Not Coming to a Theater Near You
What do you think she meant when she said “a huge black monster with giant claws”?
What do you think she meant when she said “a huge black monster with giant claws”?
Pauline Kael famously praised this movie out of failure and into the cultural relevance that has stuck to it. Arthur Penn is like Godard for the Depression-era American South, and with Bonnie and Clyde he apparently ushered in all the hip movie violence of the 70s. I don’t know. Movies have been far more brutal since way before I started watching them, so it’s hard to put myself in a mindset to comprehend the impact that getting a kick out of killing must have had at the time. In a post-Virginia Tech massacre essay in the New York Times, A.O. Scott basically said that maybe we were better off before Bonnie, or maybe the cinematic violence its success led to (especially the new psuedo-snuff shit like Saw, and Hostel) isn’t such a good thing, or at least that the issue is worth examining.
I’m not sure how Pauline Kael would have reacted to Viggo Mortensen fighting two mobsters naked in a steam room, eventually stabbing one of them in the eye in Eastern Promises, but it takes that kind of extremity to make me tense up at this point. Am I all fucked up inside because of it? No way to tell, really.
What stays with me is not necessarily the casual gunshots of Penn’s film, although the end is still pretty chilling, but how much fun the actors are having at playing dirt-poor rednecks. Warren Beatty’s sleazy psychosis and insuppressible tooth-grin tell you right off the bat what kind of woman would want to go on a road trip with him. And so we have Faye Dunaway, unbelievably gorgeous, slinking around in an endless supply of loose-fitting V-neck blouses and having a hell of a time with her fake Hollywood twang. (As illegitimate as their accents are, neither do the Foghorn Leghorn, thank god.) She can’t get him to go to bed with her, but it’s okay, ‘cuz his gun turns her on more.
When I see a movie that has a famous quote, scene or shot that’s been burned into collective consciousness long before I pop it in the DVD player, I have a tendency to sit in anticipation of what I know is coming up. I did it with the shot through the leg in The Graduate and the “You talkin’ to me?” scene in Taxi Driver. It’s almost as if the movie hasn’t fulfilled it’s promise until that certain part happens, and then it’s usually disappointing, like how Al Pacino actually says “Say hello to my little friend” really quickly in Scarface, and without much fanfare. The still image I always see from Bonnie and Clyde is Beatty and Dunaway in the doorway of a bank, stone-faced, pointing guns at the camera. Forever printed in magazines and on video cases, the image takes less than a second to happen, but it’s thrilling, emblematic. Whoever chose that still for immortality chose well; it depicts our anti-heroes in a rare moment of seriousness, looking for once like real criminals.
by Teddy Blanks | Source: DVD
04 Oct 2007 12:18 AM | Submit Comment
