Ad Choices. There are few memorable violent moments in American movies, but there is one in Penn’s first film: Billy’s shotgun blasts a man right out of one of his boots; the man falls in the street, but his boot remains upright; a little girl’s giggle at the boot is interrupted by her mother’s slapping her. There was something smart about him—something shrewdly private in those squeezedup little non-actor’s eyes—that didn’t fit the clean-cut juvenile roles. In the late forties, there were “They Live by Night,” with Farley Granger and Cathy O’Donnell, and “Gun Crazy,” with John Dall and Peggy Cummins. People so simple that they are alienated from the results of their actions—like the primitives who don’t connect babies with copulation—provide a kind of archetypal comedy for us. I resurrect it now on the occasion of the Quad Cinema’s series of films she championed (June 7-20), Losing It at the Movies: Pauline Kael at 100. The targets have usually been social and political fads and abuses, together with the heroes and the clichés of the just preceding period of filmmaking. Pauline Kael (/ k eɪ l /; June 19, 1919 – September 3, 2001) was an American film critic who wrote for The New Yorker magazine from 1968 to 1991. To revisit this article, visit My Profile, then View saved stories. A professor who had told me that “The Manchurian Candidate” was “irresponsible,” adding, “I didn’t like it—I can suspend disbelief only so far,” was overwhelmed by “Dr. Actors and actresses are usually more beautiful than ordinary people. Spoof and satire have been entertaining audiences since the two-reelers; because it is so easy to do on film things that are difficult or impossible in nature, movies are ideally suited to exaggerations of heroic prowess and to the kind of lighthearted nonsense we used to get when even the newsreels couldn’t resist the kidding finish of the speeded-up athletic competition or the diver flying up from the water. Why attack Bonnie and Clyde more than the other movies based on the same pair, or more than the movie treatments of Jesse James or Billy the Kid or Dillinger or Capone or any of our other fictionalized outlaws? She doesn’t hold a characterization; she’s in and out of emotions all the time, and though she often hits effective ones, the emotions seem hers, not the character’s. They’re young… they’re in love… and they kill people. This is the context in which Bonnie and Clyde, an entertaining movie that has some feeling in it, upsets people—people who didn’t get upset even by Mondo Cane. The audience is alive to it. Furthermore, in some difficult-todefine way, Faye Dunaway as Bonnie doesn’t keep her distance—that is to say, an actor’s distance—either from the role or from the audience. A brutal new melodrama is called “Point Blank,” and it is. The famous picture of Bonnie in the same clothes but looking ugly squinting into the sun, with a foot on the car, a gun on her hip, and a cigar in her mouth, is obviously a joke—her caricature of herself as a gun moll. Beatty was the producer of “Bonnie and Clyde,” responsible for keeping the company on schedule, and he has been quoted as saying, “There’s not a scene that we have done that we couldn’t do better by taking another day.” This is the hell of the expensive way of making movies, but it probably helps to explain why Beatty is more intense than he has been before and why he has picked up his pace. The Barrow gang had both family loyalty and sex appeal working for their legend. One photograph shows slim, pretty Bonnie, smiling and impeccably dressed, pointing a huge gun at Clyde’s chest as he, a dimpled dude with a cigar, smiles back. So are most of the new movies. Why attack “Bonnie and Clyde” more than the other movies based on the same pair, or more than the movie treatments of Jesse James or Billy the Kid or Dillinger or Capone or any of our other fictionalized outlaws? It ridiculed everything and everybody it showed, but concealed its own liberal pieties, thus protecting itself from ridicule. It is a kind of violence that says something to us; it is something that movies must be free to use. The movie becomes dreamy-soft where it should be hard (and hard-edged). This is the way the story was told in 1937. All rights reserved. Total laughter carried the day. Faye Dunaway has a sixties look anyway—not just because her eyes are made up in a sixties way and her hair is wrong but because her personal style and her acting are sixties. He’s in the tradition of the mustachioed heavy who foreclosed mortgages and pursued heroines in turn-of-the-century plays, and this one-dimensional villainy belongs, glaringly, to spoof. But he has a gift for violence, and, despite all the violence in movies, a gift for it is rare. Actors and actresses who are beautiful start with an enormous advantage, because we love to look at them. The movies may set styles in dress or lovemaking, they may advertise cars or beverages, but art is not examples for imitation—that is not what a work of art does for us—though that is what guardians of morality think art is and what they want it to be and why they think a good movie is one that sets “healthy,” “cheerful” examples of behavior, like a giant all-purpose commercial for the American way of life. The dirty reality of death—not suggestions but blood and holes—is necessary. And it’s no wonder he wasn’t able to bring out the character of Bonnie in scenes like the one showing her appreciation of the fingernails on the figurine, for in other scenes his own sense of beauty appears to be only a few rungs farther up that same cultural ladder. As we hear the lines, we can detect the intentions even when the intentions are not quite carried out. Outlaws play to this public; they show off their big guns and fancy clothes and their defiance of the law. It’s the roles that make them seem glamorous. Trading Places is one of the most emotionally satisfying and morally gratifying comedies of recent times. Being knowing is not an artist’s highest gift, but it can make a hell of a lot of difference in a movie. (The scene that shows the gnomish gang member called C. W. sleeping in the same room with Bonnie and Clyde suggests other possibilities, perhaps discarded, as does C. W.’s reference to Bonnie’s liking his tattoo.) People in the audience at Bonnie and Clyde are laughing, demonstrating that they’re not stooges— that they appreciate the joke—when they catch the first bullet right in the face. Penn is a little clumsy and rather too fancy; he’s too much interested in being cinematically creative and artistic to know when to trust the script. I had to keep reminding myself it was only a movie.” “Dr. The mother’s slap—the seal of the awareness of horror—says that even children must learn that some things that look funny are not only funny. Actors and actresses are usually more beautiful than ordinary people. Playfully posing with their guns, the real Bonnie and Clyde mocked the “Bloody Barrows” of the Hearst press. 