I’d been “saving” this along with a few other pictures, refusing for years and years to watch them on home video because I somehow felt I could only properly experience them on a film print in a theater with a crowd. As luck would have it, the L.A. County Museum of Art’s film program — also known as the greatest thing going in Los Angeles, now that Tokyo 7-7 has closed — included it in their “classic road movies” series. As luck would also have it, I interviewed Jonathan Rosenbaum, whom I consider the most taste-endowed critic around, the morning of the screening. He said that, despite coming of age as a cinephile in the seemingly golden filmgoing age of the early sixties, he prefers the on-demand, order-from-anywhere, discs-straight-to-your-mailbox present. But when I told him of my deliberate wait to see Bonnie and Clyde theatrically, he assured me that I’d made the right choice. (He added that he used to drive down to LACMA all the time when he taught at UCSB in the eighties. I gather Santa Barbara’s cinematic poverty obtained then just as it does now.)Most of what I already knew about the film revolved around the critical debate it sparked upon its 1967 release. The NYT’s Bosley Crowther effectively sacrificed his own reviewing career to his hatred of the movie, writing no fewer than three (!) jeremiads against it, while the New Yorker’s Pauline Kael seemed to have made her reviewing career by praising it. I imagine Crowther as the Rex Reed of his day, a critic to be taken seriously only when inverted. (Although he did much to champion Mizoguchi’s Ugetsu. Broken clock, twice a day, etc.) Nobody invested in film criticism could dismiss Kael, though some of her pronouncements about cinema — not all, not most, but some — strike me as shockingly philistine. I can occasionally feel a certain embarrassing wink coming through her writing: “Let’s face it: we go to the movies for the laughing, the crying, and the gripping of the armrests, right?” I feel the same embarrassment for anyone who makes a show of cutting through supposed pretension while also being wrong.
That said, Bonnie and Clyde does indeed go straight for the basic emotions, though it commands a wider suite of them than most. You’ve got these two doomed young kids, played by the biggest not-quite-young-enough stars of the time, hooking up, speeding from state to state, robbing banks, and occasionally exchanging hails of gunfire with the cops. Because critics have written so much about the influence of the Nouvelle Vague on the movie, I expected a near-pure product of the late sixties with a casual nod toward the actual Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker’s Depression era. It turns out to do it almost the other way around, with spare but meticulous thirties period production (my favorite background sign: “WE BUY PECANS”) and an avant-garde-ish sensibility that comes and goes.
The film hits its best moments when that sensibility periodically peaks, creating the feel of a Hollywood thriller as interpreted by Breathless as translated back into an American picture. Two come right at the beginning: first the opening credits’ extended series of sepia-toned snapshots of the pre-life of crime Bonnie and Clyde that don’t stay onscreen for quite the durations you expect, and then a delightfully languorous yet jump-cutty sequence illustrating the ennui of Bonnie’s Dust Bowl maidenhood that could well have been lifted from a genuine Godard project. Nearly two hours later, just after the bullet-riddled anti-heroes have met their fate, the film ends after hanging, at an unusual distance, on the downcast face of the policeman who’d had it particularly out for them. No sermonistic wrap-up; no further survey of the remaining secondary characters; no (ugh) historical blurbs offering needlessly specific context; it’s just over.
But the most striking move by far comes smack in the middle. Slowly realizing that their crime spree can end nowhere but in death, Bonnie demands that Clyde take her back home. He’s offered her the chance before, but now they’re in too deep to allow any permanent return. They compromise by meeting Bonnie’s family for a picnic in a barren sandscape, undulant with dunes and hazy with an oddly flat afternoon sunlight. The setting, weird even by the film’s dominant Texas-meets-the-moon backdrop, contributes only part of the scene’s deeply unsettling character; just wait until the conversation with Bonnie’s unnaturally withered mother, who sternly but vacantly insists that she’d better just keep on running. It feels almost like a dream sequence, but instead of revealing it as one, the movie reveals the elasticity of its own fabric, a fabric that can unexpectedly accommodate this as reality. Bonnie and Clyde’s real thrills come, for me, at times like these; I just think it could’ve used more of them. It’s a stretchier movie than it gives itself credit for.
(As a side note, if some producer ever gets the terrible idea in his head to get a remake going, there can be casting option for Bonnie and Clyde’s sidekick C.W. Moss than Jordan Morris.)
Comments