"We rob banks": A thread for Bonnie and Clyde (1967)

anyway this movie is fantastic

It's kind of interesting that prior to this film, the real Bonnie & Clyde were generally considered minor criminal legends at best. Although on the other hand, they had already inspired a couple of well-regarded noirs from the 40s (They Live By Night and Gun Crazy).

pauline kael more like pauline rubbish:

http://books.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,,2265403,00.html

I hated every minute of this smug piece of shit flim.

anyway, the "Cracker" speech comes when he grills a teen girl about her bf killer, and he rants about B&C looking into each other's eyes before they get blown away, and how fucked-up a symbol of undying love that is.

Still "important," tho, and Beatty is funny.

important like Hitler

from The Guardian review that one guy posted, which hardly seems written in English:

Bonnie and Clyde wasn't an immediate or obvious hit (ditto The Graduate) and met with a poor initial reception. Kael jumped on the support bandwagon later than most, with a review that smacked of self-serving; both films now seem less of a departure than prescient of a yuppie generation and new conservatism.

Shakey, you should read James Baldwin's review of ITHOTN in his film book.

I can't stand The Graduate, and I'm sympathetic to BAC's glamour-magazine take on the killers, but it's not a harbinger of the "new conservatism."

ITHOTN's plot is kinda miserable, but it's really about the interaction of Steiger and Poitier and is a qualified success on that score.

...and B&C was maybe the first Hollywood film that made getting shot look kinda messy.

...like sex? Faye Dunaway looks well fucked before the blood splatters in the final scene.

I love Dunaway, btw, but this is not one of her best performances.

That'd be Mrs. Pendrake in same director's Little Big Man.

I wd have to RESCREEN to say more

my new word is "re-see"

Am I the only one who basically liked Beatty in only one movie ever, Shampoo?

Well, I guess I liked him in Lilith too, but that could just be the rarely-screened cachet acting up.

maybe that and Bullworth for the Out vote

Also Bullworth- it was some kind of dramatic irony when he learned to use that phrase that is the name of an instrumental on Cosmic Slop.

(xpost)

Am I the only one who basically liked Beatty in only one movie ever, Shampoo?

He's very fine in McCabe & Mrs Miller and has good bits in Reds.

Little Big Man! I need to see that again, I remember really liking it when I saw it as a teenager.

Beatty had a bunch of great 70s roles, come on guys

All right, I'll grant you McCabe.

anyway, the "Cracker" speech comes when he grills a teen girl about her bf killer, and he rants about B&C looking into each other's eyes before they get blown away, and how fucked-up a symbol of undying love that is.

Ah, I see. I thought it was going to be about how the film whitewashed history or something along those lines.

On a different note, there's a funny story from either Newman or Benton about Jean-Luc Godard's involvement in the film that Colin MacCabe buried in the endnotes to his Godard bio. Apparently Godard--who was about to shoot Alphaville--was so pleased with the script that he wanted to shoot it three weeks after wrapping that production. Furthermore, he felt the script was universal enough that he wanted to change the setting to modern day Tokyo.

oh those wacky french guys.

don't hate this movie, and yuh it's "important", but it's not particularly good. certainly not as good as 'they live by night'.

Am I the only one who basically liked Beatty in only one movie ever, Shampoo?

Mcabe and Parallax View! "I'm a girl... Don't touch me unless you love me."

er, mccabe. my high-school girlfriend's estranged, alcoholic father started crying when talking about McCabe one night. He was a television commercial director, hated his job, and said that all he ever wanted to be able to do was spend his life making movies like it.

Gene Hackman is amazing in his one scene (with Beatty) near the end of Lilith, his first screen role of consequence.

While the Estelle Parsons hate would match up nicely with her winning an Oscar for B&C, sorry, I remember her being fab.

hey jaq what's 'pictures at a revolution' like? dying to read that.

i always found this one pretty boring, except for the gene wilder scene and the ending.

when I was at the neighborhood bar this afternoon the History Channel was showing a Bonnie and Clyde documentary focusing on their guns.

didn't they toy with the idea of suggesting that Clyde had sex with CW Moss (as the real one apparently did)?

hey jaq what's 'pictures at a revolution' like? dying to read that.

A fun, readable blend of gossip (omg, Rex Harrison! and his wife!! Mike Nichols and Elaine May duking it out live on stage!), the dying travails of the old studio system, the intricacies of distribution, and all the weird stuff that goes on w/r/t getting a movie made (like options on scripts and how the $$ gets scraped together, etc etc). Major subplots of the blatant bigotry and racism of the times (also prudishness) and the death of the Production Code.

