Debray. It made an argument about vitality and virtue vs. staidness and morality that was completely new, that resonated with young people in a way that made no sense to old people. Just the idea that the outlaws were the good guys and the bourgeois householders were the bad guys—you cannot underestimate [sic] how strange and fresh that was.
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And of course, the rest of us have been forced to live with Radical Chic and its aftermath ever since.
But at the New York Times, the passing of Bonnie & Clyde director Arthur Penn is yet another opportunity to let the boomer hagiography commence!
A pioneering director of live television drama in the 1950s and a Broadway powerhouse in the 1960s, Mr. Penn developed an intimate, spontaneous and physically oriented method of directing actors that allowed their work to register across a range of mediums.In 1957, he directed William Gibson’s television play “The Miracle Worker” for the CBS series “Playhouse 90” and earned Emmy nominations for himself, his writer and his star, Teresa Wright. In 1959, he restaged “The Miracle Worker” for Broadway and won Tony Awards for himself, his writer and his star, Anne Bancroft. And in 1962, he directed the film version of Mr. Gibson’s text, which won the best actress Oscar for Bancroft and the best supporting actress Oscar for her co-star, Patty Duke, as well as earning nominations for writing and directing.
Mr. Penn’s direction may also have changed the course of American history. He advised Senator John F. Kennedy during his watershed television debates with Richard M. Nixon in 1960 (and directed the broadcast of the third debate). Mr. Penn’s instructions to Kennedy — to look directly into the lens of the camera and keep his responses brief and pithy — helped give the candidate an aura of confidence and calm that created a vivid contrast to his more experienced but less telegenic Republican rival.
…Or maybe it didn’t, as W. Joseph Campbell writes at his Media Myth Alert Website, in a must-read post titled “Indulging in myth on debate’s 50th anniversary.”
But back to the portion of the Times’ obit of Penn that focuses on his 1960s directorial efforts, which did transform Hollywood — not entirely for the better — in the 1970s:
“Arthur Penn brought the sensibility of ’60s European art films to American movies,” the writer-director Paul Schrader said. “He paved the way for the new generation of American directors who came out of film schools.”
Many of the now-classic films of what was branded the “New American Cinema” of the 1970s — including “Taxi Driver,” directed by Martin Scorsese and written by Mr. Schrader, and “The Godfather,” directed by Francis Ford Coppola — would have been unthinkable without “Bonnie and Clyde” to point the way.
Loosely based on the story of two minor gangsters of the 1930s, Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow, “Bonnie and Clyde” had been conceived by its two novice screenwriters, Robert Benton and David Newman, as an homage to the rebellious sensibility and disruptive style of French New Wave films like François Truffaut’s “Shoot the Piano Player” and Jean-Luc Godard’s “Breathless.”
In Mr. Penn’s hands, it became something even more dangerous and innovative — a sympathetic portrait of two barely articulate criminals, played by Mr. Beatty and a newcomer, Faye Dunaway, that disconcertingly mixed sex, violence and hayseed comedy, set to a bouncy bluegrass score by Lester Flatt and Earl Scruggs. Not only was the film sexually explicit in ways unseen in Hollywood since the imposition of the Production Code in 1934 — when Bonnie stroked Clyde’s gun, the symbolism was unmistakable — it was violent in ways that had never been seen before. Audiences gasped when a comic bank robbery climaxed with Clyde’s shooting a bank teller in the face with a shotgun, and were stunned when this attractive outlaw couple died in a torrent of bullets, their bodies twitching in slow motion as their clothes turned red with blood.
Reporting on the film’s premiere on the opening night of the Montreal Film Festival in 1967, Bosley Crowther, the chief film critic for The New York Times, was appalled, describing “Bonnie and Clyde” as “callous and callow” and “slap-happy color film charade.” Worse, the public seemed to love it. “Just to show how delirious these festival audiences can be,” Mr. Crowther wrote, “it was wildly received with gales of laughter and given a terminal burst of applause.”
