At the heart of winter

Italian genre directors of the sixties had few artistic pretensions: they made commercial films. Take the so-called 'dollars trilogy'. Sergio Leone found a formula and star he could work with and struck the iron while it was hot, churning out three films that share no plot points or characters in rapid succession. What's more, directors dabbled in a variety of genres and styles, adopted the latest fads and ripped each other off enthusiastically. Creative anarchy yielded some esteemed classics alongside a whole lot of forgotten genre fare.

Strangely, this altogether mercenary system provides unexpected support for auteur theory. Italian directors may have been hard-working, extraordinarily skilled craftsmen rather than soulful romantic artists, but their films tend to brim with a fierce individualism that was encouraged by the heightened, nonrealistic styles developed in the giallo and western genres.

Sergio Corbucci, I'm starting to realise, was very much an auteur. We last encountered him in 1966, riding high on the success of Django. The following two years are as clear a lesson as anyone could want on the nature of the Italian film industry, for during that time Corbucci directed no fewer than six films - four westerns (Johnny Oro, Navajo Joe, Hellbenders and A Professional Gun), a thriller (Death on the Run) and a musical comedy (Zum zum zum).

The next Corbucci classic, 1968's The Great Silence (Il grande silenzio), is infamous for an ending so bleak that Corbucci had to shoot an alternate version for several markets. I haven't seen the sanitised cut, but it must be as jarring tonally as the actual ending is morally. The Great Silence, you see, is dark and nihilistic to an extent previously unseen in the genre. Corbucci takes all the meaner elements of the spaghetti western and exaggerates them into something resembling grotesque. Parody isn't the right word, though. The film feels too serious for that.

During the great blizzard of 1899, a community of religious dissenters is being hunted down by bounty hunters in the wilderness of the Utah mountains. (The time and place imply they're Mormon fundamentalists, but I don't believe they're ever named as such.) But the hired killers don't stop at outlaws. When her husband is shot dead by Loco (Klaus Kinski), Pauline (Vonetta McGee) hires a gunslinger nicknamed Silence (Jean-Louis Trintignant), mute since bounty hunters shot his family and cut his throat to keep him quiet, to exact revenge.

Meanwhile, Sheriff Burnett (Frank Wolff) is sent by the governor to restore order and end the violence by granting a general amnesty. After his horse is eaten by the outlaws, he barely survives to make it to his destination. He's horrified by the conditions there: Loco lugs frozen corpses around to prove his kills, while local justice of the peace and general store owner Pollicutt (Luigi Pistilli) is openly siding with the bounty hunters and making advances on Pauline.

Django was named for the famous jazz guitarist's paralysed fingers. The character of Silence is another of the director's off-colour jokes, as the taciturn nature of the spaghetti western is exaggerated into literal muteness. But here it actually harms the film. The character concept is interesting, but Trintignant just isn't a good enough physical actor to make it work. Instead, his unforgivably bland hero is constantly outshone by everyone around him.

To be fair, Corbucci seems to have realised this. I couldn't swear to it, but it certainly feels as if Kinski's Loco gets more screentime than Silence, and rightly so. In a black fur coat he resembles a vulture, brutal and amused by the scruples of lesser mortals but not apparently cruel. He carefully notes his kills in a ledger and stresses the lawfulness of his profession, insisting that 'it's our bread and butter'. He's level-headed enough not to let Silence provoke him into a gunfight he knows he would lose. Even his racism ('What times we live in - blacks worth as much as a white man', he laments after shooting Pauline's husband) is more lip-service to his white privilege than the fierce bigotry one would expect of an antagonist.

He's the Old West villain as murderous accountant, a savage indictment of the legally sanctioned violence of capitalism. I can't prove it, but I suspect there's a hint of the 'banality' of bureaucratised mass murder that Hannah Arendt's writings on Eichmann had highlighted earlier in the decade. If so, it might be part of the reason Kinski's lines were not overdubbed by a native English speaker. That, and the fact he's Klaus Kinski. It's a formidable performance, physically relatively restrained but no less mesmerising for it.

The rest of the cast range from the fantastic (Luigi Pistilli's literal murderous accountant) to the good (Frank Wolff's overmatched lawman). Vonetta McGee's performance is not much more than serviceable and her character arc hardly makes much sense, but she is helped by being gorgeous & awesome, if I may abandon my critical detachment for a second. And she gets a rare 'let's run away together, abandoning the bus full of orphans to certain doom!' speech that is actually vindicated by subsequent events.