Mr. Rex and his long-suffering wife

She was the striking ginger-haired lady in Genevieve, no?

didn't they toy with the idea of suggesting that Clyde had sex with CW Moss (as the real one apparently did)?

Yeah sort of. I read somewhere that an early draft of the script had a three-way sex scene w/Bonnie, Clyde, and CW wherein both B & C were both very interested in CW. Benton and Newman scrapped that subplot in favor of making Cylde impotent, suggesting that he'd be sodomized in jail.

She was the striking ginger-haired lady in Genevieve, no?

I don't think so; this was his 4th wife, Rachel Roberts. She was in Picnic at Hanging Rock but I don't know what else she did.

omg, she's great in a buncha stuff: This Sporting Life, O Lucky Man, etc.

but I don't know what else she did.

Drank like a fish.

Also great in "Saturday Night and Sunday Morning" and "This Sporting Life"

(xpost!)

does Arthur Penn have his own thread? Now there's a man with made his share of dross. Seeing Targets with my parents is one of my earliest childhood memories.

But Targets was Bogdanovich!

No – Target singular, starring Hackman and Matt Dillon.

Night Moves was probably Penn's last mildly interesting movie.

Movie holds up pretty well, though in a lot of ways it's sort of hard to see what all the fuss was about ...

i.e. to my taste, it doesn't really actually do all that much glamorizing; they're actually portrayed as really low-stakes criminals

Aside from the true-love last glance, I was essentially basing the glamorizing on this:

http://homepages.rootsweb.com/~ozarkgal/bonnie-clyde.JPG

not their brains or ambition.

Ever see Penn's Mickey One, which he made with Beatty 2 years prior? I remember it as more self-consciously nouvelle vaguey than B&C. It's being revived in a new print next month at MoMA, so I guess a DVD might follow.

oh, some folx think The Missouri Breaks is interesting, but I still haven't seen it.

Oh yeah, I was thinking about Rex Harrison's second (I think) wife, Kay Kendall. In addition to those Angry Young Man movies, I vaguely remember Rachel Roberts being on American TV as one of those slightly annoying British housekeeper/nanny types. IMDB informs me that I am thinking of The Tony Randall Show.

I recall her being kinda great on that

A fun, readable blend of gossip (omg, Rex Harrison! and his wife!! Mike Nichols and Elaine May duking it out live on stage!), the dying travails of the old studio system, the intricacies of distribution, and all the weird stuff that goes on w/r/t getting a movie made (like options on scripts and how the $$ gets scraped together, etc etc). Major subplots of the blatant bigotry and racism of the times (also prudishness) and the death of the Production Code.

Jaq OTM. Less hungup on nostalgia than Peter Biskind's book on the seventies generation. The bits dealing with Spencer Tracy's failing health and the awful crossroads in which Sidney Poitier found himself are worth a read.

Dede Allen, editor, dies at 86.

http://www.latimes.com/news/obituaries/la-me-dede-allen18-2010apr18,0,1409759,full.story

http://hollywood-elsewhere.com/2010/04/the_great_dede.php

rip.

i think this movie is kind of uneven, but the opening sequence is fucking incredible, and 85% of it is the editing.

She did The Hustler too. RIP

damn, rip indeed.

Arthur Penn RIP.

probably deserves his own thread. besides b&c and little big man, i forgot that he made penn and teller get killed, which is pretty great.

Hackman is sure good in this. And, yes, the editing is the star here.

The soundtrack contributes so much to the mood of this film it's ridic.

what's with the weird colour in that bit where they meet her ma?

Kevin Costner Is...Ranger Frank Hammer

Michael J Pollard is the first of the 5 principal actors to die.

RIP

Great in Star Trek too

Always think of this scene when I see a good parking spot open up.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pb1N5TcA5to

This is great too, the closest they got to having the threesome scene.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A61nJCd8hvc

"Coo-pey"

the very worst thing about the script is that Clyde regains his erectile function just before they die.

it looks great throughout, tho the oldskool DP grumbled about Penn's style. (DP then won Oscar)

Dede Allen credited her assistant with handling most of the final scene.

Reading the BFI book (just finished the one for Sweet Smell of Success). Never knew that Arthur Penn directed one-third of the Nixon-Kennedy debates. (They had four, so I'm not sure what that means--maybe he got fired partway through one of them.)