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Shooting Little Big Man
- Wayne State University Press
- Chapter
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Bonnie and Clyde Besides being the culmination of Penn’s work to date, a film of marked and consistent individuality in which every shot bears the director’s signature, Bonnie and Clyde is also the culmination to date of the long and honorable tradition of the gangster film. The influence of the New Wave has, clearly, played a part in determining its precise nature. Nevertheless, without denying the importance of the influence , it is necessary to insist that there is nothing in Bonnie and Clyde, stylistically, technically, thematically, that was not already implicit in The Left Handed Gun. The New Wave’s example of spontaneous inventiveness seems to have acted as a releasing rather than determining influence. Confronted by Penn’s use of slow motion, of special photographic textures (the reunion with Bonnie’s mother), of free intercutting of events separate in time and space (the car chase repeatedly interrupted by “cameos” of policeman and farmer giving their reactions to the robbery), one does not think of imitation (as one does, for instance, with the speeded-up motion and “free,” “lyrical” tracking shots of trees, etc., in Tony Richardson’s The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner [1962]): Penn’s “Wave” liberties work on too deep a level and are too essentially inherent in the style and mood of an entirely coherent and consistently “felt” whole. It is legitimate, in view of this cross-fertilization, to place Bonnie and Clyde in a tradition of the gangster film (using the term very loosely) that includes not only Scarface (1932) and its forerunners, neighbors, and successors but also Breathless (À bout de souffle, 1960) and Pierrot le Fou (1965) (but not, for example, the 1940s Chandler/Hammett 56 robin wood cycle and its derivatives). Leaving aside all question of different kinds of gangsters (and whether the term “gangster” is in some cases applicable at all), one can see a far more essential link between these films: a link whose nature one can point to by adducing further a film such as Hawks’s 1952 Monkey Business (not a gangster film in any sense) and Shakespeare’s Falstaff and Cleopatra. We are brought face-to-face very quickly with the immorality of Bonnie and Clyde, which I shall not attempt to deny: immorality not from the point of view of repressive bigotry but of any sensible social morality. For all the blood and pain, for all that we see the protagonists meet peculiarly horrifying deaths and are shown quite unequivocally that “Crime does not pay,” the film is far more likely to encourage spectators to be like Bonnie and Clyde than to encourage them to be conforming, “responsible” citizens in society as it exists. The Bonnie and Clyde of Penn’s film (Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway), however many banks they rob, however many men they kill, remain attractive and sympathetic characters: plainly, the most attractive and sympathetic in the film. Obviously, the intense identification that audiences feel with the characters is a major factor— the major factor—in the film’s immense box-office success: a success whose sociological implications become even more frightening when one sets it beside the comparative commercial failure of The Chase, a film equally violent but characterized by a very different (superficially, all but contradictory) moral attitude. We recognize that Bonnie and Clyde have to be shot down, just as we recognize that Prince Hal has to disown Falstaff and that Cleopatra must be defeated and trapped into suicide by Octavius Caesar. yet Bonnie and Clyde, Falstaff, and Cleopatra dead continue to be more attractive and sympathetic than Texas Ranger Hamer, Hal, or Octavius living. Why? Because, even in death, they are more completely alive, and it is the insistence of life within them—of spontaneous, socially amoral, and subversive energies— that makes it necessary for them to be destroyed. That is why one can speak, in these cases, of the artists’ tragic sense. The essential link of which I spoke lies in the ambivalence toward the protagonists and their behavior, an ambivalence felt by the artist [3.88.254.50] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 00:35 GMT) Bonnie and Clyde 57 and communicated to the audience. Doubtless what I am saying is partly that Penn “romanticizes” Bonnie and Clyde, but I am saying it without the intent of condemnation that the term usually implies. The lives and characters of the real-life Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow may have been, for all I know, entirely grubby...