Warren Beatty on ‘Bonnie and Clyde’ at 50
NEW YORK “Bonnie and Clyde” might have indelibly captured the spirit of the anti-authoritarian ’60s with a pair of devil-maycare bank robbers from the ’30s. But it didn’t exactly roar into theatres when it opened 50 years ago.
The film, starring Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway as the fatalistic outlaws, would become a cultural sensation, one of the biggest box office hits up until that point and a 10-time Oscar nominee. But on its initial release on August 13 in the midst of the Summer of Love, “Bonnie and Clyde” was virtually gunned down by bad reviews and a tepid reception at the box office.
“Sometimes you make a movie where everyone gets the joke immediately,” said Warren Beatty in an interview looking back on “Bonnie and Clyde.” “And then you have a different situation with other movies.”
“Bonnie and Clyde” returned to theatres Sunday to mark its 50th anniversary and it will again play nationwide on Wednesday as part of Fathom Events’ TCM Big Screen Classics series. It remains an epochal landmark in American movies: The first bullet fired in the coming storm of the American New Wave — the “New Hollywood” of Coppola, Scorsese, Altman and others.
It’s fitting, in a way, that “Bonnie and Clyde” should be celebrated with a re-release. That’s how it established itself, in the first place.
“Bonnie and Clyde” made a small dent in its 1967 release, but it sparked a delayed response. This was before the days of wide release, and critics had considerable influence on the months-long rollout of films. Most outlets slammed the film, with many objecting to its cavalier violence. The New York Times called it “a cheap piece of bald-faced slapstick comedy that treats the hideous depredations of that sleazy, moronic pair as though they were as full of fun and frolic as the jazz-age cutups in ‘Thoroughly Modern Millie.’”
But “Bonnie and Clyde” caught on with others, notably Pauline Kael. Her 9,000-word New Yorker review called it the most exciting American movie since “The Manchurian Candidate” (1962). “The audience is alive to it,” wrote Kael.
Others flip-flopped. Months after Time magazine labeled it “a strange and purposeless mingling of fact and claptrap that teeters uneasily on the brink of burlesque,” the magazine put it on its Dec. 8 cover (“The New Cinema: Violence ... Sex ... Art”), calling it a “watershed picture.” After making $2.5 million in 1967, “Bonnie and Clyde” grossed $16.5 million in its 1968 re-release, making
“The general opinion at the time was that if you have that kind of violence, you can’t mix it with humour. Well, we did.”
– Star Warren Beatty, on “Bonnie & Clyde
it one of the top 20 highest grossing films.
“The general opinion at the time was that if you have that kind of violence, you can’t mix it with humour. Well, we did,” said Beatty.
Beatty, now 80, isn’t much inclined to diagnose the considerable influence of “Bonnie and Clyde.”
“I thought that it was good,” Beatty said. “But I’m really of the opinion — and it seemed to me even then — when you make a movie, you don’t really know what you’ve made until years later. It takes time to separate one’s opinion from the gamble of the moment. It’s impossible to factor out all of the nonsense that accompanies trying to sell something."