“This here’s Miss Bonnie Parker. I’m Clyde Barrows. We rob banks!”

In an age of changing social consciousness, the days of clear-cut good guys and bad guys seemed to fade away. The age of the morally complex anti-hero had arrived, ushered in by Arthur Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde, a highly romanticized account of real life criminals, Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker: killers with charisma.
Paroled bank robber Clyde Barrow (Warren Beatty), adrift in Texas, tries to steal a car, but is halted by Bonnie Parker (Faye Dunaway). Bonnie is married but listless, bored and uninspired. Clyde talks her into joining him for a joyride. Only after she has helped him in a robbery and the theft of not one but two cars do they formally introduce themselves to each other. Bonnie falls for Clyde, and Clyde returns her affection, and the two embark on a wild career through the Midwest.

Stopping to rob a rundown gas station, they make such an impression on young rube C. W. Moss (Michel J. Pollard) that he joins them as their driver and the gang is on their way. The young robbers are as interested in spreading their own fame as they are in taking money. They ask their victims to make sure and credit them properly, and they use Clyde’s Kodak camera to take glamorous pictures to send to the papers.

After a botched robbery in which a cop is shot and killed, Clyde seeks out his brother, Buck Barrow (Gene Hackman) who joins up with the gang and offers a house for use as a hideout. Buck’s wife Blanche (Estelle Parsons) comes along with the deal. The gang encounters Texas Ranger Frank Hamer (Denver Pyle). They capture him, and force him to take pictures with Bonnie, then let him go, a decision that will come back to haunt them.

Federal agents gather at the hideout. Blanche screams and panics, making their getaway close to impossible. In the ensuing chase, Blanche loses an eye, and Buck is mortally wounded. Bonnie, Clyde and C.W. barely get away. C. W. takes Bonnie and Clyde to the home of his father, Ivan (Dub Taylor). During a brief period of rest and respite, Clyde is finally able to consummate his relationship with Bonnie, and she reads to him the poem she has written, “The Story of Bonnie and Clyde.” Its appearance in papers around the country assures their immortality.

On May 23, 1934, Frank Hamer stages an ambush, and Bonnie and Clyde are dramatically gunned down by hundreds of machine-gun rounds, captured by the camera in an eerie slow motion ballet of bullets and blood.

Warner Brothers had serious misgivings about the violent movie that Arthur Penn delivered to them. Warren Beatty had campaigned hard to get it made, and the studio, certain the film would fail, had offered Beatty forty per cent of the gross. The movie was a surprise hit, and Beatty was instantly wealthy.

Filmed in and around Dallas, Texas, sometimes at locations where the actual events had taken place, Bonnie and Clyde took liberties with history, but captivated with its well-played changes of tone, from comedy to pathos to unrelenting violence.

The real life Blanche Barrow was reportedly less than thrilled with how Estelle Parsons portrayed her. In spite of this, Parsons won the Academy Award for Best Actress in a Supporting Role. (Another Oscar went to Burnett Guffey for Best Cinematography.)

Bonnie and Clyde was a trendsetter. Its uncompromising depiction of gun violence (still jarring even today) touched off an era of exploding squibs and geysers of blood. Its refusal to make moral judgments was also a hallmark of the anti-establishment Sixties, though the film was widely criticized for soft-pedaling the ruthlessness of the real-life criminal couple.

Bonnie and Clyde is well-established as a classic American film, one of the most influential movies of its time. It is also a violent, iconic interpretation of one of our most endearing and larcenous love stories.