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"Bonnie and Clyde" ....From the Other Side

posted 8 days ago by roger1 (3614)
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I saw Bonnie and Clyde on its second release, in February of 1968. (It had been released and flopped in September of 1967...but producer-star Warren Beatty cajoled Jack Warner into a re-release and it was a hit and an "event" (magazine covers and the like.)

I was probably too young -- pre-teen -- to see Bonnie and Clyde. But I did. The brief nudity was nice at that age, and the bloody violence didn't bother me much(save the bank clerk getting shot point blank in the face) -- it reminded me of TV cop show shootouts -- and the final massacre of Bonnie and Clyde actually struck me as shorter and quicker and less shocking than I was expecting.

But what DID disturb me about Bonnie and Clyde was...Bonnie and Clyde. And their gang. They struck me as scary people -- psychotic people -- and very stupid people. Which made them even more dangerous in my eyes.

I was particularly scared when they ambused the lawman (Denver Pyle) on their trail and kind of mentally tortured him(as well as beating him.) And I was scared when they kidnapped Gene Wilder(not really known as comedy guy then) and his girfriend. I was worried that Bonnie and Clyde might kill ALL of these people. They weren't heroes to me(though in the international, revolutionary press of 67-68, they were.)

As I got older and watched Bonnie and Clyde as an adult over the years, I was less disturbed, but ever more concerned that this was a movie about dangerous, stupid people. And their bank robberies with innocent people being terrorized (and one bank clerk shot in the face) were hardly heroic.

Well, it took a few decades -- and a change in film audience attitudes towards the criminal kind -- for Netflix to produce a small scale but "on target" movie about Bonnie and Clyde, starring two late middle aged stars -- Kevin Costner and Woody Harrelson -- as lawmen AFTER Bonnie and Clyde. The Highwaymen -- 2019.

It seemed interesting -- this was before Yellowstone -- how Costner(once a VERY big movie star) and Harrelson(once a TV sitcom star and smaller star) had by 2019, pretty much equalized as interesting stars of equal weight. That said, in this movie, Costner kept the "mean orneriness" that made him a leading man, and Harrelson kept his folksy humor that launched him as a character star.

Costner and Harrelson lent their stardom to an interesting premise: Bonnie and Clyde in THIS movie ARE scary, psychotic, very dangerous, murderous (and likely stupid) people and the movie has no sympathy for them at all.

Bonnie and Clyde are rarely seen. They are "phantoms on the run," always one step ahead of the law, killing cops along the way and leaving the bodies behind for Costner and Harrelson to find.

And then comes a scene when Costner and Harrelson stop for gas on a country road and question the attendant as to whether or not he's seen Bonnie and Clyde stop by.

And the attendant says something like "No, but if I did...I wouldn't tell you. Those people are HEROES." (I made that line up, but its the gist.)

...and good ol' mean and ornery Kevin Costner beats the living hell out of the attendant yelling about B and C killing cops and innocents. Harrelson (of course) has to pull Costner off the attendant.

What a difference 52 years makes "at the movies" -- though The Highwaymen was a Netflix film with little "event" reach like Bonnie and Clyde had at the time.

The scene where the attendant gets beat up sets the pace for the finale: a total reworking of the climactic 1967 scene in which Bonnie (Faye Dunaway) and Clyde(Warren Beatty) give each other a last loving look from 20 yards apart before a hail of machine gun and rifle fire takes them down in "early slow motion spectacle" (which Sam Peckinpah took way up to 11 two years later with The Wild Bunch in 1969.)

Make not mistake. In the 1967 Bonnie and Clyde, we saw them kill enough cops that we knew they HAD to die, but the whole enterprise was sympathetic to them to the end.

In the massacre that ends The Highwaymen, the lawmen approach Bonnie and Clyde as "armed and very dangerous" and it is rather prayerful suspense to be able to surprise and kill them both before they can shoot back or run. We finally see their faces(very young, very plain, hardly Beatty and Dunaway) and they are massacred as an act of "nick of time saving the day."

That said,, the movie follows up on the history( I think) by showing scores of townspeople showing up to honor the dead B and C and their bullet riddled car. The 1967 version lives a bit.

But THAT said, I think that the minor-key "Highwaymen" rather serves as a public service: this can be shown as a "back to back double bill" for generations to come with Bonnie and Clyde and YOU can make the choice.

CONT

[–] roger1 (3614) 8 days ago

PS. On Turner Classic Movies, they have a short of many years ago where narrator Robert Duvall praises the greatness of his friend Gene Hackman(even then already retired from movies circa 2004.) As the clips roll by, they reach "Bonnie and Clyde"(which made Hackman a character actor before he became a star, playing Beatty's less handsome brother)..and Duvall says "I didn't care for the movie much, but Gene was very good in it."

I wonder why Duvall didn't like Bonnie and Clyde. I wonder if -- had he been younger in 2019 when it was made -- Duvall might have sought one of the two leads in The Highwaymen.

PPS. Bonnie and Clyde and The Wild Bunch were often linked together as "the bloody genre re-dos" -the gangster movie with B and C; and the Western with The Wild Bunch. And the outlaws(all men) in The Wild Bunch were actually a much more uncaring and bloodthirsty group than the B and C gang.

And yet -- I've always LIKED The Wild Bunch more. ITS bloody shootout at the end is Bonnie and Clyde times 50 -- and ITS gang are composed of male movie veterans -- William Holden, Ernest Borgnine, Robert Ryan, Edmond O'Brien, etc. The actors in Bonnie and Clyde alway struck me as "New York method actors ACTING like hicks" -- even though Beatty and Dunaway were from the South in real life.