Pauline Kael - Brian Kellow [66]
At first it appeared that their gamble might fizzle. Warners opened Bonnie and Clyde in a string of mostly undistinguished theaters in mid-August 1967. Some of the reviews—from Judith Crist and a few others—were positive, but many of the most important ones were not, and the most important one of all was, of course, written by Pauline’s bête noire, Bosley Crowther, in The New York Times. Long known for his abhorrence of violence, Crowther found the portrayal of Bonnie and Clyde nothing less than an act of moral repugnance. He denounced the film as “a cheap piece of bald-faced slapstick comedy that treats the hideous depredation of that sleazy, moronic pair as though they were as full of fun and frolic as the jazz-age cut-ups in Thoroughly Modern Millie.”
From the moment she saw Bonnie and Clyde, Pauline was one of the film’s most enthusiastic champions. It excited her as no movie had in years. If a picture as thrillingly bold and original as Bonnie and Clyde could come out of a climate that was desperate to create another Sound of Music or Doctor Zhivago, there might yet be amazing possibilities in store for American movies. The trouble was, she had not had an opportunity to write about it. She had submitted a lengthy essay to The New Republic during the month that she departed from the magazine, but the editors considered it overlong and refused to run it.
There was one place where length would not be an issue: The New Yorker. The magazine had already featured Penelope Gilliatt’s very favorable notice, but Pauline knew that the magazine’s editor, William Shawn, had been following her work for some years. Shawn was a serious moviegoer and he had been particularly intrigued by Pauline’s writings on Godard in The New Republic . She had already made her New Yorker debut in the June 3, 1967, issue with an article titled “Movies on Television,” in which she discussed the mixed blessing of reencountering old films on the small screen. Robert Mills now called William Shawn with an offer: Would he be interested in publishing a 7,000-word essay on why Bonnie and Clyde represented a moment of enormous importance in America’s pop culture?
In terms of the impact it would have on her career, it was the most important essay Pauline would ever write. It ran in The New Yorker’s issue of October 21, 1967, and it opened on a strong note of defiance, in one of her favorite devices, the rhetorical question:
How do you make a good movie in this country without being jumped on? Bonnie and Clyde is the most excitingly American movie since The Manchurian Candidate. The audience is alive to it. Our experience as we watch it has some connection with the way we reacted to movies in childhood: with how we came to love them and to feel they were ours—not an art that we learned over the years to appreciate but simply and immediately ours. When an American movie is contemporary in feeling, like this one, it makes a different kind of contact with an American audience from the kind that is made by European films, however contemporary. 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.
She felt that the screenwriters had tapped into something very important in that “they 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. In contrast with secret criminals—the furtive embezzlers and other crooks who lead seemingly honest lives—the known outlaws capture the public imagination, because they take chances, and because, often, they enjoy dramatizing their lives.”
She could tell from the vibe in the theater that “Bonnie and Clyde keeps the audience in a