Pauline Kael - Brian Kellow [65]
The New Republic continued to tamper with her copy, and by the summer of 1967 she realized she could not continue for much longer. She resigned her post, using her latest royalty check for I Lost It at the Movies to take Gina to Europe for a few weeks. She was not at all sure that another steady reviewing job would present itself.
Pauline was distressed that the creative ferment that had burst out of France and Britain at the end of the ’50s seemed to have dried up. It was particularly sad to see what had happened to François Truffaut, who had taken on the ill-advised Fahrenheit 451 and was now preparing what would turn out to be a hollow parody of his idol, Alfred Hitchcock, The Bride Wore Black. One of the few French directors to keep his hold was Jean-Luc Godard, whose Band of Outsiders Pauline had admired. She felt that Breathless and Band of Outsiders derived their spark from the fact that they were “movies made by a generation bred on movies . . . Godard is the Scott Fitzgerald of the movie world, and movies are for the sixties a synthesis of what the arts were for the post–World War I generation—rebellion, romance, a new style of life.” Unfortunately, Band of Outsiders failed to intrigue American audiences and played in New York for only a single week in March 1966.
American movies, Pauline believed, were in a shambles. She was certain that she had been right about the dangerous example set by The Sound of Music. Big, expensive, self-important pictures seemed to be all that interested the studios. Very seldom did she see anything that reflected the current climate in America in a serious or challenging way, and she had come to fear that perhaps there wasn’t even a public for such movies. Impressed as she had been by Truffaut’s and Godard’s early films, she had stopped short of genuine capitulation to them: that degree of abandon she still reserved for an American movie.
And then, on August 4, 1967, Bonnie and Clyde opened at the Montreal Film Festival.
The picture had first gone into development in 1963, when David Newman and Robert Benton, both staff art directors at Esquire, had gotten together to write a treatment based on the legendary Depression-era crime sprees of Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker. Like Pauline, Newman and Benton were impatient for the American film to move forward, and their telling of the story of Bonnie and Clyde showed the influence of the French New Wave filmmakers. When it was released, it was clear that the restless, often violent spirit of the’60s pervaded practically every frame of the movie.
Versions of the story of Bonnie and Clyde had reached the screen many times before—in Fritz Lang’s You Only Live Twice (1937) and Joseph H. Lewis’s Gun Crazy (1950), among others—but never with such complexity, such wit, such unexpected shifts of tone, the wild, jaunty scenes of the early part of the picture leading seamlessly into the more violent and disturbing second half. Warren Beatty’s Clyde and Faye Dunaway’s Bonnie were so vital and attractive that it was easy for those watching the movie to accept them as folk heroes; the film seemed to embrace them as stand-ins for all those disenfranchised by the worst economic disaster in U.S. history, and the audience wanted them to get away with everything. There was a remarkable scene midway through the picture in which Bonnie and Clyde shoot up a house that has been repossessed by the bank—and, with the fervor of a student protester, the owner joins them in shooting out the windows and the bank’s sign. In the horrifying finale the couple dies in a shower of bullets—agonizingly and yet, somehow, beautifully—in a staggering orgy of