Frequent handheld close-ups and a focus on squalor even more intense than seen in Django result in a rougher, less stately look than the earlier film. The production design, though, is at least as good. Silence's Mauser C96 semi-automatic pistol is one hell of a cool gun (much is made of the historically accurate use of the stock as a holster). And the wintry vistas of the Italian alps give The Great Silence a natural grandeur Django lacks, although those who've been to the Dolomites and recognise the mountains are in for a pretty severe alienation effect. Last but not least Ennio Morricone turns in another terrific score - though where his work for Leone tends to come out blasting, here the music begins subtly and builds over the film, for a suitably dramatic showdown. It's a great film: nasty, cold and hopeless, to be sure, but great nonetheless.

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to violence

Russ Meyer is well known as the king of sixties sexploitation. And by 'well known', I mean that until a week ago I'd never heard of the man. That isn't the sort of thing we bloggers are supposed to admit, especially of a figure with Meyer's cult clout, but there you go. For me, 1965's Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! served as an introduction both to Meyer's work and a particular strand of exploitation cinema in general.

Faster, Pussycat! is a pitch-perfect showcase for Meyer's idiosyncratic obsession with large-breasted women driving around the Mojave Desert. The film accounts for much of his lasting influence on creators from glam metal bands to Quentin Tarantino. But in some ways it's atypical, too. For one, it isn't sexploitation: it aims to titillate, to be sure, but it's no more explicit in that respect than a Michael Bay film. Neither is it crypto-feminist, pace what Wikipedia claims Jimmy McDonough writes in a book I can't afford.

But it is hilarious. Look no further than the spoof of titillation in the guise of public service that is the gloriously purple prose of the opening monologue. An uncredited John Furlong, clearly in on the joke, chews the scenery like there's no tomorrow:

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to violence - the word and the act. While violence cloaks itself in a plethora [good word, unlikely to show up in film today] of disguises, its favourite mantle still remains sex. Violence devours all it touches, its voracious appetite rarely fulfilled. Yet violence doesn't only destroy, it creates and moulds as well. Let's examine closely, then, this dangerously evil creation, this new breed encased and contained in the supple skin of woman. The softness is there, the unmistakeable smell of female, the surface shiny and silken, the body yielding yet wanton. But a word of caution: handle with care and don't drop your guard. This rapacious new breed prowls both alone and in packs, operating at any level, at any time, anywhere and with anybody. Who are they? One might be your secretary, your doctor's receptionist or a dancer in a go-go club!

Here, women defined by their direct subordination to male authority (receptionists, secretaries, go-go dancers) hide a wilder side that both entices and frightens the presumed-male audience of exploitation films. The plot proper begins as the go-go dancing trio of oversexed Billie (Lori Williams), vaguely Italian Rosie (Haji) and their violent, domineering leader Varla (Tura Satana) are out in the Mojave Desert. Racing their sports cars against clueless suburbanite Tommy (Ray Barlow) turns to violence in which Varla kills Tommy with her bare hands.

The girls kidnap the man's girlfriend Linda (Susan Bernard), but their plans change when they observe a wheelchair-bound old man (Stuart Lancaster) at a local petrol station. Informed by the station attendant that the old man and his sons, faithful Kirk (Paul Trinka) and hench but dimwitted The Vegetable (Dennis Busch), are fabulously wealthy but live by themselves in the middle of nowhere. Varla and her minions immediately decide to drive down to the old man's farm, using Linda as their cover, and get their hands on the cash by any means necessary. But it turns out the old man is less harmless - and a great deal less sane - than he appears.

Crazy murderers versus crazy murderers is a fantastic exploitation premise, and it helps that everyone involved gives it their all. B-movie stalwart Lancaster in particular gives an absurdly fun over-the-top performance, making an unhinged, misogynistic rapist and seriously abusive parent the most compelling character in sight. But the actresses who portray the girls aren't far off. Santana's black-gloved evil and propensity for gleeful violence is portrayed in such an entertaining fashion that we go along with her being both protagonist and villain. But she doesn't upstage her companions, particularly the ditzy, playful Billie, who in Varla's eyes is overly distracted from crime by her fawning over every man she sees.

