On Bonnie and Clyde's 40th Anniversary, a DVD Tribute Fans the Revolutionary Embers

I had no idea then, in 1967, in what seemed like a moment of startling beginning, that many people had done the best work they were ever going to do. But we’ll come to that in a moment.

Now Bonnie and Clyde is out again — not that it’s ever been away — in a restored and dressed-up DVD version, looking as smart and virile as anyone can at the age of 41. Some of you may even look at it for the first time in your lives — with what impact, I wonder, supposing you have little idea of old-fashioned gangster pictures, the faintest recollection of what the French New Wave was, and not a notion of who Warren Beatty was, or wanted to be? There are a lot of kids around who fit that bill and wonder why they should look at old movies.

They're young. They're in love. They rob banks.

Ready for their close-up: Dunaway and Beatty (right) strike a pose.

Related Content

• L.A.'s Top Five Actors-Turned-Rappers, Including Warren Beatty
  July 2, 2012
• The Deep Throat Sex Scandal Celebrates a Famous First Amendment Victory But Ignores the Bigger Issue
  February 7, 2013
• Henry Rollins: The Column! Americans Will Never Give Up Their Guns
  July 26, 2012
• 10 Movie Womanizers, From Shame to Shampoo
  November 29, 2011
• TCM Classic Film Festival: 12 Highlights
  April 28, 2011

More About

• Warren Beatty
• Lillian Gish
• Robert Towne
• D.W. Griffith
• Crime and Gangster Films

Bonnie and Clyde still works, but like an antique. The culture knows now that the hero and his moll are shot to pieces, and there is a rumor of slow motion and so many bullets. So our chilled connoisseurs of violence wait for the ending — to see how it was done. “Pretty cool!” they may say, and pass on. There is nothing left like the shock from 1967 and nothing close to its perilous identification with the young hoodlums. These days, kids look at the actors and know they don’t look much like rural Texas. They’re right, but in 1967 that disparity simply wasn’t noticed. Beatty the producer insisted that the unit go to Texas, to get away from Warners’ interference and to stand up for rural authenticity. These days, that “authenticity” is a joke: How could anyone as gorgeous as this Bonnie be holed up in a country diner? Why isn’t Clyde an actor in Burbank? They look so gloriously attractive, so movielike. And these days, you have only to flash a bit of that existential glamour at the kids and they start laughing at a picture.

In 1967, it was a matter of tremendous audience concern and need — whether Bonnie and Clyde could survive, get their rocks off and be famous before Bonnie’s mother’s foreboding set in. It’s a boy-meets-girl film in which he offers to rescue her from the warm-grease life of a waitress if she will write about him in the papers. (“You told my story! You told my whole story right there, right there!”) Beatty seized upon it, with ferocious accuracy, as a secret issue of the ’60s, that wondering in young people whether they could ever be known — not just famous, but in the light safe from the dark that cloaked the huddled masses of America. It’s no exaggeration to say that the couple is thieving and murdering and going through the clumsy foreplay simply to sit in glory, to be like Sonny and Cher. But these days, every kid knows his or her duty to mock and abuse the idiots washed up on that desolate shore.

In 1967, Bonnie and Clyde, Faye and Warren, looked like what they became — models in Carnaby Street windows and icons on the cover Rauschenberg shot for Time (at the end of the year, by which time the movie had shrugged off its early doldrums and become a sensation). Audiences didn’t see the fakery, no matter that they were buying Bonnie berets. They hardly registered the cockamamie attitude to banks. There it was, that emblematic scene where the dispossessed tenants come by and the beautiful children say “We rob banks!” and shoot up the bank sign on the house where the farmers once lived. In 1967, that meshed with the greedy antiestablishment feeling, and no one noticed that Warners and Beatty were stacking their money away in ... banks, and trusting that such pillars of the establishment would be well looked after.

At the moment, you see, the sensationalism always wipes away the white lies. So, No Country for Old Men describes an untenable country where Cormac McCarthy and Tommy Lee Jones (and millions of others) continue to live in some kind of ease and pleasure. Movies cheat at the time, and their magic is a matter of preventing us from seeing the sham. Birth of a Nation may have been a reckless, shameless account of the death of the old South, but it was a sensational, backhand acknowledgment of the birth of a business — that of movies.

The one point established by the new Bonnie and Clyde DVD is that it was its producer’s film. I am not out to deny or minimize the work of Arthur Penn, for he is truly a fascinating figure in his extraordinary clutched-hands style — one hand for tenderness, the other for violence. The editing (by Dede Allen) is so skilled and so intuitive about the characters. Burnett Guffey was a veteran cameraman who seemed a die-hard to the younger filmmakers, but his color is shot through with blood. The acting is still riveting: Estelle Parsons and that whining voice as Buck’s wife; Evans Evans and Gene Wilder as the couple the gang pick up; Denver Pyle, taking Bonnie’s lewd kiss and vowing vengeance.