Similar reactions by other major critics followed when the film opened in the United States a few weeks later. The film, promoted by Warner Brothers with the memorable tag line, “They’re young. They’re in love. They kill people,” floundered at first but soon found an enthusiastic audience among younger filmgoers and won the support of a new generation of critics. “A milestone in the history of American movies,” wrote Roger Ebert in The Chicago Sun Times. Pauline Kael, writing her first review for The New Yorker, described it as an “excitingly American movie,” although she disliked Ms. Dunaway’s performance.
“Bonnie and Clyde” was nominated for 10 Oscars but won only two (for Burnett Guffey’s cinematography and Estelle Parson’s supporting performance), reflecting the Hollywood establishment’s ambivalence over a film that seemed to point the way out of the creative paralysis that had set in after the end of the studio system while betraying all the values — good taste and moral clarity — the studios held most dear.
But by the late 1960s, the studios were in a double-blind trap: they believed that they could feel audience sensibilities changing, but the replacement of the Hays Office and its Production Code with the much more wide-open G-PG-R-X ratings system was disastrous for Hollywood’s bottom line, as Michael Medved noted in the Wall Street Journal back in 2004, when Jack Valenti retired as president of the Motion Picture Association of America:
Hollywood originally panicked that television would destroy its business by offering for free the sort of entertainment that cost money at the local Bijou, but during the fateful 10 years of the primary TV invasion (1950-60) the audience actually declined 34%, compared with a 60% decline in those nightmarish four years of the late ’60s. In later decades, the arrival of the VCR, cable TV and DVD actually corresponded to modest increases in the motion-picture audience, so no theory centered on technological alternatives can solve the mystery of the missing moviegoers.
* * *
So what happened 38 years ago to drive millions of Americans away from movie theaters? In 1966, Mr. Valenti’s Motion Picture Association of America quietly dropped its enforcement of the restrictive old Production Code that Hollywood studios had imposed on themselves since 1930. Then, on Nov. 1, 1968, Mr. Valenti introduced the “voluntary rating system” that continues in force to this day. As he proudly declared in his farewell address to the industry on March 23 of this year: “The rating system freed the screen, allowing movie-makers to tell their stories as they choose to tell them.” That new freedom allowed the profligate use of obscene language strictly banned under the Production Code, the inclusion of graphic sex scenes along with near total nudity and, more vivid, sadistic violence than previously permitted in Hollywood movies.
The resulting changes in the industry showed up with startling clarity at the Academy Awards. In 1965, with the Production Code still in force, “The Sound of Music” won Best Picture of the Year; in 1969, under the new rating system, an X-rated offering about a homeless male hustler, “Midnight Cowboy,” earned the Oscar as the year’s finest film. Most critics, then as now, welcomed the aesthetic shift and hailed the fresh latitude in cinematic expression, but the audience voted with its feet.
And for a time, it seemed like the only thing Hollywood knew how to do was to make dank, depressing films in which everybody dies at the end. (Happily so at times, as P.J. O’Rourke’s old joke about Easy Rider goes.)
Ed Driscoll wrote “And you cannot underestimate how exhausted and utterly predictable it’s become.”
Shouldn’t that be “overestimate?”
Aside from that one nitpick, I really love reading your posts. I regularly archive binge, going back to Rathergate and beyond. My favorite time-killer.
Yes, that’s why the mistaken word choice is followed by [sic], a literary device that derived from the Latin ‘thus, so’. You don’t correct a mistake like that quoting someone, but you can mark it by this handy tool that conveys that the error was intentional.
I was referring to, and indeed quoted, the last line of the post. Which Ed has since corrected.
Oops, sorry ’bout that!
It’s all right. I completely missed that it was a callback to the earlier quote!
Now I’m wondering if that “[sic]” (with an excellent link) was added along with the correction.
Power to the proofreaders!
It can be argued (Ed. You’re arguing it. LoTM Shaddup.) that the single most destructive ruling of the SCOTUS in the 20th Century was United States v. Paramount Pictures, Inc., 334 US 131 (1948) that broke up the studio system. It did to American culture and a major American industry what the Battle of the Somme did to the culture of England. Roe v Wade may have more blood on it’s legacy than anything since Dred Scott but it probably did less damage to as many people.
