The Big Screen

by David Thomson

  Elinor Jones and her brother Norton Wright, friends of Benton, took the project on as producers and sent the text to Truffaut. His English wasn’t good enough to read it himself, but Helen Scott and a few others told him it was exciting. Truffaut was close to taking it on. He thought of Jane Fonda to play Bonnie. But at the same time he was considering making Fahrenheit 451 (from the Ray Bradbury story) and he was visited by Leslie Caron, who was then in an affair with Warren Beatty, who was hopeful about the lead role in Fahrenheit. The three of them met, and when Truffaut praised the Bonnie and Clyde script, Beatty resolved to get a look at it. He flew to New York and met Benton. Meanwhile, Truffaut had also shown the script to Jean-Luc Godard, who said he would love to do it. This musical chairs happens on nearly every film, enough to persuade everyone that casting is a helpless gamble—so keep changing your mind until you can’t any longer, and then you shoot a piece of film and it may last forever.

  Jones and Wright wanted Truffaut to accept a movie star for Clyde. Paul Newman? No. Warren Beatty? “Actually,” Truffaut wrote to Jones, “I have no admiration for Warren Beatty and, moreover, he seems to me an extremely unpleasant person.” As if to demonstrate a point, Beatty waited for the Jones-Wright option to lapse, bought the script from Benton and Newman for $75,000, and announced he was going to produce it himself. The two writers were swept along like corks on a stream. Truffaut went to England to shoot Fahrenheit 451, with Oskar Werner in the part that had tempted Beatty.

  Beatty was only thirty in 1967, the year his film opened. He had had a fine debut in Kazan’s Splendor in the Grass (1961). He became notorious for his love affairs and his aloof intelligence act, and he took it as his duty to be difficult. Two of his films were uncommon ventures, Lilith (1964, with Jean Seberg) and Mickey One (1965), both failures and distressing to him because of that, but indicators of a taste for risky material. Moreover, on Mickey One he had been directed by Arthur Penn, raised in television and the theater, who had won praise and Oscars with the movie of The Miracle Worker (1962). The two men got on, which was a measure of sympathy and of Beatty’s guess that he could handle Penn. In fact, Penn had had an early look at the Benton-Newman script and turned it down. Now he was hired to direct it for his one-time actor. And if Penn was to make something of Bonnie and Clyde that was personal (and he was that kind of director), he knew he had to let the young actor feel in charge. So musical chairs turns into poker, and then moviemaking becomes more tiring than answering a hundred questions every hour, staying on your feet while looking beautiful.

  Beatty was patronized and disdained by Warner Bros., the studio he had gone to with the project. This was a very old guard. (Jack Warner was still active, but he was seventy-five by 1967.) The cameraman on the picture, Burnett Guffey, was sixty-two, though he had shot All the King’s Men (1949) and From Here to Eternity (1953). He soon concluded that Penn and Beatty were modernist upstarts who didn’t know how to shoot a picture the proper way. Benton and Newman were the scriptwriters of record, home in New York, but they heard that Beatty had taken a friend and script doctor, Robert Towne, to Texas on location with him, and Towne was rewriting every night at Beatty’s instruction. So the sexual triangle they had intended, with Bonnie, Clyde, and C. W. Moss as a threesome, proved too problematic—C.W. was tossed out of the bed, and Warren had the girl to himself.

  On the other hand, Beatty had approved Michael J. Pollard as C.W., just the kind of unpredictable actor who worried Warners. He had cast Faye Dunaway as Bonnie (after Tuesday Weld turned it down), and in addition he had Gene Hackman, Estelle Parsons, all the way to Gene Wilder and Evans Evans, both indelible as the bourgeois couple picked up by the gang. And then there was Penn’s direction. The gentlest of men in person, Penn had an unexpected instinct for violence: few scenes in American film are more revealing of physical and emotional combat than the one in The Miracle Worker where Annie Sullivan gets Helen Keller to fold her napkin while the room is reduced to wreckage. Bonnie and Clyde would disturb people, not just for its killings, but because of the rapidity with which such assaults were bumped into humor on jaunty music. The first urge to get something fit for Truffaut was surviving in the shifts of tone.

