To the Editor:
Stephen Hunter’s dissent on Arthur Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde, like so much of the original criticism it generated, had little to do with the movie and much to do with making a political point [“Bonnie and Clyde Died for Nihilism,” July-August]. He implies that the real Bonnie and Clyde weren’t famous until Penn’s film came out in 1967. But the couple had already inspired numerous movies, including Fritz Lang’s You Only Live Once (1937), Nicholas Ray’s They Live by Night (1948), Joseph Lewis’s Gun Crazy (1950), and the B-movie The Bonnie Parker Story (1958). Edward Anderson’s 1937 roman à clef, Thieves Like Us, would later be made into a film by Robert Altman.
I do not know why Mr. Hunter regards Bonnie and Clyde’s fame as an issue in the first place. Other Depression-era outlaws he mentions, including John Dillinger and Baby Face Nelson, were simply lucky enough to ply their trade in regions where there was more press. (As Louise Lasser says in Woody Allen’s Take The Money and Run, “It’s not who you kill, it’s who you know.”)
As I understand it, the crux of Mr. Hunter’s problem with the film is that it “pandered to and fed on the vanities of a generation hell-bent on avoiding an inconvenient [Vietnam] war. . . . Even now it’s difficult to know whether to read the two outlaws as forces of the far-off Dust Bowl 30s or symbols of the more insane 60s.” I assume that Mr. Hunter means the 60s were insane not because there was a war in Vietnam but because people were protesting it.
Bonnie and Clyde, Mr. Hunter writes, “is an ideological crock.” For him, the Chicago Daily News’s Mike Royko and the New York Times’s Bosley Crowther were the only critics brave enough to denounce the film. “I thought they were both idiots,” he says, “I know better now.” No, Royko and Crowther were not idiots, they were just stuffy reactionaries—like, apparently, Mr. Hunter himself.
Bonnie and Clyde had no ideology except for two brief scenes in which it was implied that farmers who had lost their land regarded the couple as Robin Hood–like heroes for robbing banks. If this makes for a crock, one might as well throw Steinbeck out the window.
Mr. Hunter unearths the tired criticism about the actors’ being better looking than their real-life counterparts. This argument was long ago dismissed by John Ford, who, when asked about the historical accuracy of one of his films, said, in effect, “Who cares? It’s a movie.” Hunter objects to the way the Texas Ranger Frank Hamer was portrayed as “the kind of man the Boomer generation would be taught to distrust. . . . Hamer stands for your grandfather’s authority, annoyance at fools, and the willingness to kill in the belief that he was saving the weak by eliminating their predator. He was a righteous killer, a dinosaur whose time had passed. He’s what Barack Obama swears he’ll change about America.” Since much of Hamer’s career consisted of breaking the heads of union men for oil companies, perhaps, then, Obama is right and Mr. Hunter has confused who the weak and the predators really are.
In his cheap shot at “gullible critics” who call Bonnie and Clyde a great film, Mr. Hunter wisely omits its most notable champion, Pauline Kael, who four decades ago demolished his argument when she wrote in the New Yorker:
Why attack Bonnie and Clyde more than the other movies based on the same pair or more than the movie treatments of Jesse James or Billy the Kid or Dillinger or Capone or any of our other fictional outlaws? I would suggest than when a movie so clearly conceived as a new version of a legend is attacked as historically inaccurate, it’s because it shakes people a little. . . . I don’t see how else to account for the use only against a good movie of arguments that could be used against almost all movies.
It’s good to know that after all these years Bonnie and Clyde is still a great enough movie to shake up people like Stephen Hunter.
ALLEN BARRA
South Orange, New Jersey
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Stephen Hunter writes:
It’s a little hard to know what to say to someone who quotes Pauline Kael and thinks he’s making an argument. But then he also thinks name-calling—as in “stuffy reactionary”—is an argument, and that Bonnie and Clyde were as famous as Dillinger and Nelson. Actually, the pictures he cites may have been inspired by Bonnie and Clyde, but none played off the fame of the two Texans, none claimed the mantle of historical re-creation, and all offered—honorably—characterizations that were clearly the province of drama, not history. Arthur Penn’s film is set smack in the middle of History. Is this a distinction Mr. Barra is unable to see?
And of course he misses the central undercurrent of my piece: History is important. Popular art has consequences. Yes, movies customarily butcher the record, as Michael Mann proved in this year’s unfortunate Public Enemies. (My favorite instance of Hollywood license is in The Charge of the Light Brigade, which placed the Crimean War after the Sepoy Mutiny.) But the movie version of reality shouldn’t be accepted as reality, and when a movie plays hard with figures of record, it should be tested by critics against that record. And yes, Frank Hamer may have busted some union heads (who may have busted some knees themselves), but to judge him by the standards of our enlightened time is a little facile and greasy for my taste. By the standards of his own time, a cop who was wounded multiple times in performance of his dangerous duties was a hero.
As for the influence of Bonnie and Clyde, aside from the testimonials to it in the works I cited, I can only say: I was there. I saw how it became an anthem for my generation. I know this because it became an anthem for me, and it was only the passing of many years and the assumption of many adult responsibilities that enabled me to understand what an ideological crock it was.