Ed, I just wanted to say that I love your critiques of the film industry. As a movie lover, it gets depressing watching the absurd lack of merit worsen as the years go by. You articulate this decline superbly and I applaud you for it.
The problem was, that Studios could make money selling stuff that had little appeal, and stuff done decades earlier, to television. And then to audiences via Video cassettes, and then DVDs. All at premium prices.
So Hollywood had little financial incentive, to make money off of theatrical film releases. Since there was little money, relatively, coming in from box office, why not indulge one’s self? And that’s just what Hollywood did (the power of incentives again).
Now Hollywood is trapped. There is no Spielberg or Lucas to rescue them. Not even John Lassetter can do it. Lassetter’s films at Pixar have made 100 times more than Tarantino’s, but because the studios are built on edge/buzz and not money from box office, the former has no real sway and the latter considerable. Now of course, DVD, TV, foreign, and every other revenue is falling dramatically. All that makes money is kids movies in animated form, and about 60% of the money actually comes from toys/merchandise.
The problem is not just a decline in taste. It is the inability of two to three generations of movie makers to even understand ordinary people, much less deliver what they want. Where is the money? The money is in the numbers. The numbers of people willing to pay reasonable amounts of money for entertainment that makes them feel good and want more of it. Hollywood cannot produce that. Meanwhile it cannot charge premium prices for “edgy/hip” stuff it CAN make, and its cash cows (TV rights, DVD, foreign sales) are in the toilet.
Bonnie and Clyde, apart from capturing the angst of the Viet Nam/baby boomer generation, had some of the finest actors in Hollywood appearing in it, and had a wonderful musical score I can still play in my head. It was thus a finely written and acted movie, with great music, produced at a significant point in American history, about a young, violent, and nihilistic couple who are executed by the authorities. In some ways the Kent State killings which came later could be said to have confirmed the Viet Nam generation’s all to frequently expressed fears of “The Man”, that is the government, and the government’s propensity to use violence. Bonnie and Clyde, as well as Easy Rider, also successfully played on this fear.
Who is “Arthur Hitchcock”?
“Bonnie and Clyde” was nominated for 10 Oscars but won only two (for Burnett Guffey’s cinematography and Estelle Parson’s supporting performance), reflecting the Hollywood establishment’s ambivalence over a film that seemed to point the way out of the creative paralysis that had set in after the end of the studio system while betraying all the values — good taste and moral clarity — the studios held most dear.”
Yes, the studios abandoned movies with good taste and moral clarity and gave us ultra-violent movies with no heroes that any decent kid should emulate. Yes, we got more “realism,” sex, bad language, violence, and really seedy characters in the movies in the late 1960s, if that’s your taste, and abandoned all of the people we expected out of movies when we were kids in the “Baby Boom” generation. Out with John Wayne, in with psychotic killers by Quentin Tarantino. Out with the Jimmy Stewarts or Gary Coopers, in with the Jack Nicholsons or Samuel L. Jacksons. Out with Gone with the Wind or Casablanca, in with pathetic fantasies like Avatar. And this is progress?
I’ll take the movies on Turner Classic Movies any day.
RickA – Tongue in cheek I’d thought the same thing.
I still don’t understand the romanticism betrothed to the Bonnie & Clyde movie. Ms. Dunaway’s performance was lacking, and Warren Beatty, not a great actor nor admirable, hadn’t produced a decent, memorable role until the campy mid-late 70′s – JMO.
The late Pauline Kael stated movie audiences of the 60′s ‘..are going beyond good taste’ – is but another explanation of ‘dumbing down’ the messages exuded/portrayed in movies occurring and now incorporated 100 fold.
Imagination, ebb and flow and the nuances of great film has been replaced with CGI, mostly mediocre actors and ‘fun’ movies.
Gone are ‘A Streetcar Named Desire’ ‘Raging Bull’ type performances. replaced with ‘The Social Network’ ‘The Town’ ‘Easy A’ and other tripe.
