Arthur Penn: American Director

14. Foggy Mountain Breakthrough

141 14 Foggy Mountain Breakthrough Bonnie and Clyde was no accident. It was the result of actorproducer Warren Beatty’s single-minded plan to generate his own screen material and guide it through the Hollywood gauntlet , and director Arthur Penn’s ability to apply the vision he’d been honing his entire career. Penn, Beatty, and their creative team were at the peak of their game. The only accident—and it’s tempting to call it Fate—was that the picture succeeded entirely on its own merits, having been cast adrift by a studio that neither understood it nor recognized the emerging film generation that would rise to support it. That last component is the most significant, for Bonnie and Clyde was arguably the first shot fired in the movie revolution that crowned the “New Hollywood.” Even if, as Robin Wood insists, “there is nothing in Bonnie and Clyde, stylistically, technically , thematically, which was not already implicit in The Left Handed Gun,” the fact remains that American audiences were more attuned to Penn’s syntax in 1967 than they had been ten years earlier. Indeed—again quoting Wood—“obviously, the intense identification audiences had with the characters is a major factor . . . in the film’s box office success.”1 In other words, Penn and Beatty knew how to reach the changing audience, and the Hollywood system did not. The audience shift had, in fact, begun in the mid-1950s when 142 Arthur Penn adolescent baby boomers emerged as a distinct consumer group. Kids suddenly had money and leisure time, and they spent both on comic books, records, candy, clothes, and, especially, movies. At the time, Hollywood made films primarily for general audiences . As the studio system began to wither in the 1960s, however , independent companies gained access to the marketplace with fare that grownups wouldn’t be caught dead watching: biker films, monster movies, beach blanket romps, and pictures where kids were heroes and authority figures were buffoons. This increasingly reflected the unrest outside of movie theaters— quite literally outside of movie theaters, in the streets—as these same young audiences realized that their parents had been lying to them about Vietnam, civil rights, sex, drugs, and politics. It was in movies that these chords of rebellion came together. Young people began seeking films that reflected their collective raised consciousness. They recognized film as a visual medium and didn’t need to explain things neatly.2 In short, they were primed. The tipping point was Bonnie and Clyde. Countless scholars have traced Bonnie and Clyde’s genesis , but no timeline can reflect its creative zeitgeist.3 Even Penn acknowledges that he “caught lightning in a bottle” with his most lauded work: “Bonnie and Clyde was one of those absolutely fortunate films where I made the movie I wanted to make, and it turned out to be a big hit.”4 Looking back, it was Beatty who nailed it when he complimented —actually, conned—Jack L. Warner that Bonnie and Clyde was “a kind of an homage to your body of work, to all those gangster pictures that were so extraordinary.” But it really wasn’t; the old Warner Bros. gangster films were urban westerns where the bad guys were exciting but the good guys won. The Public Enemy, Little Caesar, The Roaring Twenties, and Angels with Dirty Faces were about Italians, Irish, Jews, and other ethnic types fighting for survival in a hostile urban culture. Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow, by contrast, were corn-fed products of that part of America that Warner and his brethren were both jealous of and excluded from. Robert Benton and David Newman , who wrote it, declared that they wanted their gangster film Foggy Mountain Breakthrough 143 to have all the things you never saw in a gangster film. Consequently , Bonnie and Clyde became the first major studio release that gleefully flouted the prevailing Motion Picture Production Code’s starchy admonitions against explicit violence, sex, and, especially, making crime attractive. The real Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow may have thought they were rebels, but they were rebels without any knowable cause except their own pleasure, which came to a bloody end on May 23, 1934, when authorities pumped between 130 and 167 rounds into them (depending on who’s doing the counting). She was twenty-three; he was twenty-five. It was Easter Sunday, which may account...