Arthur Penn
Gangster Story

After the political invective in the film "The Chase," Arthur Penn focused on a more canonical story, drawing directly from one of the "myths" of American history. Across New Mexico, Texas, Missouri, Louisiana, and Oklahoma, Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow built their borderline life and shaped one of the most known and loved pages in modern American history, comparable to another legend like Jesse James, who has had several cinematic representations. Penn follows these two and other characters along their criminal trajectories, essentially creating a full-fledged action film with a road movie setup.

"Bonnie and Clyde" (1967) might seem (and in some respects it is) a film that has "aged poorly." There is no pathos and drama in the narrated events, but a sort of emotional superficiality that can mislead the viewer, but which is actually a European legacy that Penn decides to make his own: the artistic influences of the French Nouvelle Vague had now arrived overseas and helped shape the vision with which Penn built his film. Interpersonal relationships are vacuous and almost nonexistent. Clyde (Warren Beatty) and Bonnie (a wonderful Faye Dunaway) are never truly half of each other, just as there is no relationship with young Clarence (Michael J. Pollard awarded with an Oscar), a sort of gray and impersonal figure to whom it is difficult to assign a place and purpose. But what Penn makes most his own from the "French" lessons is that documentary-like and almost "aseptic" style that moved the early stirrings of the Nouvelle Vague: in this sense, the Clyde/Bonnie duo recalls the clash/meeting relationship between Michel and Patricia in Godard's "Breathless," a manifesto film of the Nouvelle Vague.

A breakthrough film in Penn's career, this film is a sort of reversal of Penn's poetics: in the previous "The Chase," his gaze was filled with political and social criticism towards the formal moralism of a nation in disarray, while here Penn starts directly from the American epic to unabashedly show the violence of that same nation. Penn "limits" himself to telling us a story without delving into the cultural background, even though it is a film set during the post-1929 Depression, but this does not prevent him from showing without restraint a violence rarely seen until that time. Several sequences (including the final one) anticipate that explosion of realism that would later rage in the seventies.

Penn built half of his career trying to overturn the basic characteristics of Hollywood genres, and "Bonnie and Clyde" is an integral part of this process. In its syncopated rhythm structure, in its refusal to show us intimacy and sentimentality, but also, and especially from a technical standpoint. Instead of working on narrative tricks, Penn puts himself ahead of his time (at least in the United States) by using frenetic editing and especially by setting aside the wide angle to rely on long-focus shots, compressing the perspective. Some total shots of the beautiful American countryside resemble paintings by the more "rural" Edward Hopper.

Many film critics are divided regarding this film: according to some, it is the crowbar that opens the doors to New Hollywood, while others believe the honor will go to "Easy Rider" two years later. It is certainly true that Penn anticipates some of the themes that we will find later in Dennis Hopper's film: in particular, the nonchalant image of Bonnie seems to be ahead of its time, as she asks the man to make love, she is willing to open up her sexuality. Hers and that of her bandmates is a rebellion not anti-system like "Easy Rider," but the desire of the young generations of the sixties to finally be unshackled from family (many references are scattered throughout the film). To seek absolute freedom. Because even though the film is set in the '30s, it is just as true that it seems a metaphor for the generational tensions in '60s America.

Penn's fifth feature film is in many ways revolutionary in American cinematic history. It anticipates technical and content elements that will later be extensively revisited in the development of New Hollywood. Today, it may appear as a film lacking depth, almost superficial in storytelling, but placed in the context in which it was born it remains one of the most innovative and decisive filmic chapters for future American cinema.