Only the most curmudgeonly reviewer of Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! could avoid consulting his thesaurus for synonyms of 'fun'. It's a brilliant project that concedes not an inch to reason, taste or reality. Meyer directs with an enthusiasm and panache - see left for a typical heightened contrast in size between two characters, something Sergio Leone would develop into his stylistic signature. At the same time, Meyer is more restrained here than he was in his earlier 'nudies' or post-Hays Code sexploitation flicks. While gratuitous shower and wrestling scenes abound, there is no outright nudity. Faster, Pussycat! does quite well without it.

That leads us to the question of Meyer's portrayal of his central trio, for here we have three active, physically strong women. But that is not at all the same as asserting they are strong female characters. For one, they're fantasies, obviously conceived as different but equally buxom types to cater to various tastes in a presumed-male audience. (Meyer famously preferred buxom women to the petite build characteristic of sixties icons like Mia Farrow and Faye Dunaway, but the fact that we can discuss the man's muses in the same terms we might a prize racehorse tells us everything about the male gaze in his films - never more than a funhouse mirror of patriarchal society, grotesquely exaggerated but springing from the same fount.)

They're also shockingly one-note: designed not to appear as full human beings but as dangerous and exotic circus animals, as the prologue's use of zoological language all but announces. The real characters are men. Kirk and the Vegetable actually develop over the course of the film. So any claim for Meyer as a feminist, inadvertent or otherwise, is pretty much bogus. That doesn't diminish the film's achievements, but it helps us subject Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! to critical appreciation, not fanboyish whitewashing.

Satan of suburbia

In the month of winterfylleþ, 'the tally-keepers of Purgatory, its clerks and gaolers, listen in to the living, who are praying for the dead'. To honour the run-up to Halloween I'll spend this month focusing on horror films, from esteemed classics to tawdry schlock. Above all that'll mean resuming that Mario Bava series, but I'll find time for other films too.

Today's entry falls firmly on the 'classic' side of the spectrum: so much so, perhaps, that we're inclined to forget it's above all a superb piece of genre filmmaking. Roman Polanski is perhaps the greatest purveyor of genre fare since Hitchcock, whether it's noir (Chinatown), thriller (The Ghost) or Oscar bait (The Pianist). Rosemary's Baby (1968), then, is a perfect paranoia thriller with higher aspirations.

A young couple, Rosemary Woodhouse (Mia Farrow) and her actor husband Guy (John Cassavetes), move into an apartment building in New York. Rosemary doesn't like their nosy and eccentric elderly neighbours, Roman and Minnie Castevet (Sidney Blackmer and Ruth Gordon), but Guy soon becomes fast friends with them.

When Rosemary becomes pregnant, it's at first an occasion of joy for the couple. But the mother-to-be soon becomes suspicious. At the advice of the Castevets she has switched to a new obstetrician, Dr. Sapirstein (Ralph Bellamy), who refuses to take seriously her concerns over an increasingly draining and troubled pregnancy. What's more, the Castevets seem to have Guy on their side as they move to isolate Rosemary from her friends, give her suspicious drinks in lieu of prenatal vitamins and have her wear a malodorous pennant containing tannis root, a plant associated with witchcraft according to Rosemary's elderly friend Hutch (Maurice Evans). When the previously healthy Hutch falls into a coma and dies after investigating the Castevets, Rosemary begins to suspect that her neighbours are involved in witchcraft and have made a pact with her husband to take her baby from her.

Feminist readings of Rosemary's Baby have pointed out that the film is about a woman constrained by patriarchy. Guy is a patronising jackass from the start, regularly infantilising and objectifying his wife. When she finds scratches on her body, he nonchalantly explains that he raped her in her sleep. Any bodily autonomy is taken away by the Castevets' witches' brews and Dr. Sapirstein's belittling of her fears. In Rosemary's Baby Polanski empathises with his protagonist's anxiety about a living creature growing in her body, and attacks a system that negates women's personhood by reducing them to the role of carrier.

But the film is also a broadside against the bourgeois culture of the sixties, caught between the stuffy respectability of the Castevets and the hip appeal of a younger generation. Early on Rosemary goes for a Vidal Sassoon haircut, in what would be product placement - if every other character did not immediately (and unfairly) opine that it looks terrible. Beyond a veneer of befuddled harmlessness, of course, the honourable personages of the older generation turn out to be members of a satanic conspiracy. Not that that dampens their enthusiasm for housekeeping: in one of the film's finest scenes, Minnie disarms a knife-wielding Rosemary, then checks to make sure the blade hasn't damaged her parquet floor.

