‘Bonnie and Clyde’ celebrates 50th anniversary

While researching for a "Movies 101" show that I recorded with Nathan Weinbender and Mary Pat Treuthart, I stumbled upon a quote from the late film critic Roger Ebert. “Blockbusters," Ebert wrote, "run the mainstream (film) industry. We may never again have a decade like the 1970s, when directors were able to find such freedom.”

By "the 1970s," Ebert was actually talking about a period that included the late '60s. It was during that decade that filmmakers such as Stanley Kubrick, Mike Nichols, Sam Peckinpah and Arthur Penn created some stunning cinema with films such as "2001: A Space Odyssey," "The Graduate," "The Wild Bunch" and "Bonnie and Clyde."

In many ways, that last film was a prime example of the era. Starring Warren Beatty and Fate Dunaway as the 1930s-era bank robbers Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker, it ushered in an era of new filmmaking norms. As was written in a 1967 Time magazine cover story, "(W)hat matters most about Bonnie and Clyde is the new freedom of its style, expressed not so much by camera trickery as by its yoking of disparate elements into a coherent artistic whole — the creation of unity from incongruity."

That "unity," so to speak, derived from Penn's style of "blending humor and horror." The "incongruity" came from how his film "draws the audience in sympathy toward its antiheroes. It is, at the same time, a commentary on the mindless daily violence of the American '60s and an esthetic evocation of the past."

And then there was the ultra-violence, which is a term freely used in another film from the 1970s, Kubrick's 1971 offering "A Clockwork Orange." Like Peckinpah, Penn splashed fake blood across the screen — in full technicolor — in a way that surprised, and shocked, audiences. And more than a few critics.

As New York Times critic Bosley Crowther wrote, "It is a cheap piece of bald-faced comedy."

Time, of course, has proven Crowther wrong (and not just about "Bonnie and Clyde"). As Ebert wrote in the Chicago Sun-Times, " 'Bonnie and Clyde' is a milestone in the history of American movies, a work of truth and brilliance. It is also pitilessly cruel, filled with sympathy, nauseating, funny, heartbreaking, and astonishingly beautiful."

As always, though, those in the audience are free to form their own opinions. And those who haven't yet seen the film will have a chance by watching "Bonnie and Clyde," on the big screen, on Aug. 13 and 16. The screenings are part of a Fathom Events special 50th-anniversary event at select theaters.

In the Inland Northwest, those screenings will be held at Regal Cinemas' NorthTown Mall and Coeur d'Alene Riverstone Stadium theaters.

Time to step away from the films of today and see one of the films that made everything that followed possible.