The film
Bonnie and Clyde is a 1967 American crime film directed by Arthur Penn and starring Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway as Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker, the bank robbers who became notorious in the early 1930s. The screenplay was by David Newman and Robert Benton. Beatty also produced the film and was closely involved in getting it made. The supporting cast included Michael J. Pollard, Gene Hackman and Estelle Parsons.
The real Barrow and Parker were killed in a police ambush in Louisiana in May 1934. The film uses the outline of their story but takes considerable liberties, and it presents the pair as young, stylish outlaws in a Depression landscape of poverty and dust. That was part of what made it controversial: it treated criminals as attractive, funny and at times sympathetic.
A difficult release
The film was shown at the Montreal film festival in August 1967 and opened in American cinemas that month. Warner Bros. reportedly did not promote it with great confidence at first, and it did not immediately become a hit. Some leading critics were unimpressed or hostile. Bosley Crowther of The New York Times, then one of the country’s most influential reviewers, wrote harshly about it and objected to the mixture of comedy and bloodshed. He returned to the film in follow-up pieces, and his stance became a sign of how divided opinion was.
Other writers saw something different. Pauline Kael wrote a long defence in The New Yorker in the autumn, arguing that the film’s blend of humour and horror was the point rather than a flaw. Other critics followed. Warner Bros. gave the film a wider re-release, and it began to attract the large young audiences that had been missing at the start. By the end of the year it was a major box-office success, and Crowther left his post as the Times film critic in early 1968.
Why the violence mattered
The argument was less about whether violence could be shown, since crime films and westerns had long featured gunfire, than about how it was shown. The film’s final ambush sequence, in which the two leads are shot repeatedly, was notable for its length, its editing and its physical force. Earlier Hollywood films had often cut away or presented death in a stylised way. Here the effect was designed to be shocking.
Critics who objected feared that the film made killing look glamorous and invited the audience to enjoy it. Critics who defended it argued that the film did the reverse: the early scenes were comic, so that the late violence arrived as an unwelcome jolt, and viewers were made to feel what they had been laughing at. Both readings were put forward at the time, and the dispute was not neatly resolved.
The wider climate
The debate did not happen in a vacuum. Americans were seeing images of the Vietnam War on the evening news during a period of Vietnam War escalation, and the summer of 1967 brought the Newark riot and the Detroit uprising. The political killings that followed in 1968, the King assassination in April and the Robert Kennedy shooting in June, came after the film’s release and cannot have caused its debate, but they sharpened later arguments about violence in public life. Some commentators connected the film’s popularity with a changed mood in 1967 itself. Others cautioned against reading too much into one film. Historians today generally treat the film as both a symptom of those changes and a contributor to them, without claiming a simple cause-and-effect link.
The film also drew on European influences. Accounts of its development say that the French directors François Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard were at one stage considered for the project, and its pacing and tone reflect the influence of the French New Wave. This is one reason it is often cited as an early example of New Hollywood.
Awards and legacy
At the Academy Awards in April 1968 the film received ten nominations, including Best Picture, Best Director and acting nominations for Beatty and Dunaway. It won two: Estelle Parsons took Best Supporting Actress, and Burnett Guffey won for cinematography. The Best Picture award that year went to In the Heat of the Night.
The film’s long-term influence is easier to see than its immediate effect. It encouraged studios to take younger audiences and more daring directors seriously, and it influenced the explicit violence of films in the following years. The old Production Code was soon replaced by a ratings system in November 1968, which let studios release adult material with a warning rather than cutting it.
The debate has never fully ended. Each generation of viewers asks again whether screen violence informs, excites or desensitises, and Bonnie and Clyde is still the film people point to when they discuss the origin of that question. Its reputation, once so contested, is now secure: it is regularly named among the notable American films of the 1960s.