BONNIE AND CLYDE Explained: Fleeing from Freedom

Bonnie and Clyde actually has little to do with the real story of the criminals who roamed America during the Great Depression. The screenwriters treated the titular characters as mere symbols, which were ideal for making a statement in the countercultural discourse that swept through the United States in the 1960s. Penn’s film stays silent about the less romantic, more down-to-earth aspects of Bonnie and Clyde’s gangster life. We learn nothing about their time in prison or the accidents that left Bonnie almost crippled. The complex, yet very characteristic story of 1930s America was transformed in the 1960s into a dynamic but still melancholic and hopeless protest against the inability to fit into a reality shaped by previous generations. The criminals became rebels.

Preparing for the Big Heist

The first version of the screenplay was written by David Newman and Robert Benton in the early 1960s. While creating it, the authors were heavily inspired by the French New Wave and American gangster films of the 1920s and ’30s. From the beginning, their goal was to contrast the somewhat comic-book nature of the story with the graphic depiction of violence, disrupting the otherwise light tone of the film. The first director offered the project was Arthur Penn—the same one who eventually directed the movie. At this stage, however, Penn had to turn down the offer due to other professional commitments.

The clear inspiration from French New Wave cinema naturally brought the script to the attention of one of the movement’s leading directors and theorists, François Truffaut. Truffaut made several revisions to the script, most of which were accepted by the authors, but he eventually withdrew from the project to focus on the film adaptation of Ray Bradbury’s novel Fahrenheit 451. Truffaut, however, recommended the services of his friend, Jean-Luc Godard, to Newman and Benton. The reason why arguably the most famous avant-garde French filmmaker refused to direct the film remains unclear. One theory suggests that Godard distrusted American studios and declined almost instinctively. Another theory claims that Godard’s ideas were flatly rejected by the producers. Godard allegedly wanted to shoot the film in New Jersey during winter, disregarding the fact that the states where Bonnie and Clyde had roamed were not known for snow and freezing temperatures. When confronted about this by the producers, Godard supposedly replied, You talk about the weather, I talk about cinema.

As it happened, around the same time, Warren Beatty, who would later play Clyde, was in Paris. He learned about the script and, upon returning to the United States, decided to acquire the rights to the film. His negotiations with Godard proved fruitless, and after their meeting, Beatty began pushing the idea that despite the clear inspiration the screenwriters had drawn from the New Wave, the thoroughly American story should be told by a local filmmaker. Among those considered were George Stevens (Giant, A Place in the Sun), William Wyler (Ben Hur, Roman Holiday), Karel Reisz (Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, The French Lieutenant’s Woman), John Schlesinger (Midnight Cowboy, Marathon Man), and Sydney Pollack (They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?, Three Days of the Condor). None of them expressed interest in the project. After a series of setbacks, Beatty again approached Arthur Penn, who initially was hesitant but ultimately agreed to direct.

By purchasing the rights to the script, Warren Beatty initially did not plan to go beyond the role of producer, as evidenced by the fact that he considered casting his sister, Shirley MacLaine, as Bonnie. It was only during the subsequent rewrites of the script that he decided to play Clyde, which made casting MacLaine somewhat problematic. The producers considered Jane Fonda, Ann-Margret, and Leslie Caron for the role. Beatty himself unsuccessfully tried to convince Natalie Wood, famous for Rebel Without a Cause, to take the role. Even Cher expressed interest in playing Bonnie. In the end, the part went to the then-unknown Faye Dunaway, for whom the role marked the start of her Hollywood career.

The production was not easy, as it initially didn’t enjoy much support from Warner Bros.’s management, including the studio head, Jack L. Warner, who openly expressed his disdain for both the project and Beatty. The actor had fallen out of favor with Warner by refusing a role in PT 109, a film about the heroic deeds of John F. Kennedy aboard the title vessel. Furthermore, Warner disliked the film’s subject matter, which he believed took the studio back to the days when gangster films were its main product. Finally, producers were concerned about the depiction of violence, fearing that Bonnie and Clyde would come under fire from the American public immediately after its release.

Despite financing problems and studio pettiness, the film was completed, but the conflict between Beatty and Warner Bros. didn’t end there. Initially, the studio did not plan a wide release, limiting the screenings to a few select theaters. Despite receiving mostly positive reviews and being well-received by audiences, Warner Bros. still resisted putting the film into general circulation. The situation changed only when Beatty threatened to sue the studio. Ultimately, Bonnie and Clyde became a financial success for Warner.