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. Strangelove,” chortling over madness, did not indicate any possibilities for sanity. His most interesting previous work was in his first film, “The Left Handed Gun” (and a few bits of “The Miracle Worker,” a good movie version of the William Gibson play, which he had also directed on the stage and on television). In the past, directors used to say that they were no better than their material. There is always an issue of historical accuracy involved in any dramatic or literary work set in the past; indeed, it’s fun to read about Richard III vs. Shakespeare’s Richard III. 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. The Depression reminiscences are not used for purposes of social consciousness; hard times are not the reason for the Barrows’ crimes, just the excuse. That turns into another way of making “prestigious,” “distinguished” pictures. Nevertheless, Penn is a remarkable director when he has something to work with. If movie stars can’t play criminals without our all wanting to be criminals, then maybe the only safe roles for them to play are movie stars—which, in this assumption, everybody wants to be anyway. In reality, Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow were murderers, thieves, and lovers. And Newman and Benton have been acute in emphasizing this—not making them victims of society (they are never that, despite Penn’s cloudy efforts along these lines) but making them absurdly “just-folks” ordinary. It is not fair to judge Penn by a film like “The Chase,” because he evidently did not have artistic control over the production, but what happens when he does have control and is working with a poor, pretentious mess of a script is painfully apparent in “Mickey One”—an art film in the worst sense of that term. In many ways, this method is more effective; we feel the violence more because so much is left to our imaginations. (This may help to make her popular; she can seem prettier to those who don’t recognize prettiness except in the latest styles.) Would having criminals played by dwarfs or fatties discourage crime? Faye Dunaway has a sixties look anyway—not just because her eyes are made up in a sixties way and her hair is wrong but because her personal style and her acting are sixties. A simple frozen frame might have been more appropriate. His squatters’ jungle scene is too “eloquent,” like a poster making an appeal, and the Parker-family-reunion sequence is poetic in the gauzy mode. To mark the occasion, a documentary, American Desperadoes: The Story of Bonnie and Clyde (Russell Leven 1999), was released. The famous picture of Bonnie in the same clothes but looking ugly squinting into the sun, with a foot on the car, a gun on her hip, and a cigar in her mouth, is obviously a joke—her caricature of herself as a gun moll. Bonnie and Clyde needs violence; violence is its meaning. But the whole point of “Bonnie and Clyde” is to rub our noses in it, to make us pay our dues for laughing. Bonnie and Clyde and their partners in crime are comically bad bank robbers, and the backdrop of poverty makes their holdups seem pathetically tacky, yet they rob banks and kill people; Clyde and his goodnatured brother are so shallow they never think much about anything, yet they suffer and die. It may, on the contrary, so sensitize us that we get a pang in the gut if we accidentally step on a moth. “Dr. In this sense, the effect of blur is justified, is “right.” Our memories have become hazy; this is what the Depression has faded into. As we hear the lines, we can detect the intentions even when the intentions are not quite carried out. It seems rather doubtful.) What looks ludicrous in this movie isn’t merely ludicrous, and after we have laughed at ignorance and helplessness and emptiness and stupidity and idiotic deviltry, the laughs keep sticking in our throats, because what’s funny isn’t only funny. She doesn’t hold a characterization; she’s in and out of emotions all the time, and though she often hits effective ones, the emotions seem hers, not the character’s. It is a kind of violence that says something to us; it is something that movies must be free to use. The Hollywood writer is becoming a ghostwriter. Audiences at Bonnie and Clyde are not given a simple, secure basis for identification; they are made to feel but are not told how to feel. Bonnie and Clyde and their partners in crime are comically bad bank robbers, and the backdrop of poverty makes their holdups seem pathetically tacky, yet they rob banks and kill people; Clyde and his good-natured brother are so shallow they never think much about anything, yet they suffer and die. During the first part of the picture, a woman in my row was gleefully assuring her companions, “It’s a comedy. If movie stars can’t play criminals without our all wanting to be criminals, then maybe the only safe roles for them to play are movie stars—which, in this assumption, everybody wants to be anyway. Once you get on the wrong side of the law, “they” won’t let you get back. Strangelove” it’s a quick leap to “MacBird” and to a belief in exactly what it was said we weren’t meant to find in “Dr. After all, if they played factory workers, the economy might be dislocated by everybody’s trying to become a factory worker. In interviews, Penn makes high, dull sounds—more like a politician than a movie director. Bonnie and Clyde is the most excitingly American American movie since The Manchurian Candidate. Good roles do that for actors. It is not fair to judge Penn by a film like The Chase, because he evidently did not have artistic control over the production, but what happens when he does have control and is working with a poor, pretentious mess of a script is painfully apparent in Mickey One—an art film in the worst sense of that term. he is also a character in our biography.” For a while, people went to the newest Bergman and the newest Fellini that way; these movies were greeted like the latest novels of a favorite author. 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. A brutal new melodrama is called Point Blank, and it is. Their “bad taste” shaped a new accepted taste. They gained money, fame, and – although they could never know this – immortality. It’s particularly inventive in the robberies and in the comedy sequence of Blanche running through the police barricades with her kitchen spatula in her hand. And there was a cheap—in every sense—1958 exploitation film, The Bonnie Parker Story, starring Dorothy Provine. I know this is based on some pretty sneaky psychological suppositions, but I don’t see how else to account for the use only against a good movie of arguments that could be used against almost all movies. . – Ad campaign for Bonnie and Clyde. 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