Bonnie and Clyde

American Thirties via European Sixties, as Brecht would have it, Jules and Jim and Pierrot le fou suffuse the Dust Bowl reverie. A Warhol mouth in West Dallas, the waitress bare and bored (Faye Dunaway) who finds a mate in the smiling jailbird (Warren Beatty) about to steal her car. Bonnie and Clyde, in their own minds already glamorous movie stars, the words "armed robbery" and the barrel of his revolver get her going. (The Freudian joke informs their delayed tryst, he's "not much of a lover boy.") The crime spree is a merry jaunt until it isn't, the slapstick of a botched bank robbery yields to a bullet in the teller's face—hiding in a theater, Clyde sweats about the man he's just shot while Bonnie marvels at the Busby Berkeley musical on the screen. Dim grease monkey (Michael J. Pollard), older brother (Gene Hackman) and screeching sister-in-law (Estelle Parsons), the larcenous national family. "At this point we ain't headed to nowhere. We're just running from." Arthur Penn at his most dynamic mythologizes the rebellious spirit of a country in flux, a glossy image promptly splintered. (The period pictorialism of Burnett Guffey's Old Hollywood camera is jolted into modernity by editing like "a sub-gun's rat-a-tat-tat.") Ray's They Live by Night and Lewis' Gun Crazy are crucial precursors, the cosmic note—fugitive couple dwarfed under foreboding cloud in wheat field—is taken up by Malick's Badlands. An oneiric filter for the picnic in the middle of the chase, where lyricism receives a bucket of cold water from the heroine's blunt mother. Celebrities at the Okie camp, authors of their own ballad, importance to cure impotence. "That's what you've done for me. You made me somebody they're going to remember!" One final look between lovers before the endless fusillade, afterward a shattered lens. The plug-ugly rebuke of Kastle's The Honeymoon Killers scrapes off the sheen. With Denver Pyle, Dub Taylor, Gene Wilder, and Evans Evans.