Bonnie and Clyde - Another Bad 1967 Review

Producer Beatty and Director Arthur  Penn have elected to tell their tale of bullets and blood in a strange  and purposeless mingling of fact and claptrap that teeters uneasily on  the brink of burlesque. Like Bonnie and Clyde themselves, the film  rides off'in all directions and ends up full of holes.

Beatty, playing the lead, does a capable job, within the limits of his  familiar, insolent, couldn't-care-less manner, of making Barrow the  amiable varmint he thought himself to be. Barrow fancied himself  something of a latter day Robin Hood, robbing only banks that were  foreclosing on poor farmers and eventually turning into a kind of folk  hero. But Faye Dunaway's Sunday-social prettiness is at variance with  any known information about Bonnie Parker. The other gang members  struggle to little avail against a script that gives their characters  no discernible shape.

The real fault with Bonnie and Clyde is its sheer, tasteless  aimlessness. Director Penn has marshaled an impressive framework of  documentation: a flotilla of old cars, a scene played in a movie  theater while Gold Diggers of 1933 runs off on the screen, a string of  dusty, fly-bitten Southwestern roadhouses and farms. (One booboo: the  use of post-1934 dollar bills.) But repeated bursts of country-style  music punctuating the bandits' grisly ventures, and a sentimental  interlude with Bonnie's old Maw photographed through a hazy filter, aim  at irony and miss by a mile. And this, if you please, was the U.S.  entry in this year's Montreal Film Festival.