Fun
Frisky
Nostalgic
Intense
Adventurous
Choked Up
Curious
Romantic
Weird
“They’re young… They’re in love… And they kill people.”
That was the advertising campaign surrounding Bonnie and Clyde as it entered theaters exactly 50 years ago today. Believe it or not, it’s been half a century since director Arthur Penn first showed audiences a revolutionary piece of midcentury film that changed the industry forever.
Faye Dunaway and Warren Beatty, the co-stars of the 1967 classic, are no longer young, in love, OR killing people. In fact, what most young people know the duo for now isn’t driving getaway cars but for infamously flubbing the Best Picture winner at this year’s Oscars. (Not that it was their fault.)
Regardless of what happened in 2017, exactly fifty years ago Dunaway and Beatty were the coolest kids in Hollywood. Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker robbed banks and looked extremely cool as 1930s gangsters. What more could you want?
The film also stars Gene Hackman, Michael J. Pollard, Estelle Parsons, and Gene Wilder. Parsons won the Oscar for her supporting role as Blanche, an auxiliary and often unwilling part of Bonnie and Clyde’s gang.
When Bonnie and Clyde was released in theaters on August 13 of ’67, it upended expectations for what a big budget movie could be — and what it could show. I won’t spoil the ending (I think most already know what happens), but a certain visceral scene opened the doors for movies in the future to tell the stories they needed to tell, no matter how gruesome.
Let’s all spend our Sunday watching Bonnie and Clyde and appreciating what the award-winning film accomplished for the next five decades of movie-going.
