Criticizing Criticism: The Impact of Auteurism on BONNIE AND CLYDE

Image courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures

Shortly after the 1967 release of Bonnie and Clyde, overwhelming positive responses from youth audiences forced critics to re-evaluate their initial reactions to Arthur Penn’s controversial film. Because critics found themselves out of touch with the younger audiences, they were forced to seek out new means of studying movies. Thus, Bonnie and Clyde forever altered American film criticism by forcing critics to use auteur theory as a means of examining important changing social values ambiguously hidden in a film’s historical content and political subtext.

The significance of Hollywood’s studio system abandoning the Hayes Production Code in 1966, and their adoption of the new ratings system introduced American audiences to a wider variety of films and ideologies. By issuing films a “coded letter” to alert viewers to unfavorable moral values contained within a particular film, “the ratings system allowed the industry to present itself as being sensitive to public concern while giving filmmakers license to treat violence, sexuality, or unorthodox ideas” (Bordwell 515).

Director Arthur Penn took advantage of this new freedom in Bonnie and Clyde by showing graphic violence, by hinting at Clyde’s ambiguous sexuality, and by glorifying the murderous gangsters. Yet, because Penn refused to conform to America’s out-of-date Production Code values, Bonnie and Clyde received unfavorable reviews from out-of-date American critics.

Former New York Times critic Bosley Crowther was one such critic who claimed the film’s “blending of farce with brutal killings is as pointless as it is lacking in taste, since it makes no valid commentary upon the already travestied truth” (Crowther 178); and, was “even more disturbed by the movie’s reception at the film festival, where audiences ‘wildly received’ the film with ‘gales of laughter and applause’” (Carr 82).

Buried within his blatant inability to comprehend that “by 1966, many students were questioning authority and rejecting traditional American values,” Bosley Crowther proves just how far American film critics had fallen out of touch with younger audiences by continuing to cling to a rapidly fleeting set of moral values that Hollywood could no longer afford to embrace (Bordwell 557).

Glenn Mann accurately describes the audience’s desire to identify with Bonnie and Clyde: “The film recaptured the charisma, flair, and powerful appeal of the gangster…making them out to be heroes against the system” (Man 112). Even though the film “restored the myth of the individual at odds with the system,” it did not restore the “counteracting myth of the need for a stable, law-abiding society” (112).

In the article, “From ‘Fucking Cops!’ to ‘Fucking Media’” Steven Carr quotes Todd Gitlin’s recollection of an incident that occurred at the Hollywood premiere of Bonnie and Clyde in which “an audience member arose from his seat [at the end of the movie] and yelled, ‘Fucking cops!’” (Carr 71). This single profane statement perfectly illustrates the frustration American youth had with its own government during the late sixties. Thus, with the implementation of the ratings system, Hollywood inadvertently widened the gap between movie critics and audiences by releasing films that challenged the traditional moral-driven values left behind by the Hayes Production Code.

In addition to dissolution of the Production Code, Bordwell and Thompson also discuss auteur criticism’s tendency “to promote a study of film style” in which “artistry was revealed not in what was said but in how it was said” (Bordwell 416). “Auteur critics were especially alert for ambiguities that could be interpreted as the director’s influence on a subject of a theme” (416); and, viewed the director as “the main source of a film’s value” (415).

In her review of Bonnie and Clyde, Pauline Kael suggests the reason why film critics and youth audiences have such dramatically opposing reactions to the film was because: “audiences at Bonnie and Clyde are not given a simple, secure basis for identification; they are made to feel but are not told how to feel” (Kael 183).

From an ideological perspective, younger audiences liked the film and reacted positively to it because the film told them what they already wanted to hear. American youth wanted to see the rebellious Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway fighting against the system. On the other hand, critics hated the film for the same reasons youth audiences loved it; the movie did not tell them what they wanted to hear. American film critics did not want to see a couple of glorified hoodlums wreck havoc on the traditional Hollywood values of law and order.

Carr discusses the importance of the film’s ambiguous narrative: “Unlike other contemporary Hollywood releases, Bonnie and Clyde’s narrative and stylistic elements allowed for a relatively open set of reading positions that resonated with the social and political shifts of the time” (Carr 81). Nicole Rafter further reiterates Carr’s theory by adding: “This was the right film at the right time…in that it gave the rebellious youth of the period heroes with whom they could instantly identify” (Rafter 156).

Author Glenn Man also probes Bonnie and Clyde’s historical context in his claim that major social upheavals associated with the Vietnam War, the race riots, and the America’s emerging counterculture, was feeding American youth the fantasy of being a rebellious spirit fighting against the establishment (Man 112-13). Furthermore, American critics who were not yet using France’s auteur theory failed to recognize the importance of the film’s historical and political contexts in relation to its young audience.

According to Steven Carr, “American criticism remained in crisis over how to explain Bonnie and Clyde’s immense popularity” (93) because “critics fretted over the perceived indifference of audiences who could no longer distinguish between good and bad, right and wrong, truth and falsity…auteurism challenged this assumption” (88). More importantly, this aspect of auteurism helped to explain another reason for Bosley Crowther’s dismal failure at connecting his own disgust at the movie’s graphic violence to the same type of disgust the American youth felt towards the violence occurring in the race riots and the Vietnam War.