It is only in the film's final minutes that the script clarifies whether the all-encompassing witches' coven preying on Rosemary is real or a figment of a disempowered housewife's imagination. Before that Polanski refuses to tip his hand, emphasising the extent to which male domination mirrors the demonic possession of folklore. 'Patriarchal' is decidedly the right word: the film is about the rule of old men more than men per se, be they naturally aged like Roman or only seemingly old, in the way Guy artificially constructs an age difference to his wife by infantilising her.


All of that, and I haven't yet praised Rosemary's Baby as a near perfect example of the paranoia thriller. Polanski makes the most of images of satanism and witchcraft. It's no coincidence that the film provided much of the imagery peddled both by respectable society and rebellious youth culture during the infamous satanic panic of the following decades. Then there is the terrific, terrifying score of longtime Polanski collaborator Krysztof Komeda.

A supremely accomplished horror film, then, and at 96 minutes leaner than most prestige pictures know to be in our decadent age. It set the stage for the explosion of lurid diabolical cheapies at the turn of the seventies (The Brotherhood of Satan, Mark of the Devil), and the slightly more respectable religious horror that followed (The Exorcist, The Omen). But Rosemary's Baby is smarter and more aware than its imitators, and it's as fresh now as it was in 1968.

I'll destroy you with my positronic ray!

I watched Barbarella the same night I saw 2001: A Space Odyssey with a friend. It was an entirely accidental, oddly specific themed evening: the state of science fiction cinema in 1968. I suppose they're from opposite ends of the spectrum: 2001 is a hugely ambitious, deeply serious attempt to deal with the human condition and the possibility of life 'out there', told through the medium of hard sci-fi; Barbarella is 98 minutes of Jane Fonda prancing through papier-maché sets in stripper outfits.

And yet I love them both equally; and while I may one day be worthy to review 2001, Barbarella has the courtesy to be stupider than me right now. This knowing ludicrousness is not a sign of quality in itself: I loathed the equally gormless Flash Gordon, and one of the most obnoxious qualities of the Scream franchise is its postmodern winking at its own flaws. What, then, makes Barbarella: Queen of the Galaxy (the indescribably beautiful promotional title) a delight where these others aren't?

Well, it isn't the plot. (Which, incidentally, I had to look up.) Sometime in the far future, Barbarella (Jane Fonda) is asked by the President of Earth (Claude Dauphin) to travel to the planet Tau Ceti and find the missing scientist Durand Durand (Milo O'Shea), who is in possession of a positronic ray, a dangerous weapon in an age that has left war behind. On Tau Ceti, Barbarella encounters a series of events that don't quite constitute a plot, and eventually finds she must confront the Great Tyrant of Sogo (Anita Pallenberg) with the help of the blind angel Pygar (John Phillip Law) and Professor Ping (Marcel Marceau). Incoherent is putting it mildly: the various points in the story bear little relation to one another, and the ending is utterly baffling.

Which is why the producers didn't promote the plot: they instead counted on the appeal of Jane Fonda in skimpy clothing. I wouldn't normally discuss an actor's looks, but the film itself pushes Fonda's physical attributes to the front so insistently that I could not review the final product without reference to them. Well, with that lie out of the way:  Jane Fonda is extremely attractive in Barbarella: QotG, although she also looks a lot like her father, Henry Fonda. (Which, my friend remarked, is something frequently encountered in real life: your friend has a fit sister, but the family resemblance is undeniable, creating a weird situation.)

Barbarella is introduced performing an infamous zero-gravity striptease during the opening titles. Your reaction to the visuals and the music in this scene will determine your attitude to the rest of the film: is it sleazy titillation, lowest-common-denominator fluff offering cheap thrills to an assumed male audience, or a charming slice of sixties silliness and an expression of the sexual revolution? (It's both.) Throughout, Fonda slips from one revealing outfit into another. She discovers sex which, we learn, has ceased to be physical on earth, and is eventually tortured in the 'Excessive Machine', in which, the villain threatens, 'you will die... of pleasure!'. Barbarella makes the most of the fall of the Hays Code in the same year. Earlier films could get quite a lot of innuendo past the censors (see The Big Sleep); but in 1968, Dino de Laurentiis could offer you boobs.

