Bonnie & Clyde Review — Charger Press

Apr 3

Apr 3 Bonnie & Clyde Review

Lari Li

Bonnie & Clyde is a film from the late 1960s. It was directed by Arthur Penn and the two main stars are Faye Dunaway as Bonnie Parker and Warren Beatty as Clyde Barrow. Bonnie and Clyde are based on the true Bonnie Elizabeth Parker and Clyde Chestnut “Champion” Barrow, the bandit leaders of a gang during the years of the Great Depression.

The movie starts off with Clyde, a young man fresh out of jail, about to steal Bonnie’s mother’s car. Bonnie is a waitress and dissatisfied small town girl, searching for something more than her humble life. When Bonnie catches him, the two of them become intrigued with each other, and he offers to take her to town. When Clyde shows her his gun, she taunts him, saying that he’s not brave enough to use it. To prove her wrong, he robs a store with it, and the two of them are on the run.

They continue with their crime spree through robbing banks or thievery in stores all throughout the American South, and recruit a few gang members, such as C.W. Moss, a mechanic, as well as Clyde’s brother Buck, and Buck’s wife, Blanche, a preacher’s daughter. The gang’s reputation grows worse and they become more widely known with the more robberies and crimes they commit, escalating the lengths they’d go to stay alive as well. For example, the gang handcuffs a Texas ranger named Frank Hamer that was pursuing them. They humiliate him, but he’s eventually attacked and sent away on a small raft when he spits in Bonnie’s face.

Eventually, Clyde’s brother Buck gets fatally wounded in a police chase, and his wife Blanche is left blinded in police custody. Hamer tricks Blanche while she’s in custody into revealing the name of the unnamed accomplice C.W. Moss. Moss eventually takes Bonnie and Clyde to his father’s house. Through a private conversation from father to son, it’s shown that Moss’ father is not happy with his son’s accomplices or the activities he’s been doing. He bargains with Hamer for a lenient jail sentence for his son C.W. in exchange for a trap to kill Bonnie and Clyde. The movie ends with an ambush on the highway where Bonnie and Clyde end up dead.

I liked the way Bonnie & Clyde does its best to accurately portray old America. Bonnie has a prominent American accent. Even the gunshots don’t sound like modern guns, the music is synonymous to the time period, and the fashion is very similar to the 1920s and 1930s, just a bit too glamorous for a time like the Great Depression. Even though the time period of the movie is set in the Great Depression, the production and directors did their best to incorporate Hollywood glamor and appeal, which is something else I liked, even if it’s not completely accurate.

The plot was slightly hard to follow, as it was mainly only driven forward by dialogue. There was little to no scene setting or outside scenes; it was just music and dialogue that allowed the plot to move forward. It was hard to understand what was going on at times, especially when C.W. Moss very suddenly joined the gang in a heartbeat, or when the gang ran into Clyde’s brother Buck and his wife Blanche. Overall, Bonnie & Clyde was an enjoyable watch. I enjoyed the mix of glamor and the Great Depression, the chemistry and acting between Dunaway and Beatty, as well as the overarching theme of the extent people will go to when times are tough, or how easily people can cave under the influence of others.

The themes and lessons learned were effectively portrayed with the movie’s tragic ending of the death of Bonnie and Clyde, as well as the betrayal and multifaceted nature of C.W. Moss’ father. Bonnie & Clyde effectively shows watchers the effect that the Great Depression had on US society. This is seen with the first bank robbery that Bonnie and Clyde committed. When Clyde went in and threatened the place with a gun, it was revealed that they only had around one dollar. This connects back to historical material reviewed in class, as one of the most notoriously famous attributes of the Great Depression were the nationwide bank failures and bankruns that were committed after the stock market crash in 1929. The towns that Bonnie and Clyde went through were also pretty run down and empty, showing that the average American during this time was not very well off. By watching Bonnie & Clyde, people are able to understand the difficulty of living through the Great Depression, and as mentioned before, the extent that people will reach to make it through.

While the film was able to portray American life during the Great Depression to a sufficient extent, it failed to accurately portray the characters of Bonnie and Clyde as actual people. Like mentioned before, Bonnie and Clyde were portrayed as this glamorous couple, very similar to the old Hollywood aesthetic. In the movie, they robbed a ton of banks and small stores while enjoying their life on the run and in love. In reality, they very rarely attempted to rob banks, most of their crimes being committed in mom and pop stores. They also grew up in the slum of West Dallas, which was one of the worst slums in America. The two were extremely poor already, and their conditions were worsened by the Great Depression. This is very unlike the movie, where the couple was portrayed as very well-off; Bonnie was portrayed as a fashionable waitress and Clyde as a clean looking gentleman who robs for the fun of it. The main way that filmmakers stretched the story of Bonnie and Clyde was by portraying them as a glamorous criminal couple that had fun robbing banks and committing crimes from state to state.

Bonnie & Clyde is an enjoyable watch that highlights Hollywood appeal and glamorizes a life of love and violence. However, it’s not entirely historically synonymous with the Great Depression era and life during the time period. Viewers should watch at their own discretion and for entertainment purposes.