Bonnie and Clyde, broadcast this evening on Arte, traces one of the craziest criminal epics that America has known. Faye Dunaway and Warren Beatty play the murderous lovers in Arthur Penn’s masterpiece, a legend of cinema.
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When we pronounce the names of Bonnie and Clyde, two things come to mind: the famous song by Serge Gainsbourg and Brigitte Bardot, and the Arthur Penn film, released in 1967, with Faye Dunaway and Warren Beatty, glowing in the skin of two criminal lovers. In the 1930s, in the United States, Clyde Barrow is about to steal a car in a small town when he notices a young woman. She joins him. It is Bonnie Parker, daughter of the owner of the vehicle and modest bar waitress who is very bored. Fresh out of prison, Clyde doesn’t hide anything from him about the armed robberies that sent him behind bars, nor about his dreams of easy money, freedom and adventure. Leaving everything, Bonnie runs away with him. Together, they become a famous couple of robbers.
Twelve murders are attributed to them
Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow are among the most famous criminals of the 20th century. As John Dillinger, Al Capone, Pablo Escobar … They inherited the title of public enemy number 1 “. With their gang, they passed in the 1930s from the status of petty thugs to that of bank robbers and murderers. Twelve murders are attributed to them. Clyde kills her first man in prison: Ed Crowder, a co-detainee killed who had sexually abused him, in 1931. Then, the murderer accumulates the corpses: the owner of a shop, a sub-sheriff, a grocer, a salesman on Christmas Eve…: yet he claims not to not like killing and taking action just to defend yourself.
The legend of Bonnie and Clyde begins in 1933 when, in the urgency of leaving one of their hideouts, they leave a series of photographs behind them. Happy, armed, cigar in hand or in mouth, they are beautiful, young, and arouse the fervor of the common people, amazed by their daring against the police. In a country hard hit by the Great Depression, their feats of arms spread to the headlines and put the police in several states on the teeth … In June 1933, their car rolled over and caught fire. Bonnie remains trapped in the flames which will cost her her right leg. She will never be able to walk properly again.
Between 1931 and 1934, they engage in a frantic chase with the police, before being finally shot in an ambush on May 23, 1934. It is Franck Hammer, a formidable Texas Ranger who has 53 dead bandits on his hunting board, who is in charge of trapping them. An accomplice parks his car on the side of Route 154. When Bonnie and Clyde Barrow pass him, he asks them for help. The lovers are ducked into ambush by the police and their bodies so riddled with bullets that they are unrecognizable when pulled from the car.
Symbols of a youth in search of emancipation
Several films have been devoted to the duo, the first of which I have the right to live from Fritz Lang (1937), only three years after the assassination of the legendary couple, The lovers of the night from Nicholas Ray (1947), The Bonnie Parker Story (1958) and more recently, Bonnie & Clyde : Dead and Alive (2013).
The shooting of the signed version Arthur Penn, took place at the very scene where the outlaw couple committed their crimes. A respect for reality that gave the film crew the feeling of following in the footsteps of their legend …
When the film was released in 1967, the film’s murderous heroes were erected as symbols of the rebellious youth of the 1960s, then in search of emancipation. It is funny to note that the script was refused by Francois Truffaut and Jean-Paul Godard ! Since then, Arthur Penn’s film has entered the legend of the seventh art. Faced with the unexpected public success of Bonnie and Clyde, many people felt they had been defamed and claimed damages as a result. Among these, let us retain the sister of Bonnie Parker, the nephew of Clyde Burrow or the son of Captain Hammer.
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