  It was a battle: the production designer, Dean Tavoularis (on his first big job), was arguing with Burnett Guffey. Penn and Beatty began most days with a half-hour dispute; it was called “artistic fighting” by observers. And Estelle Parsons would comment later on Faye Dunaway:

  Nobody was too keen on Faye. We were all kind of annoyed with her. We’d be ready to do a shot, and Faye would need the makeup woman. We’d all be set to roll, and oops, Faye would have to have her hair combed. There was a lot of that. We’d go in early to get made up, five or six in the morning, and she’d be there with rock and roll blasting. Listen, that was the way she kept herself going. She’s got a temperament, but I love her, and I understand the way she is. Don’t get me started on being a woman in a situation like that.

  For good reason: Faye Dunaway looked like a movie star, while Bonnie Parker had a face like raw wood shaped with a hatchet (there are photographs). In an early scene in the film, Beatty’s Clyde sits down with Dunaway’s Bonnie and, like a producer, redoes her hair. It’s such a cute lift for Bonnie, why wouldn’t Faye fuss over her hair throughout the shoot? Bonnie and Clyde is a gangster film of the early 1930s and a movie about young liberation and sexual self-discovery to stir 1967. In addition, it dramatizes the quest for fulfillment that possessed Beatty and Dunaway on the project. This was their breakthrough, and that’s how the emotional climax of the story comes, when Bonnie writes the poem about them and Clyde says, “You know what you done? You told my story!” Isn’t that what we have always wanted?

  But the sweetest thing of all—and it affects so many fine films over the years—is that this aura of discovery is available for the audience, too. It is us grabbing at some light for ourselves. So the film hangs on the marriage between Penn’s eager eye for human animalism, Guffey’s alertness to light, and editor Dede Allen’s rescuing of brief flashes of life, looks, and reactions—especially in Dunaway and Beatty. This gang kills people, but how they yearn for life in scenes where they are wounded. It is a film of desperate glances, like the loving exchange when the two outlaws seize a last sight of each other before the comprehensive fusillade. That execution is the orgasm they (and we) have been longing for. No matter that the bodies are clothed and untouching, it may be the key erotic scene of the 1960s (brilliantly edited by Dede Allen and rendered in several different time speeds by Arthur Penn).

  In 1967 this was one of the most devastating but complete endings to an American picture, and an unprecedented fusion of sex and violence. For the young audience, there was hardly a more desirable commodity; it surpassed the chic of Bonnie’s clothes or the satisfaction felt by Warren Beatty at bringing the picture in. The outlaws were removed (as killers had to be), but their fame and being recognized were the point of the film—and the cause of grief to come as its battle carried on in the critical reaction. The film’s selling line would be “They’re young…They’re in love…And they kill people.”

  Beatty’s job was far from over. The cutting of the movie had been kept in Manhattan, to avoid Warner’s interference and to stop the studio from witnessing the prevailing artistic fights. But one executive had seen enough to send warning messages back to Burbank. The studio threatened to cut off funds as the editing extended: the costs climbed to $2.5 million. When Beatty and Penn at last reached Los Angeles they were required to show the film to Jack Warner himself, in his private screening room, that symbolic lair of old authority.

  “If I have to get up and pee,” said Warner, “I’ll know it’s a lousy movie.” As Arthur Penn would say later, with the boss on his bathroom trot, it felt like “the most diuretic film in human memory.” The mood was so bad that Beatty offered to buy the picture back—this was a bluff, for he lacked the funds for repurchase. Then fate intervened: the Six-Day War broke out in June in the Middle East and
Jack Warner was emotionally energized by the Israeli success. Gambling is a matter of mood and impulse: so the picture would open, on August 13, 1967.

  In the New York Times, Bosley Crowther began what became a campaign against Bonnie and Clyde. He called it “a cheap piece of bald-faced slapstick comedy that treats the hideous depredations of that sleazy, moronic pair as though they were as full of fun and frolic as the jazz-age cut-ups in Thoroughly Modern Millie.” Crowther was sixty-two and he had been at the Times over twenty-five years. He was also increasingly distressed by the violence in movies: “The film critic,” he said, “is performing a function akin to a pastor—he is a counselor of a community about the values of a picture.” A lot of educated people were scared in the 1960s.