In his hilarious riff on abstract expressionism, “The Painted Word”, Tom Wolfe devatatingly portrayed the pose of the “transgressive” artist in fields such as painting and sculpture. Wolfe observed that with the rise of “the artist” as a class in the 19th Century, their over-arching goal was to “shock the bourgeoisie.” The technical merit of a work matters less than its ability to make the middle-class squirm and demonstrate how much the artist despises middle-class values. The theoretical and political justification for the work (always leftist in nature) is in reality much more important than the work itself. The end product has been the “public art” funded by our friends at the National Endowment for the Arts.
It took the film industry a while to catch up but they did with a vengeance in the late 1960′s. In a way it was an impressive accomplishment to go from “The Sound of Music” in 1965 to “Midnight Cowboy” in 1969. “Bonnie and Clyde” begat “Easy Rider” which begat “The Graduate” which begat the scores of motion pictures ever since where actors, writers and directors endlessly lecture us on what morons we are. Fortunately, the internet and the rise of truly alternative media is starting to break stranglehold that “progressives” like Warren Beatty and Robert Redford have exerted for the last forty years.
BTW – In all the praise lavished on Arthur Penn for “Bonnie and Clyde” I haven’t seen a word about “The Chase”, one of the most hilarious big-gudget stinkers of all time and which Penn directed in 1966. A truly epic awful movie, “The Chase” starred Marlon Brando, Robert Redford, Jane Fonda, Robert Duvall, and E.G. Marshall written as southern-fried stereotypes by none other than Lillian Hellman. The film is so bad its hypnotic. When I think of Arthur Penn I always think of “The Chase.”
The trend of Hollywood making films no one wants to see has accelerated.
My 22 old son a movie fan like myself, were recently talking. We werre going decade by decade discussing what films were not only enjoyable but also had cultural significance and artistic merit. Each decade we agreed had an extended list of films that met this critertia. We started with the 30′s and as we approached current times the lists for each decade became shorter. Since 2000 the only films we felt met the standard was the Lord of the Rings trilogy.
Help me out, did we miss any?
Eh. It was the score. Earl Scruggs is a flipping sooper genius!
Rather than “Bonnie and Clyde”, I believe wholeheartedly that Sergio Leone’s spaghetti westerns (“The Man With No Name”, “The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly”, among others) actually introduced gratuitous violence — violence portrayed for no other reason than to portray violence — to American movies. They preceded “Bonnie and Clyde”, and since westerns had always been a staple of Hollywood up to that time, they were widely accepted and watched. Dirty, seedy characters in raggedy clothes populated those movies, instead of Beautiful People like Beatty and Dunaway. There were no heroes at all, just guys who were a little less bad than the bad guys. In fact, I believe it was spaghetti westerns that pretty much killed off the western movie.
Sam Peckinpah started the trend. Leone followed.
As I’ve said many times, if you want to shock audiences these days, you have to make a serious movie about an honest and cheerful cop, a patriotic secret agent at an agency full of same, or a happy marriage with well-adjusted kids. And the critics will murder you for living in a fantasy world.
Regarding the bleakness of the “pre-Star Wars 1970′s:”
Actually, it was not “Star Wars”(1977) that broke the spell, but “Rocky” (1976.)
I remember what a breath of fresh air that movie was at the time and how even those of us who considered ourselves oh-so-sophisticated couldn’t help but like it.
I remember old timers like Bette Davis and Jimmy Stewart on talk shows expressing their joy that someone had made a good, dramatic movie “like they used to.”
I also remember being shocked that it (deservedly) won the Oscar. By the standards of the moment, it was not ‘serious art,’ and many of my artsy friends were deliciously outraged.
“Mary Poppins” is what really destroyed the generation. Millions of kids saw it multiple times and their lives were ruined FOREVER! “Just a Spoonful of Sugar” BARBITURATES! “Feed the Birds” SOCIALISM!!!! “Sister Suffragette” RADICAL FEMINISM!!! “I Love to Laugh” POT!!!! “Supercali…(well, you know)” LSD!!!!! “Fidelity Fiduciary Bank” BANKERS ARE EVIL!!!! “Let’s Go Fly a Kite” SLOTH AND SLOVENLINESS!!!!
