They rob banks


Ok, get your hands up and don’t turn around. It’s Wednesday Night at the Movies again here at newcritics. Empty your pockets of comments and nobody’ll get hurt.

Few thoughts to mull over while we wait to get started. First, here’s part of a post I wrote way back in April when I started reading Mark Harris’ Pictures at a Revolution and got the idea for this caper:

Did you know that at two separate points during the early stages of its development, Francois Truffaut was set to direct Bonnie and Clyde?

Did you know that he helped novice screenwriters David Newman and Robert Benton reshape, revise, and rewrite their script, even though he didn’t speak English and they didn’t speak French?

Did you know Newman and Benton, who were working at Esquire magazine when they came up with the idea of a movie based on the life and death of Bonnie and Clyde, wrote it to be first American French New Wave/Nouvelle Vague film, whatever that would have meant? (SFMike thinks it would have meant disaster.)

Did you that after the first time Truffaut begged off he managed to get Jean-Luc Goddard interested in taking over. That deal fell apart over an argument over the weather in New Jersey in wintertime.

Did you know that the second time Truffaut was attached—or seriously thinking of becoming attached to the project—Warren Beatty set up an accidental meeting between himself and Truffaut at a Paris cafe in order to cajole Truffaut into letting him play Clyde Barrow? Truffaut took a dislike to Beatty and vowed that if he wound up directing the movie there was no way en terre that he’d cast Beatty?

Did you know Truffaut would have liked to have cast Jane Fonda as Bonnie? Maybe.

Did you know that Truffaut finally gave Bonnie and Clyde the skip because he wanted Fahrenheit 451 to be the first film he made in English?

Did you know that right up until the nearly the last minute the script included a menage a trois between Bonnie, Clyde, and the character that was eventually played by Michael J. Pollard? The character was a bit different before the scene was dropped and Clyde was rewritten as impotent rather than as bisexually confused.

Did you know that for years afterwards Beatty liked to tell a story about how after he took over as producer he went down on his knees to beg Jack Warner to finance the film? Warner didn’t want Warner Brothers to have anything to do with Bonnie and Clyde. Not because he thought it was too cutting edge, too French, or too New Wave. Warner thought it was too old-fashioned. No different from all the gangster films Warner Brothers produced back when Cagney and Bogart were the resident tough guys.

Did you know Beatty came very close to casting Natalie Wood as Bonnie?

Next, here are five things the Siren loves about Bonnie and Clyde:

1. The superb control of tone. Take the scene with a kidnapped Gene Wilder, which starts out mocking the squares in a way that’s very 60s without killing the period ambience. And then, when Wilder tells them his profession, Penn cuts to Dunaway’s face, and the scene is suddenly the very darkest kind of foreshadowing. Split-second abrupt, and smooth as Talisker.

2. The tender, whispery-quiet family reunion scene that functions as the funeral we never see.

3. The beauty of Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway. All the Siren can say to that is, damn.

4. The supremely witty script from David Newman, Robert Benton and the uncredited Robert Towne. Some say that screenplays are about structure, not dialogue. This one has both, the light-and-dark interplay between the episodes kept moving along perfectly, while the dialogue is always spare but telling.

5. The music. Boy, does this bring out the Siren’s inner Alabama. In a good way, of course.

Now, over to Jim Wolcott who gives us this lyrical quote from Manny Farber describing the opening of the movie and Faye Dunaway’s ethereal presence in it:

The movie starts with the aroma of a French Agnes Varda bedroom scene: Miss Dunaway lying belly down on a bed, in heat, restless, with no action in town, West Texas. “Hey, there, that’s my momma’s car you’re stealing!” She flies down the stairs, the camera staring up her billowing skirts. The movie picks up now that it’s out in the open air, an authentic small town street with covered sidewalks: pseudo-folk conversation, spiffed-up Warren Beatty doing that coy shuffle when his face loses itself inside a boyishly fake half-grin.

The fluke of Dunaway is that her body moves uncannily in harmony with the film’s movement. While Beatty-[Michael J.] Pollard-[Gene] Hackman are muscular, earthbound, scurrying and plodding in skit-like business that is both entertaining and synthetic, she is almost air.

And finally back to me but really to Rick Perlstein, author of Nixonland, for a sense of the political and cultural impact Bonnie and Clyde had when it came out in 1967—just the link though because it’s a long, long quote, Bonnie and Clyde in Nixonland.

Some background trivia, some film criticism, Faye Dunaway, and counterculture politics—that ought to be more than enough to get us started. Fire away. Anybody gets caught lurking’s going to have to answer to the business end of my tommy gun, got that? So unbutton your yaps at spill.

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July 10th, 2008
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