Here is an excerpt from a classic film review written by Pauline Kael for The New Yorker (). To read the complete article, check out others, sign up for email alerts, and obtain subscription information, please click here.
Illustration Credit: Photograph from Everett
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How do you make a good movie in this country without being jumped on? “Bonnie and Clyde” is the most excitingly American American movie since “The Manchurian Candidate.” The audience is alive to it. Our experience as we watch it has some connection with the way we reacted to movies in childhood: with how we came to love them and to feel they were ours—not an art that we learned over the years to appreciate but simply and immediately ours. When an American movie is contemporary in feeling, like this one, it makes a different kind of contact with an American audience from the kind that is made by European films, however contemporary. Yet any movie that is contemporary in feeling is likely to go further than other movies—go too far for some tastes—and “Bonnie and Clyde” divides audiences, as “The Manchurian Candidate” did, and it is being jumped on almost as hard. Though we may dismiss the attacks with “What good movie doesn’t give some offense?,” the fact that it is generally only good movies that provoke attacks by many people suggests that the innocuousness of most of our movies is accepted with such complacence that when an American movie reaches people, when it makes them react, some of them think there must be something the matter with it—perhaps a law should be passed against it. “Bonnie and Clyde” brings into the almost frighteningly public world of movies things that people have been feeling and saying and writing about. And once something is said or done on the screens of the world, once it has entered mass art, it can never again belong to a minority, never again be the private possession of an educated, or “knowing,” group. But even for that group there is an excitement in hearing its own private thoughts expressed out loud and in seeing something of its own sensibility become part of our common culture.
Our best movies have always made entertainment out of the anti-heroism of American life; they bring to the surface what, in its newest forms and fashions, is always just below the surface. The romanticism in American movies lies in the cynical tough guy’s independence; the sentimentality lies, traditionally, in the falsified finish when the anti-hero turns hero. In 1967, this kind of sentimentality wouldn’t work with the audience, and “Bonnie and Clyde” substitutes sexual fulfillment for a change of heart. (This doesn’t quite work, either; audiences sophisticated enough to enjoy a movie like this one are too sophisticated for the dramatic uplift of the triumph over impotence.)
Structurally, “Bonnie and Clyde” is a story of love on the run, like the old Clark Gable–Claudette Colbert “It Happened One Night” but turned inside out; the walls of Jericho are psychological this time, but they fall anyway. If the story of Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow seemed almost from the start, and even to them while they were living it, to be the material of legend, it’s because robbers who are loyal to each other—like the James brothers—are a grade up from garden-variety robbers, and if they’re male and female partners in crime and young and attractive they’re a rare breed. The Barrow gang had both family loyalty and sex appeal working for their legend. David Newman and Robert Benton, who wrote the script for “Bonnie and Clyde,” were able to use the knowledge that, like many of our other famous outlaws and gangsters, the real Bonnie and Clyde seemed to others to be acting out forbidden roles and to relish their roles. In contrast with secret criminals—the furtive embezzlers and other crooks who lead seemingly honest lives—the known outlaws capture the public imagination, because they take chances, and because, often, they enjoy dramatizing their lives. They know that newspaper readers want all the details they can get about the criminals who do the terrible things they themselves don’t dare to do, and also want the satisfaction of reading about the punishment after feasting on the crimes. Outlaws play to this public; they show off their big guns and fancy clothes and their defiance of the law. Bonnie and Clyde established the images for their own legend in the photographs they posed for: the gunman and the gun moll. The naïve, touching doggerel ballad that Bonnie Parker wrote and had published in newspapers is about the roles they play for other people contrasted with the coming end for them. It concludes:
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Here is a direct link to the complete article.
Pauline Kael wrote for The New Yorker from 1967 until her retirement, in 1991. In 1968, shortly after the publication of her review of “Bonnie and Clyde,” she became the magazine’s film critic. While at The New Yorker, Kael wrote hundreds of Current Cinema columns, as well as many shorter film reviews. She was the author of thirteen books, including “I Lost It at the Movies,” “Kiss Kiss Bang Bang,” “Deeper Into Movies” (which won the 1974 National Book Award), and “5001 Nights at the Movies.” Kael received a Guggenheim fellowship in 1964 and was an honorary member of Phi Beta Kappa. She received Front Page Awards from the Newswomen’s Club of New York in 1974 and 1983 and a George Polk Memorial Award in 1970. Kael died at her home in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, in 2001. In 2011, her film criticism was anthologized in the Library of America collection “Deeper Into Movies.”