You can tell how excited we were to watch this movie from the part where it’s been like three months since the last one of these that we watched.

So it’s one of those “partners team up for crime, because crime is exciting and sexy, but oh no it turns out crime is also bad, and then they get shot by the law” movies. It’s like Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, it’s like Breathless, like Badlands, it’s like seriously a zillion movies.

I think it might be the first Hollywood movie of its kind, though? (Breathless was 1960, and this was 1967, and they definitely feel of a kind… but maybe French movies weren’t super popular with mass audiences back then/ever? But fun fact: They actually approached both Truffaut and Godard to direct this movie, because the script was heavily influenced by the French New Wave.) And Beatty and Dunaway definitely work as big ol’ movie stars in the movie, just oozing charisma in their attempts to make crime seem fun and cool for the whole family.

Overall upshot, though, is that it feels kind of generically bland and been-there-done-that, so this is definitely one where you need to account for its age, and then also ignore French cinema, I think.

Random things:

  1. Wikipedia says: Bonnie and Clyde was one of the first films to feature extensive use of squibs – small explosive charges, often mounted with bags of stage blood, that are detonated inside an actor’s clothes to simulate bullet hits. Released in an era where shootings were generally depicted as bloodless and painless, the Bonnie and Clyde death scene was one of the first in mainstream American cinema to be depicted with graphic realism.

    I feel like this is a big thing with American shooty-shooty cinema, that there’s always a “new benchmark for graphic violence” being set, and they all seem SUPES CHEESY by modern standards. Look how far we’ve come at depicting the violent destruction of human bodies!

  2. Weirdest moment: They kidnap Gene Wilder, and he does a whole awkward thing where he’s just totally being Gene Wilder, and it’s seriously just totally out of nowhere in the middle of the movie, very bizarre. Also, apparently it was Wilder’s first movie role. I would not have guessed that.

  3. Every time they get in a car, it plays this deedle-deedle banjo music, and it’s supes-ridiculous. I kept expecting a narrator to get on and talk about them Duke boys. (A police car did, at one point, even stop and turn around at the state line, so.)