The tongue-in-cheek attitude I mentioned earlier certainly goes a long way. In a delightful sequence, Barbarella is attacked by children and killer dolls after crash-landing on Tau Ceti; she is rescued by the Catchman (Ugo Tognazzi), who is just as hairy clad in furs as he is without them. The production design is an important part of the calculation: the producers never attempt to create realistic alien worlds, going instead for obvious plastic, rubber, papier-maché and plaster. The look is somewhat reminiscent of the obviously-fake sets of the original Star Trek series, which was on television at the time; it is certainly light-years from serious contemporary science fiction.

So why do I adore this film - this mess of over-the-top dialogue, awful sets and cheap titillation - where I actively dislike Flash Gordon? It helps that Jane Fonda, unlike the hapless Sam J. Jones, is in on the joke and an able actress. (One wonders how different Bonnie and Clyde and Rosemary's Baby would have been had Fonda not turned them down in favour of filming Barbarella with then-husband Roger Vadim.) There are the hammy supporting performances: the best known may be Milo O'Shea, who gave a more earnest performance as Friar Laurence in Romeo and Juliet the same year. And then there's the fact that Barbarella's spaceship has shag carpet on the walls. Shag carpet. On the walls.

But overall, I think it's the mind-boggling sixties-ness of the thing. The amazing psychedelic pop soundtrack by Bob Crewe and Charles Fox ('Barbarella psychedella, dazzle me with rainbow colours...') sets the mood for the film. And that's where I think Barbarella is more than a guilty pleasure. Though exploitative, its trippy camp and celebration of sex show the buoyant optimism of the flower power generation, the belief that a new age of peace and love was just around the corner. It's a vision of the future we've lost with our cyberpunk metropoleis, killer robots, and nuclear wastelands. Barbarella's future may be the least likely of our visions, but it's certainly one I wouldn't mind living in. Except for the shag carpet, of course.

I want to say one word to you. Just one word. Plastics.

The Graduate is a fine example of an almost extinct subgenre: the funny comedy. Once, you see, funny comedies were fairly common, but in recent years they've been crowded out by scatological and infantile varieties, as well as alleged comedies that contain no jokes (Definitely, Maybe). But first things first.

Benjamin Braddock (Dustin Hoffman, aged thirty in a comical case of Dawson Casting), has recently graduated from university and returned home to his affluent parents and their dreary friends, who are inexplicably enamoured with him (and want to recruit him for tedious careers). Plagued by ennui he begins an affair with Mrs Robinson (Anne Bancroft), the wife of his father's business partner. Things take a dramatic turn, however, when Benjamin is forced by his parents to date the Robinsons' daughter, Elaine (Katharine Ross), and ends up falling for her, much to Mrs Robinson's chagrin.

Let's get this out of the way first: no, The Graduate is not a universal tale of young people's disaffection. Benjamin, unlike most twentysomethings, is filthy rich and, even near the end of the post-war era of prosperity, spoilt for choice among high-flying careers. (As Roger Ebert remarked, 'I wonder how long it took him to get into plastics'.) It's a story of the horror of a life of luxury mapped out for you from birth: a dystopia, I suspect, that many would gladly trade for their less glamorous lives.

So yes, it's a self-indulgent story of privilege. What's more, it is curiously free of any of the struggles of the 1960s: no race conflict, no Vietnam War, no drugs, no real rebellion, in fact, at all: just a curious sense of being adrift. Perhaps the sanitised world the Braddocks inhabit was shielded from these tremors; perhaps that's not what Mike Nichols was interested in.

Ah yes, director Mike Nichols! For I referred to the fact that The Graduate is a funny comedy, and the inspired direction has a lot to do with that. The most famous image from the film is, of course, that of Mrs Robinson putting on her stockings while seducing Benjamin, embodying their lazy objectification of each other; another well-known sequence, Benjamin driving across the San Francisco Bay Bridge, was later to be lovingly ripped off by Cruel Intentions. The editing absolutely needs to be mentioned: my favourite moment is a cut from the protagonist lunging forwards in the swimming pool to a scene I dare not spoil.

All this with a whip-smart comedy script, full of hilarious lines ('Are you here for an affair?' can hardly be bettered, and the subsequent scene of Benjamin being accidentally introduced to various strangers is  priceless), although the later turn into drama is not handled as well as it might have been. While The Graduate is clearly a product of its age, it remains mercifully free of the mustiness that can afflict some pre-1970 films.

