BONNIE AND CLYDE

Bonnie and Clyde

Bonnie and Clyde

Introduction

The 60's is a term used by historians, journalists, and other objective academics; in some cases nostalgically to describe the counter-culture and social revolution near the end of the decade; and pejoratively to describe the era as one of irresponsible excess and flamboyance. The decade was also labeled the Swinging Sixties because of the libertine attitudes that emerged during this decade. Rampant drug use has become inextricably associated with the counter-culture of the era, as Jefferson Airplane co-founder Paul Kantner mentions: "If you can remember anything about the sixties, then you weren't really there." This paper discusses the fil Bonnie and Clyde (1967) and describe, with specific details and examples how it reflects the decade in which the film was made.

Discussion

The turning point from Hollywood's moribund studio system to the impending youthquake of the 1970s, Arthur Penn's Bonnie and Clyde (1967) audaciously broke conventions, upset critics, and revealed a young audience's box office power. With its unstinting violence and sympathy for the glamorous, gun-toting criminals, Bonnie and Clyde sharply divided critics over whether it was strikingly innovative or reprehensibly amoral and nihilistic. The increasingly rebellious youth audience, however, embraced the doomed heroes, and both Time and Newsweek recanted their initial negative negative reviews as other critics continued to savage it. Though Warner Bros. had dumped the film, star Warren Beatty badgered the studio into a second release. Bonnie and Clyde grossed over $20 million, landing on the cover of Time as the harbinger of the "New Cinema" as Theadora Van Runkle's costumes inspired a 1930s fashion craze. Heavily influenced by the European art movies of the early 1960s, writers Robert Benton and David Newman intended to make a revisionist gangster movie in the spirit of the French New Wave, to be directed by Jean-Luc Godard or François Truffaut; the film openly sympathized with its glamorous gangsters, who became analogues of hip 1960s counter-culture protestors, and its tone veered unexpectedly between slapstick comedy and serious consequences, galling more conventional critics who wanted the film to enforce a clear morality. Faye Dunaway's strong-willed Bonnie and Beatty's impotent Clyde were hardly a traditional couple, and their gory demise in rapid-fire, slow motion montage went far beyond previous Hollywood bloodshed.

Bonnie and Clyde showed the 1960's association with a large increase in crime and urban unrest of all types. Between 1960 and 1969 reported incidences of violent crime per 100,000 people in the United States nearly doubled and have yet to return to the levels of the early 1960s.[8] Large riots broke out in many cities, such as Chicago, Detroit, Los Angeles, New York City, Newark and Oakland. By the end of the decade, politicians such as Richard Nixon and George Wallace campaigned on restoring law and order to a nation troubled with the new unrest.

The 1960s have become synonymous with all the new, exciting, radical, and subversive events and trends of the period, which continued to develop in the 1970s, 1980s, 1990s and ...