Fleeing from Freedom

Many viewers accused Arthur Penn of excessively mythologizing the story of Bonnie and Clyde, who, after all, were nothing more than gangsters responsible for thefts and murders across several American states. The 1967 film transformed them into romantic heroes of the counterculture, who had the courage to defy the rules constructed by generations of their parents and grandparents, the courage to try a different life. For the families of their victims, this portrayal certainly could have seemed unjust. One need only mention the lawsuit filed by the relatives of Captain Frank Hamer, the Texas Ranger who, in the film, is depicted as a vengeful representative of the old order. A man who, in reality, devoted his life to public service, receiving his badge in an era when Texas was still traversed on horseback and handing it over when Ford’s invention had firmly embedded itself in the landscape of the old Wild West, was portrayed as a lesser figure compared to the thugs he managed to lure into a trap and kill. Is this fair? Probably not. But with whom was it easier for young people visiting the cinemas to identify? With the pair who threw everything aside and bet their lives on a single card, or with the man defending a reality that many cinema-goers had already grown tired of?

Bonnie and Clyde is a tale of defiance and discontent, but also of confusion and a lack of ideas on how to break the monotony of small-town life and reach for the stars, which most people only shyly gaze at. It’s a story of children trapped in adult bodies, because it’s hard to take the slogans proclaimed by the characters as anything more than the expression of childish dreams of becoming someone important, someone everyone knows, loves, and respects. Like most American counterculture films, this one shows how easy it is to rebel against established patterns and how difficult it is to find something to replace them with. Bonnie, exhausted from running from the police, longs for her mother, though some time ago she would have given anything to escape from her. Clyde naively dreams about marriage and living a simple life with his ideal woman. Scared and helpless, Moss takes Bonnie and Clyde to his father’s house. When the gunfire stops, when the smoke and dust settle, it turns out that the characters themselves don’t fully know what they are rebelling against. In their eyes, their heroic and reckless gesture is essentially a childish cry for attention. They all suffer from an obsession with being “someone,” meticulously searching through local newspapers for even the most laconic mentions of themselves. In a time when many young people were recognized only by the numbers stamped on their dog tags, it’s hard to be surprised by their popularity.

In the first version of the screenplay, Bonnie, Clyde, and Moss were supposed to be involved in a sexual relationship. Ultimately, we are presented with a completely different approach to this aspect of the characters’ lives. In fact, at the very beginning of the film, we learn that Clyde, in Bonnie’s eyes the embodiment of masculinity and freedom, has difficulties in intimate relations with women. Throughout the film, he struggles with pressure and is unable to be physically intimate with the woman who clearly expects such a relationship from him. In the final moments of the film, when Bonnie finishes reading her poem about the life of the two criminals from one of the columns in an American newspaper, the couple joyfully realizes that at that moment, they have become “someone.” Thanks to Bonnie’s short, somewhat clumsy poem, people learned about their story from their perspective. It is at this point that they have their first intimate encounter, which painfully reinforces the viewer’s impression that they are still children who wasted their lives before they even really began. Clyde, embarrassed, asking Bonnie if he managed to “do it,” behaves like a boy who has finally taken that mythical step into adulthood.

Clyde’s impotence thus becomes a subtle metaphor for the situation in which Penn’s characters find themselves. Their powerlessness is dictated by fear that, by choosing a different path in life, they will fail to meet the expectations of those closest to them or the community in which they grew up. Only when they shake off this burden, in that ultimately insignificant moment when Bonnie becomes a published poet and Clyde the hero of her poem, do they overcome their impotence and experience a brief moment of happiness. It’s no coincidence that immediately afterward, Clyde begins making plans for a wedding with Bonnie. Since they’ve already proven that their way of life made them more than just another pair of nameless citizens losing their lives between a local bar, work, and a poor home, it’s time to return to normalcy. But by then, it’s far too late.

The widely discussed finale of Penn’s film, one of the first in American cinema to escalate violence to a level that left the average viewer stunned, is in fact the most poetic part of the movie. The joyful, hopeful look on Moss’s face, who, through the gap between the curtain and the window frame, sees Bonnie and Clyde escape from under the sheriff’s nose, is a poignant record of youthful fascination with breaking the rules, escaping patterns, and tearing down socio-cultural foundations. In Moss’s eyes burns nothing other than rebellion, which moments later is mercilessly gunned down on one of the hundreds of thousands of American roads. Because you cannot watch the world burn if you have no idea what to build on its ashes. Bonnie and Clyde is not, as many critics once claimed, a hymn to violence but an elegy for all those who, in their quest for freedom, unknowingly shackled themselves, not understanding that what they fought for was just another, equally despised, social construct.