Pauline Kael - Brian Kellow [67]
One of the many ways that Bonnie and Clyde ushered in a new era in American moviemaking was with its stunningly direct portrayal of violence and its effect on our lives. Accusing the film of romanticizing crime and promoting violence was an easy, facile way of attacking it, and many critics and columnists had taken it. Arthur Penn objected to this in a New York Times interview that appeared a few weeks after the movie’s release. “The trouble with the violence in most films,” he said, “is that it is not violent enough. A war film that doesn’t show the real horrors of war—bodies being torn apart and arms being shot off—really glorifies war.” Pauline agreed, writing that “the whole point of Bonnie and Clyde is to rub our noses in it, to make us pay our dues for laughing. The dirty reality of death—not suggestions but blood and holes—is necessary.... Bonnie and Clyde needs violence; violence is its meaning.” And she cautioned against people who saw “Bonnie and Clyde as a danger to public morality; they think an audience goes to a play or a movie and takes the actions in it as examples for imitation. They look at the world and blame the movies.” Bonnie and Clyde had done contemporary audiences a favor, she felt, because “it has put the sting back into death.” At last, it seemed that the American film might be on its way to growing up, as she had longed for it to do for decades. The ultimate cinematic seduction she had dreamed of for so long might now actually be on the verge of happening.
Pauline’s review did not, as was often claimed, turn around Bonnie and Clyde’s fortunes single-handedly. The movie had been doing well in its single-theater bookings in a number of major U.S. cities, but Warner Bros. had never put much promotional muscle behind it, and by mid-October, it was being yanked from theaters to make way for the studio’s new release, Reflections in a Golden Eye, starring Marlon Brando and Elizabeth Taylor.
But the fascination with Bonnie and Clyde continued, and in December Time ran a lengthy cover story about the movie’s impact on the culture. Early in 1968 Warren Beatty strong-armed Warners into giving the picture a well-orchestrated rerelease, and this time, there were long lines at the box office everywhere. It was nominated for ten Academy Awards, including Best Picture, in competition with another of the year’s trendsetting films, Mike Nichols’s The Graduate. (Both lost to the much tamer In the Heat of the Night—but even that, via its exploration of racial tensions in a Mississippi murder case, was indicative of a changing Hollywood.)
The management of The New York Times, meanwhile, had taken note of the movie’s resonance and decided that the time had come for their chief film critic to step down, and December of 1967 marked the end of Bosley Crowther’s twenty-two-year reign. He continued on staff for a time as a special reporter, but he was devastated that the success of Bonnie and Clyde had unseated him from the powerful position he had held for so long.
In an act of counterpoint so perfect it might have come out of an old movie, Pauline’s fortunes rose at the precise moment that those of her old nemesis collapsed. She had been out of work