  In Newsweek, Joe Morgenstern was half-impressed but half-troubled: it’s “a squalid shoot-’em-up for the moron trade,” he wrote. But he felt uneasy. So he asked his wife, the actress Piper Laurie, if she’d care to see the film in a theater. What they found—and this is a lesson for us all—was that the movie that had seemed squalid and rowdy in a sedate screening room had a packed house excited. So Morgenstern tried another, friendlier review—second thoughts from a film critic?

  That’s when Pauline Kael jumped in, with Bonnie Parker’s flourish. She had planned a long essay for The New Republic. When they turned it down, Kael went to The New Yorker (where she had appeared just once before). This was her own career being built, and why should that not help her love the film more? She identified with the kids and with Beatty! (Ten years later, in a wild misstep, she would go to work for him in Los Angeles.) She did a seven-thousand-word piece (revolutionary in its length) and she uttered a sweeping cry such as we heard in the Last Tango review. She was at the cultural barricade, going over the top:

  “Bonnie and Clyde brings into the almost frighteningly public world of movies things that people have been feeling and saying and writing about…Bonnie and Clyde needs violence; violence is its meaning.”

  At Time, Stefan Kanfer overthrew the magazine’s first dismal notice and supplied a rave for which editors ordered up a cover collage by Robert Rauschenberg. By the end of the year, Bonnie and Clyde was not just a rerelease hit but a cultural talking point.

  Over forty years later the violence in Bonnie and Clyde may prompt nostalgia. The picture is farther away now than the Barrow gang was in 1967. But in its moment, it split age groups and attitudes to the cinema. Kael was on the mark in divining the passionate involvement some people felt for the characters and the film’s effrontery in a time when public danger seemed out of control. Antiwar marches were on television news, including clashes with police. One outrage in Bonnie and Clyde was its contempt for those nasty Texas Rangers. When Bonnie kissed Ranger Frank Hamer, on or in the mouth, he spat in her face—it was an iconographic incident for the 1960s, separating those who wanted satisfaction from those embarrassed at its prospect.

  “You know what you done? You told my story!” Clyde’s epiphany was infinite and embracing: a deft glamorization of the 1930s had caught a current longing in America. This dream may have been fanciful, yet no sillier and no less potent than what Casablanca had meant in 1942–43. Beatty became a role model for a changing industry. The film clawed its way back into the light, after being withdrawn by Warners in early October. It would end up with rental income to Warner Bros. of $22 million. Pauline Kael was established at The New Yorker, not that that eased her insecurity. And the film can be regarded now as a halcyon moment, when American movies mattered.

  Who did it? Benton and Newman saw the opening, and Beatty insisted on its happening. He came out of his shell as an actor (he was usually too guarded and smart to give that much of himself). Dunaway was uncannily present—but was she ever there again? Arthur Penn deserves credit for that as much as for Estelle Parsons’s wailing discord and Michael Pollard’s sleepy-boy mumbling. The music and the clothes became marketable. Careers were launched for Benton and Newman, Gene Hackman, and several others.

  But it was the audience that made the picture and would not abide by Bosley Crowther’s counsel. The critic was replaced at the Times in 1968—not that he was simply wrong. (Renata Adler held the job for a year, and then Vincent Canby took over.) Jack Warner had sold his interest in the family company to Seven Arts. It was a heady moment, though the long-term consequences of liberated violence would one day spill beyond control. Of course, 1967 was also the year of The Graduate (a cool, ironic show over which many lost kids identified with Dustin Hoffman and allowed the deadpan first two thirds to dissolve into a daft escapist ending). But In the Heat of the Night won Best Picture, with racial liberalism and narrative predictability. That was a “statement” film the Academy could congratulate itself on.

  Bonnie and Clyde was nominated for ten Oscars, but it won only for Estelle Parsons and for Burnett Guffey’s photography. In the Best Actress category, Katharine Hepburn in Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner? beat out Faye Dunaway’s Bonnie—which one would you take home to meet your parents? But which one wrote the poem in your dreams? The past has always lingered at the Academy. Dede Allen was not even nominated for the editing. The old guard of Hollywood was in shock from the alarming rhythms she’d put in the film, but America knew the pacing already from television’s montage.