Perhaps, if Crowther had been willing to use the new auteur theory to interpret ambiguous narrative meanings or to acknowledge historical contexts of Arthur Penn’s film, he might not have been questioning “whether ‘a film should represent…[our] country in these critical times’” (Carr 83). Thus, through the use of auteurism, critics could now identify the historical and political subtexts of Bonnie and Clyde; except, of course, for one American critic who was still unable to see the history unfolding right in front of his eyes.

The final element crucial to the historical impact of auteurism on Bonnie and Clyde and American film criticism is the empowering voice of youth and how it “turned the critical establishment on its head” (Carr 86). Steven Carr recounts how “shortly after these initial [unfavorable] reviews, the film’s distributor, Warner Brothers-Seven Arts, pulled Bonnie and Clyde from circulation” while a “groundswell of support for the film emerged” (Carr 83). Because the movie was pulled, “readers of the New York Times began protesting Crowther’s missives” (84), the American public witnessed “press conferences, retractions, letters to the editor,” and “even public fretting over manliness…all of which were in print, and…precipitated by a single film” (86).

The effect of these media events forced movie critics across America to finally wake up and take notice of an opinion now more authoritative than their own: the opinion of the youth movement. The most obvious cause for the change of opinion occurred when “Time and Newsweek reversed their critical assessments of the film,” and, “its producer and star, Warren Beatty, convinced Warner Brothers-Seven Arts to re-release the film” (85).

Another important change of opinion is evident in Carr’s article when he cites Richard Schickel’s statement that New York Times critic, Bosley Crowther, “hastened the end of his long career by attacking Bonnie and Clyde three times in print“ (Carr 86). Fortunately, not every critic shared Crowther’s misguided perspective. “Pauline Kael’s career-making defense of the film…marked a turning point for Bonnie and Clyde;” because Kael, unlike Crowther, was cognizant of the fact that audiences had become knowing spectators (85).

According to Carr, “the knowing spectator…understands Bonnie and Clyde’s analogues: the Depression stands for the sixties, gangsters for the counterculture, the police and bands for the Establishment” (82). Furthermore, “that Bonnie and Clyde could be about something other than the historical Bonnie and Clyde, and that audiences could understand this distinction, marks the film as one of the most important of the decade” (81).

But, even more important to the film industry than the remarkable changing of opinions about the film was the fact that “a Hollywood movie like Bonnie and Clyde could appeal to rebellious youth served at least two important functions: first, it meant that the potence of films in reaching marginalized audiences was solidified; and second, it meant that the youth audience could be contextualized within mainstream culture” (Carr 93).

Ironically, by fighting the “Establishment,” these revolutionary youth audiences managed to create their own ambiguous narrative by inadvertently helping the studios “establish the now infamous ‘youth market’” (Carr 86). Even critic Richard Schickel admits his own “amazement that he and his fellow critics did not initially see how Bonnie and Clyde has ‘plugged into youth’s new…image of itself as a band of outsiders…attacking the…corrupting social order ruled by old men and institutions’” (Carr 94). Thus, by recognizing the ambiguousness element of Bonnie and Clyde, the young audience “much like the gangsters before them…both do and do not belong to the system” (Man 113).

In conclusion, by using auteur theory, American film critics were finally able to understand how changing ideologies within a specific historical context establish Arthur Penn’s 1967 film, Bonnie and Clyde, as one of the most important films of the 1960’s. Once critics and audiences were able to comprehend the duality of the film’s narrative structure, “Bonnie and Clyde became the field upon which important struggles of subtext were waged…over a whole way of thinking and talking about the American audience” (Carr 88). Thus, the violent massacre of Bonnie and Clyde at the end of the film that “seems to violate nature itself” has now come to symbolize the violent massacre of American film critics at the end of a violent decade (Rafter 159). “Bonnie and Clyde needs violence; violence is its meaning….It is a kind of violence that says something to us” (Kael 188).

© Kelly Bartley 2005

WORKS CITED

Bordwell, David, and Kristin Thompson. Film History: An Introduction. 2nd ed. New York: McGraw-Hill, 2003.

Carr, Steven Alan. “From ‘Fucking Cops!’ to ‘Fucking Media.’” In Arthur Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde edited by Lester D. Friedman. New York: Cambridge University Press. 2000.

Crowther, Bosley. “Bonnie and Clyde Arrives.” Rev. of Bonnie and Clyde, by Arthur Penn. Reprinted in Arthur Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde edited by Lester D. Friedman. New York: Cambridge University Press. 2000. Originally published in The New York Times, August 14, 1967.

Kael, Pauline “Bonnie and Clyde.” Rev. of Bonnie and Clyde, by Arthur Penn. Reprinted in Arthur Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde edited by Lester D. Friedman. New York: Cambridge University Press. 2000. Originally published in The New Yorker, October 21, 1967.

Man, Glenn. “Ideology and Genre in the Godfather films.” In Francis Ford Coppola’s Godfather Trilogy edited by Nick Browne. Cambridge University Press, unk.

Rafter, Nicole. Shots in the Dark: Crime Films and Society. Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2000.