In the beginning of the film Bert should’ve just b*tch-slapped that little hussy back to wherever she came from. We would’ve all been better off.
Thanks for this, Ed!
While one ‘Rocky’ or Lord Of The Rings or Incredibles may outweigh everything by Tarentino and company, the cynical anti-heroic movies are critically acclaimed. Strangely, I’ve found too many recent movies (a) rehashes, (b) obvious political sermonizing, or (c) leaving you feel like you need a shower & mindwash afterwards.
When my wife & kids & I can rewrite plots and characters and dialogue to make a better movie than we just watched, there’s something terribly wrong with Hollywood. Equally, with people like George Lucas or James Cameron or even the past-master Stephen Spielberg producing uninteresting heroes and depicting shallow good and evil, who is now capable of making truly great movies, and books/ sceenplays worth translating to film?
Pixar has done so well because they make stories about relatable characters and– dare we say it– themes of real good and evil. The Toy Story series abides– and 3 was best of the crop! How pleasantly surprising.
It’s like most of Hollywood has been overrun with zombies, who can only feed on and regurgitate their own rotting brains.
Sometimes I think being panned by the critics is a badge of honor. Do w really care what they think?
DonB71inWA – As for recommended movies the last 10 or so years – that’s tough!
Pixar and related type movies (Up, Toy Story 3..) are most impressive. Others are foreign films.
I found myself prior to NetFlix and like-minded companies sprouting up I ONLY checked out movies from Blockbuster’s Foreign Film/Sundance movies section.
I can’t think of a whole lot more than that.
When ‘Bonnie and Clyde’ was released, a surviving member
of the Barrow Gang was asked if it had really been that way,
to which he replied:
“There weren’t nothing real in the movie but the killing,
and that was so real that it hurt.”
“Bonnie and Clyde” was little more than a big-money production of the ’50′s grindhouse noir classic “Gun Crazy,” with period costumes and bigtime production values.
Coppola was grossly overrated from the start—and should have been seen for the empty sack he was when he took forever to make “Apocalypse Now.” Spielberg and Lucas, too, owe their success to stripmining snippets, scenes, and the most hackneyed plots from earlier films; the opening sequence of “Raiders,” for instance, owes much to the Gable film “Too Hot to Handle.”
What “Bonnie and Clyde” did was what the Sixties as a whole did; it made the grindhouse worldview, and grindhouse morality, the default setting for the society at large.
As someone who was 13 when “Bonnie and Clyde” came out and who was in the thick of the generational change that came about in America entertainment media at the time, I think it is difficult to argue that audiences voted with their feet. In fact, TV and Hollywood gave off a reflection of what the public wanted which was more realism or should I say, verisimilitude. While I agree that “Bonnie and Clyde” was a game changer it was only one example of what was beginning to inundate American culture at the time and that was a wholesale rejection of American values spurred by drug addled loners writing books like “On the Road” in the 50s which readers mistakenly believed called into question mainstream America but without ever once providing any answers to the decades before the 1960′s which have fallen into ever more disrepute. From fine art photography to literature to music, anything before the mid-60s came to be reviled and that is still true to this day as the story of America is hated by more misguided politically correct Americans than ever before. Rushing to the future can create a disconnect with the pass that can prove unbridgeable because it is that ‘hated’ past that made this country the greatest in the world. Unfortunately, the new generation which points their noses up at their forefathers, is a bigger group of staid rednecks than ever actually existed in the mythical Ozarks.