  A Hollywood window opened as many moguls took their big sleep. The owners and the new corporations in American pictures were less likely to grasp the power and the knack of making movies that made an audience say, “You told my story!” Instead of taking the public’s money and hearing their reactions afterward, the new leaders had been to law school and business school. They would treat pictures as actuarial case studies. A sensation was at risk of being organized. So in history, we have to see how this pivotal moment called Bonnie and Clyde had glimpsed the exit sign as well as the modern orgy.

  Critics and commentators on film who came into their own in the years from 1967 to 1976 (roughly from Bonnie and Clyde to Taxi Driver) often refer to the period as a “silver age.” That is meant to balance the golden age, which is more or less from sound until the end of the war. But in American film studies, any attribution of an “age,” with the promise of shared attitudes or consistency, is loaded with danger. Yes, it’s true that the brief span of time saw the arrival of a band of new filmmakers, many of whom were at least wary friends. (Film is always a competition.) It would include Bob Rafelson, Robert Altman, Martin Scorsese, Alan Pakula, Sam Peckinpah, Francis Ford Coppola, Steven Spielberg, Brian De Palma, Hal Ashby, George Lucas, Dennis Hopper and Peter Fonda, Peter Bogdanovich, William Friedkin, and tangential or visiting figures such as Roman Polanski, Bernardo Bertolucci, John Schlesinger, John Boorman, Milos Forman, Bob Fosse, John Cassavetes, and that recurring American in Hertfordshire, Stanley Kubrick.

  You don’t have to like all the silver age films, but the grouping that follows is such a departure from pictures of the early 1960s. It is marked by a concern with current realities, with bleak endings and a mounting unease over the state of America. It is a new attitude toward movie entertainment, more challenging, less universal. Still, several of these films made serious money: Easy Rider (1969), Five Easy Pieces (1970), The Last Picture Show (1971), The Long Goodbye (1973), The Wild Bunch (1969), Mean Streets (1973), A Woman Under the Influence (1974), Klute (1971), Chinatown (1974), Jaws (1975), One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975), and the most intricate and ambivalent of them all, The Godfather (1972).

  At first, it seems enticing to view that group as the result of youngish, robust talents (many of whom had been to film school or some equivalent) stepping into the wreckage of the studio system and taking power for themselves in a way that meant looking at their world “for real” and seeing it accurately. It was something to be excited about. Alas, in time it led to the reassertion of business reorganization in American film—and for the worse. Moreover, it coincided with technological developments—the culture of special effects and the onset of video—that few could foresee or control. In addition
, the “silver age” also had its share of films that had nothing to do with reality and every sign of playing the old game of reassurance that a mass medium took as its duty: Doctor Dolittle (1967), Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner? (1967), The Lion in Winter (1968), Oliver! (1968), Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969), Airport (1970), Love Story (1970), Patton (1970), The Sting (1973), The Towering Inferno (1974), Rocky (1976), and even Jaws.

  Yes, Jaws is on both lists, and a sign of how tricky it is to read trends. Everyone agreed that Jaws was a very frightening film, but the source of its fear was a ridiculous rubber toy and a concocted threat. As a rule, that’s how Hollywood handled fear directly. It was rare for a movie, like Psycho, to offer lurid “horror” as a mask for the inner dread of loneliness, or like Chinatown, which used a murder mystery and a nasty case of incest to highlight the way Los Angeles had always been a show run by the bosses. Sharks and scandalous incest can be games for the huddled masses that may divert their attention from political and economic failure, from racism and unnecessary wars. Combat war games sometimes serve to make us bored with the real thing. Worrying films often give us the wrong thing to worry about. Thus, the lasting question in The Godfather, both parts, was whether we ended up loathing the Corleones or wanting to be part of their protective family. It was said, fairly enough, that Michael Corleone, the most fascinating character of the silver age, carried a hint of Nixon. But was the film liberal or conservative?