That leaves us with the performances. To be frank, neither Hoffman nor Ross are exactly brilliant; both struggle with underwritten characters, and Hoffman shows few signs of the actor we know & love. But Bancroft shines as Mrs Robinson, dominating every scene she's in, although the script serves her ill during the third act. Not a timeless masterpiece, perhaps, but an excellent comedy well worth treasuring in our depraved age.

Headin' nowhere

(Note: much of the historical context, and some of the analysis, is drawn from two sources: Bonnie and Clyde by Lester D. Friedman and Arthur Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde, edited by Friedman, who seems quite the expert on the film. I won’t reference rigorously, this not being an academic essay – just note that I’ve stolen much of the material.)

The ‘New American Cinema’ (c. 1967-1981) was without doubt the richest period of Hollywood. Easy Rider, The Godfather and its sequel, The Conversation, Taxi Driver, Carrie, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, Badlands, Raging Bull, Apocalypse Now, The Deer Hunter, A Clockwork Orange, Annie Hall… That’s just a few of the most important films of that magical decade-and-a-half when new filmmakers revolutionised cinema. They were auteurs, fiercely protective of their individual visions, but by common consent they had one thing in common: they were unleashed by Bonnie and Clyde.

Bonnie and Clyde (1967) was created first and foremost by the passion of four men: first-time screenwriters David Newman and Robert Benton, producer and leading man Warren Beatty and director Arthur Penn. Beatty wanted to gain more independence within the studio system, while Penn was eager to realise his vision of a film inspired by the New Wave that was then in full bloom in France. Indeed both François Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard were in talks to direct the film: while Truffaut made some very specific suggestions that survived in the final product (such as the high angles during car chases), Godard wanted to make the film resolutely his own and set it in the modern day. But Penn won the day, and being no Godard can be a good thing: while still an auteur, he did not insist on being so idiosyncratic and, frankly, difficult. So, like it or not, Bonnie and Clyde is far more accessible (‘easy’, I guess) than your average French film. It was a box-office flop on its limited release in October 1967, but the immediate critical controversy it spawned and the ten Oscar nominations received persuaded executives to re-release the film in early 1968, and the rest is history.

After an astonishingly effective opening montage of Depression-era photographs that begins in silence, the film proper starts with a close-up image of a woman’s mouth. She’s Bonnie Parker (Faye Dunaway), and she spends this opening scene naked. Hollywood naked, you understand: it’s quite clear she is, but you don’t see anything. Still, that’s Penn telling you straight away that what you’re about to see will be taboo-breaking and exciting in all sorts of ways. From her bedroom window, Bonnie observes Clyde Barrow (Warren Beatty) trying to steal her mother’s car. This leads to him inviting her out for a drink, and when he tells her that he has just been released from jail after serving time for armed robbery, she not only suggestively strokes the gun he produces to show off (really, it’s very suggestive, and no-one in 1967 was in any way likely to mistake it), but also dares him to rob a shop for her. Which he does, and she is so excited by this that it takes little persuasion from Clyde to convince her to abandon her tedious existence as a waitress and follow him on a life of driving cool cars, taking what they need without asking, and being wildly in love. Not that the last part works as Bonnie hoped: in a major point of the film, Clyde turns out to be impotent, and the external violence leashed out mirrors the characters’ inner frustration.

Bonnie and Clyde is very clearly divided into three acts, each ending in violence: in the first part, the titular characters meet and set out on their life of crime. Their play-acting at being gangsters definitively ends when, during a bungled bank robbery, Clyde shoots a bank employee to make possible their escape. The second act chronicles the crime spree of the Barrow Gang, consisting beside Bonnie and Clyde of the latter’s brother Buck (Gene Hackman), Buck’s wife Blanche (Estelle Parsons), who is drawn into the gang by accident and loyalty to her husband, and the simple-minded mechanic C.W. Moss (Michael J. Pollard). The Barrow Gang’s aimless life of robbing banks and stealing cars comes to an end when they are cornered by police in the film’s hardest-hitting gunfight. In the third act, Bonnie and Clyde are in hiding, hoping for a fresh start, but we know it is not to be.

If that sounds like I’ve just given away large parts of the plot, fear not: the fact that it will not all end happily is quite clear from early on. Clyde’s shooting of the bank employee is the point of no return: from there on, the lovers have blood on their hands and must atone for it in the end. Nor is their journey really represented as a romantic road trip, although it is clear that the characters would very much like to think they’re living wild and free outside societal restrictions. In her poem about their lives together, Bonnie frames their ‘adventure’ as a modern Robin Hood story. She recounts Clyde’s experience of being kept down by the Man: ‘Then he said to me, “I’ll never be free, so I’ll meet a few of them in hell”.’ But in an early attempted stick-up, Clyde is assaulted by the desperate shop owner, evidently unaware that he is robbing not the rich, but hard-working average Americans.