Well, how’s about re-booting how movies are sold? First off, the trailer? Can the trailer please tell me that there’s only mild profanity, or none? Can the trailer tell me if the characters are morally okay- as in, in love with their spouse? Patriotic? Struggling with right and wrong? Having a good conversation? I read in reviews that Valkyrie was duller than dry toast. Another mother at the park loaned me her copy, as we are rabid Tom Cruise fans. I would have happily paid to see it on the big screen- we could have taken the kids. Awesome forties special effects, a good guy, an interesting plot, a story about heroism and good choices. The director talked about how they cut a scene of him dancing with his wife- that would have taken it from wooden documentary, to a story about a passionate, fulfilled in private life, man with a wife who understands him. Those three minutes cost—date night perfection—We could have taken the kids. I’ve learned to not trust critics, at all, now. They want a different experience.
Second, can that trailer find me? I’m a housewife watching kids cartoons. I want movies I can see with my kids, and it doesn’t have to be a movie about how the kids down the street have so much cooler of a life- spying, or being in a large group, or at summer camp. we’ll take indy and anakin and anything by pixar.I’d love to see other sensibilities. I’d love to see a movie ad that I can tell my husband- we have to go see this, together. He saw ads for “Despicable Me” and “Dinner with Schmucks” and had that feeling. I have no idea if the movies are good, but they might be. I know the kids can see despicable me. I’ll get to say hi to the voices of actors we like- that counts. I watched Muppet Treasure Island just to watch Tim Curry chew scenery- I can’t watch Rocky Horror in front of the kids.
Third, is it possible for movie theatres to offer a grownup ticket with a free youth ticket? It cost around $100 for our family of five- two adults, two children and an infant, with sodas and popcorn, to go see the last Indiana Jones movie. The year the baby was born, sposo took the boys to see the last star wars. Then he took me and the baby and the kids. And that was, quite literally, our entire entertainment budget for the summer- blown on two movies. Unreal.
And, movies with characters trying to figure out the right thing, and then do it, are completely fascinating, right now, just because they are so rare. Knocked Up, 40Yo Virgin, Juno–at the end, they matter b/c the characters do the right thing.
Best advice I can offer is to make movie-watching an event in your own home. Use paper bags to make popcorn cheaply and conveniently. Buy cheap soda and popcorn. Rent (or better yet, borrow) a movie that’s well recommended.
Set a time to watch it. Make everyone prep for it. Turn down the lights. That makes a large difference in the moviegoing experience. The movie will look better with less distraction.
You can even do this with a broadcast movie. Networks used to do this with “Friday Night at the Movies” features.
(I remember my mother taking us to the drive-in on “Carload” night. One cost for the whole family. Station wagon with pillows and blankets to watch a Planet of the Apes triple feature. Brought our own drinks, too.)
Europe has been down this road before us. Before the French Revolution, there was top down mockery by the aristocracy (e.g., Moliere). After the Revolution, it was the new ruling class – the bureaucrats and intelligentsia – who disdained the bourgeoisie (Celine Houellebecq and everyone between, before, and after). Even Impressionism and Cubism used the productive members of society as their foil. Unlike Europe, many middle-brow, middle class Americans don’t feel the need to suck up to their soi-disant betters, maintaining a market for wholesome culture.
“In fact, I believe it was spaghetti westerns that pretty much killed off the western movie.”
Leone was a huge John Ford fan (he had whole films memorized) and was not trying to make purposely “subversive” films. He was basically applying the sensibilities of 60′s European cinema to a genre he loved, and which was already becoming moribund because of what he called the rise of “psychological westerns.” His masterpiece, ‘Once Upon a Time in the West,’ is a giant homage to the American western, Ford’s films in particular (it contains something like 30 references to earlier American westerns) and can be viewed in one sense as truly “the last western.” The myth had ended (hence the title) and Leone was sad to see it go — OUATITW is his cinematic way of sprinkling earth on the casket.
This is depicted in the film itself by the realization of the gunmen that their day is over, and that the coming of the railroad signals the end of the Old West and the beginning of the New. In Italian the title is more suggestive — ‘Once Upon a Time, The West,’ which might be paraphrased, “once upon a time there was The West.” It’s not that this particular story happened ‘once upon a time,’ but that the whole Western story, the entire mythos, did.
Understanding what Leone did in his Westerns, especially OUATITW, can increase one’s appreciation of the older Westerns he loved. I know it has for me.