Remembering 'Bonnie and Clyde'

DUSK was approaching high up on the rim of Mulholland Drive and Warren Beatty, relaxed at poolside, looked down on the twinkling lights of the Valley before he recounted a quarrel he had four decades ago at the Warner Bros. lot in Burbank.

"I was arguing with Jack Warner about 'Bonnie and Clyde,' and he said to me, 'Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's fine, kid, that's your opinion.' Then he says, 'You have your opinion, but you do know whose name is up on the water tower, right?' So I said, 'Yeah, hey, look, it's got my initials!' "

Beatty is 70 now, and any animus he had toward the late mogul is long gone ("Really, he was kind of an enjoyable guy, and he said some funny things"), but that image of Beatty as the young-buck star and producer of "Bonnie and Clyde" playfully laying claim to the power structures of Old Hollywood is an irresistible metaphor.

Old-man Warner and the other executives who released "Bonnie and Clyde" had absolutely no idea that the quirky gangster picture would become a commercial sensation, cultural flash point and generational battleground. The only thing that surprised them even more is that "Bonnie and Clyde" also became a pivot point in the business of Hollywood; within months, it seemed like the town belonged to a new maverick generation of filmmakers with "personal vision" and a glee for toppling every Hollywood convention. In hindsight, it's amazing they didn't pull down Col. Warner's beloved water tower.

"Bonnie and Clyde" was released in 1967, but it was the following year, with America in turmoil, that the film surged into the public consciousness. The story was a mix of Robin Hood and Romeo and Juliet and more loose legend than real-crime; it starred Beatty and Faye Dunaway as Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker, the doomed Texas lovers who became a media sensation in the Great Depression. Beatty remembers that Warner grumbled that "these gangster movies went out with Cagney," but this film would have little in common with dated tommy-gun cinema.

This film was jarring, and not just in its bloody realism. "I remember a creative impatience by almost everyone involved," Beatty said, "and there was so much energy on the screen." The really interesting thing, though, was how audiences latched onto "Bonnie and Clyde" as a flexible symbol. Already feeling far removed from the Summer of Love, young America embraced it as nihilistic thrill ride and anti-establishment poetry. Many film critics and older viewers, however, seized on it as entertainment-as-evidence, a sign of an amoral society in slide.

The interest in the film endures and, if any aspect of it does feels dated now, that's primarily a function of so many imitators through the decades. Tuesday, Warner Home Video will release a lavish repackaging of the film that comes with a 36-page hardcover photo book and the new documentary "Revolution! The Making of Bonnie and Clyde." Then there's "Pictures at a Revolution," the acclaimed new book by Mark Harris that weaves together the history of 1967 best picture Oscar nominees "Bonnie and Clyde," "In the Heat of the Night" (which won) and "The Graduate" to show an industry amid sea change.

The word "revolution" is part and parcel of the "Bonnie and Clyde" legacy, but Beatty said he can't say whether the movie was more seismograph or lightning rod. "It was Victor Hugo who said that there's nothing so powerful as an idea whose time has come," he said. "Something is going to happen, and certain things are going to be emblematic of that change, that flux. It was 1968. There was a storm in the world. If someone wants to give us credit for 'Bonnie and Clyde,' I'm happy to take it." Then he added, with a wink: "I don't want to overwhelm you with my attempt to be attractively humble."

"Bonnie and Clyde" made him a wealthy man (his contract, in a nod to the studio's expectations, gave him a percentage of the gross instead of a minimum payout), and he became the career model for the now-common transition that sees cerebral stars step behind the camera. But "Bonnie and Clyde" was hardly a one-man show. In fact, sitting down to talk about the film, the first words out of Beatty's mouth were a question: "You already talked to Arthur, right?"

The director

ON the phone from Manhattan, Arthur Penn, 85, apologized for the catch in his throat. "I'm just getting over the flu; but I very much wanted to talk about this film. . . . It amazes me that 40 years have passed since 'Bonnie and Clyde.' It's almost beyond imagination."

Penn had no interest in directing "Bonnie and Clyde" and, in fact, after the grueling production and disappointment of "The Chase," the former Tony winner was ready to return to the boards of Broadway. "I had to bludgeon Arthur to get him to direct 'Bonnie and Clyde,' " said Beatty, who had worked with Penn on the 1965 mob movie "Mickey One."

In the end, Beatty won Penn over by promising daily screaming matches. As Penn remembered it: "He told he wanted to have an argument every day and then come to an agreement . . . and Warren is one of the most persuasive people you will ever meet."

In origin the project was part Texas, part Paris. The script had come from magazine writer Robert Benton, who had grown up in East Texas and was well versed in Bonnie and Clyde mythology (his father attended Barrow's 1932 funeral), and his Esquire colleague David Newman. French New Wave director François Truffaut had flirted with the project but had moved on, although the film that "Bonnie and Clyde" became would certainly borrow the New Wave's jagged shifts in tone and choppy editing, especially in its famous climax when the lovers, after locking eyes, die in a hail of bullets.

If the movie looked like a foreign film, it was cast like a New York stage play. Beatty and Penn both came from the theater, as did many of the actors they brought down to Texas. Gene Hackman (who had just been fired from "The Graduate") played Buck Barrow, Clyde's brother; Estelle Parsons was Buck's screeching wife, Blanche; and Michael J. Pollard was the quirky henchman C.W. Moss. "It was an extraordinary cast," Penn said. He was proved right when all five main cast members were nominated for Oscars. "All of them! Just think of that."

Gene Wilder was also lured from New York by the prospect of making his feature film debut. Wilder had a memorable cameo as a hostage snatched up by the Barrow gang, and Wilder didn't have much trouble feigning a look of shock on the set.

As Parsons remembers it: "I remember Gene got there, and the first day he comes out and is ready to go and we're standing there in costume and then Warren and Arthur begin yelling at each other. Gene was horrified. 'What's happening, is this movie going to get made?' I told him, 'Oh, don't worry. This happens every day.' "

The angst went further. Dunaway (whose agent did not reply to interview requests) had a breakthrough performance, but, according to the Harris book, was "physically and emotionally fragile" during the shoot and, like her character, moody and volatile.

The production, headquartered in Dallas, traveled each day to film in little towns such as Ponder, where local ambitions had been shuttered since the Depression. The idea of leaving the Warner back lot was not well received by executives, but Penn was resolute that the small towns would give a dusty stillness to the movie and enhance the sense of restless souls trapped in a dust-bowl wasteland. "One filling station, two hairdressers, maybe a drugstore," Parsons said. "That's what these towns were."

Hackman said that on one afternoon, he was preparing for a scene when an elderly man ambled up and pointed at the hat on the actor's head. "He said to me, 'Buck Barrow was my cousin, and he would never wear a hat like that,' " Hackman remembered. "For the people there, life hadn't really changed all that much since the real Bonnie and Clyde had come through."