The obsession with image is one of the most pervasive themes of the film. It is no coincidence that Bonnie and Clyde begins with photographs and a reflection in a mirror while the very final frame of the movie is seen through a window. Bonnie in particular grasps the possibility the media afford. She constructs the image of the gang as dashing outlaws posing with guns and cigars by taking pictures with a captured policeman (Denver Pyle) and sending them to the newspapers. If Bonnie projects an image outwards, Clyde creates illusions within their relationship, cultivating hopes of a romantic life that will plainly not materialise. He tells Bonnie’s mother that when he and Bonnie settle down, they will live no more than three miles from her. ‘You try to live three miles from me and you won’t live long, honey’, Mother Parker tells her daughter in one of the best scenes of the film. ‘You best keep running, Clyde Barrow. And you know it.’

This rejection at his lover’s hands reveals Clyde’s weakness. From the first, he is not in the dominant position in the relationship a Hollywood lead might be expected to be in. He commits the first robbery of the film in his desperation to impress Bonnie and is visibly the more nervous of the two in their early crimes. Bonnie, the clear protagonist in the film’s first act before fading somewhat in the second, takes easily and naturally to a life that liberates her from the cage she knew before. Where Clyde is inarticulate, insecure (constantly driven by the need to impress his girlfriend and keep up with his older brother) and fails in the bedroom, she is vocal, confident and sexually voracious. Indeed, it is difficult to resist the early impression that she is something of a hellcat, a temptress leading weak-willed Clyde down the path of iniquity. That this is not so becomes clear when the rigours of their run from law enforcement reveal Bonnie’s frailty.

If I’ve now made the film doom-laden and laborious, I’ve given you a very wrong impression. For starters, the entire thing is hilarious. Penn switches between action, comedy and tragedy very quickly. One of Clyde’s early attempts at bank robbery fails when the bank he has chosen is revealed to be abandoned, whereupon he drags the sole remaining cashier outside to explain the situation to Bonnie for fear of embarrassing himself: this is a good example of using humour to further the plot (in this case, showing Clyde’s insecurity). And if not for the humour, let’s face it: Bonnie and Clyde is also great at showing attractive young people posing with guns (which, wrong and reactionary though it may be, are decidedly awesome) and wearing fantastic fashion. Here’s what I mean:

Yeah. Faye Dunaway is decidedly central to the film not only in being absurdly well-dressed, but also in exuding sex appeal (no-one can drink a bottle of Coke like Bonnie Parker). Even if little is explicit, Dunaway is so sensual that it would be astonishing if every moral conservative in America hadn’t been appalled. This brings us to the major criticism the film received then: namely, the accusation that it romanticised violent crime. As I pointed out above, the reality is rather more complex than that, but there’s no denying that young people being in love and robbing banks are cool (unless it’s Malick’s Badlands). And of course the policemen gunned down along the way are more or less faceless goons. So the film has it both ways: it foregrounds the characters’ self-delusion while also letting the viewer feel their appeal.

I am as usual ill-equipped to discuss technical aspects, so let’s do it. Penn’s direction is self-consciously flashy: it works to draw attention to itself, but since it’s excellent, that’s all to the good. A character’s death is filmed with an unsteady zoom from a high angle, an unflinching eye on human suffering. In what is probably the film’s most famous scene, Penn uses rapid cutting to devastating effect. His filming of violence is almost nauseatingly visceral, far more real than what moviegoers in 1967 were used to. No accusation is more wrong-headed than that Penn made violence look glamorous. Instead, he made you feel it. At the height of the Vietnam War, that was a political statement, and one just as relevant today.

Bonnie and Clyde is a rich film. It bears endless scholarly dissection. But for the casual or not so casual viewer, it’s a visceral, innovative and, dare I say it, thoroughly entertaining experience centred on a couple of outstanding performances. Like Godard’s Weekend, Bonnie and Clyde has a sort of inbuilt negative dialectic: it constantly negates the meanings it seems to construct. It’s a cautionary tale about the follies of youth. Ah, but it’s so romantic! As for me, I’ll remember the tragedy and the violence. And Faye Dunaway sporting a beret.