The cities saw the rise of organized crime in the early 20th Century. Meanwhile, for a few years at the end of the 20s and into the early 30s, the small towns and rural areas of the American Midwest and South saw a collection of the classic outlaw, updated for modern times. Instead of gangs of robbers riding horses, the likes of Machine Gun Kelly, John Dillinger, and the Ma Barker Gang drove from town to town, hitting banks or in some cases pulling off kidnappings for ransom. The stars of this particular movie are Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker, more simply known as Bonnie and Clyde.
Aside
from their long string of crimes, the duo was widely known for the simple fact
that they were a devoted romantic couple (Wikipedia doesn’t even give them
separate pages). Also, like many of the highway robbers of the time, they
displayed a “ride-or-die” attitude, engaging in illegal and violent activities
with seemingly no actual exit plan. Eventually a posse of Texas and Louisiana
lawmen ambushed them on the Louisiana State Highway 154 on May 23, 1934,
riddling them with about 130 bullets. Over 30 years later, the famed villains
were turned into antiheroes in Arthur Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde.
Bonnie and Clyde was one of the first New Hollywood films. By the late 60s, the stringent Hays Code was on its way out. At the same time popular culture was starting to grow more cynical and anti-authoritarian. As a result, Bonnie and Clyde (Faye Dunaway and Warren Beatty) as well as their fellow gang members got a heroic lift. They can be chummy with random strangers (including hostages), openly sympathize with farmers struggling with the effects of the Great Depression, and are just all around likeable people when not robbing banks. Actually, one of the stranger aspects of the movie is that while romanticizing the leads it still presents a couple of their ugly moments, such as when Clyde blasts a civilian in the face for hanging onto their car in an attempt to slow them down. For the most part, though, their violence is directed at law enforcement, reflecting the counterculture of the time.
