|
Bonnie and Clyde
Average Customer Review : 4.5/5 based on 142 reviews
Usually ships in 24 hours
List Price : $14.98
Price : $13.49
Customers who bought this also bought
No Country for Old Men
There Will Be Blood
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (Two-Disc Collector's Edition)
Cool Hand Luke (Deluxe Edition)
The Wild Bunch - The Original Director's Cut (Two-Disc Special Edition)
Editorial Reviews
One of the landmark films of the 1960s, Bonnie and Clyde changed the course of American cinema. Setting a milestone for screen violence that paved the way for Sam Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch, this exercise in mythologized biography should not be labeled as a bloodbath; as critic Pauline Kael wrote in her rave review, "it's the absence of sadism that throws the audience off balance." The film is more of a poetic ode to the Great Depression, starring the dream team of Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway as the titular antiheroes, who barrel across the South and Midwest robbing banks with Clyde's brother Buck (Gene Hackman), Buck's frantic wife Blanche (Estelle Parsons), and their faithful accomplice C.W. Moss (the inimitable Michael J. Pollard). Bonnie and Clyde is an unforgettable classic that has lost none of its power since the 1967 release. --Jeff Shannon
Spotlight Reviews
"Reach for the sky!" sweet-talkin' Clyde would holler... (2008-12-30)
Customer Review : 5
"Bonnie and Clyde" is the correct answer to the trivia question: "What movie did CBS-TV air opposite the Billie Jean King/Bobby Riggs 'Battle of the Sexes' tennis match?" (King won, BTW.) "The Ballad of Bonnie and Clyde" was also a 1967 Top 40 pop hit for Little Georgie Fame (on EPIC records and 8-track tapes!).
Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow lived fast and died young and violently. Their final moments are the stuff of legend, and for anyone doubting the "hail of lead" scenario, I can only say that a LONG time ago, I saw the actual car that Parker was in essence executed in while Barrow caught a few dozen bullets as he stood nearby. You would not believe the number of holes that machine sustained!
This is one bloody darn picture, and not just at the end. For example, the fate of one Barrow gang member (Clyde's older brother Buck) shouldn't happen to a dog, as the saying goes. Every principal cast member gives here a stand-out performance. The story of a free-wheeling bank robber couple is fast-moving and at times positively gruesome. While director Arthur Penn does allow the blood to flow freely, he also chooses to gloss over the issue of Clyde's sexuality. A minor point.
Also from director Arthur Penn:
THE LEFT HANDED GUN (1958) is another take on the Billy the Kid story. With Paul Newman as William Bonney. Adapted from the Gore Vidal play.
THE CHASE (1966) is a prison break story set in a small Southern town. Stars Marlon Brando, Jane Fonda and Robert Redford.
THE MISSOURI BREAKS (1976) is a fine western featuring Jack Nicholson, Marlon Brando and Randy Quaid.
Parenthetical number preceding title is a 1 to 10 viewer poll rating found at a film resource website.
(8.1) Bonnie and Clyde (1967) - Warren Beatty/Faye Dunaway/Michael J. Pollard/Gene Hackman/Estelle Parsons/Denver Pyle/Dub Taylor/Evans Evans/Gene Wilder
Models gone wild (2008-12-28)
Customer Review : 3
For the first half of this film, it's just pretty to look at. Dunaway and Beatty are just too pretty for words even if the acting is questionable. I was amazed to find out that Estelle Parson won an Oscar for her portrayal of Blanche (the only member to live to a ripe old age.) Parson just runs around screaming--annoyingly so. Still the film manages to entertains and in the end that's all that counts.
3 stars out of 4 (2008-12-18)
Customer Review : 4
The Bottom Line:
Bonnie and Clyde was a cultural touchstone, but that does not make it a classic; while it is by no means a poor movie, it has a tendency to meander and does not resonate now the way it did in the 1960s.
Beautiful, but misses a lot of the real story (2008-11-24)
Customer Review : 4
As our nation teeters on the brink of what may be another Great Depression, it's poignant to look back on the last one. This movie was visually beautiful and artistically ground breaking, but the real story was much richer and darker.
They did not meet when Clyde was trying to steal Emma Parker's car; they met at a gathering of mutual friends and relatives when Bonnie was out of work.
Clyde was not gay or impotent, but an accomplished Cassanova who had serveral girlfriends, some serious, before he ever met Bonnie. Everyone who actually knew him testified to that. Also, banks were not his favorite target; convenience stores, gas stations, drug stores, and fruit stands were more his speed. He kept moving like a haunted man; when the owner got the death car back, she found he'd averaged 300 miles a day on the odometer. He was brutalized and sodomized at Eastham prison farm, and this experience gave him a mission he eventually carried out (which is not depicted in the movie): to go back and free as many cons as he could. It was the killing of a prison guard by a man he freed that set in motion the task force that would eventually ambush him. They never kidnapped or humiliated Frank Hammer, he never saw them till the day he helped kill them.
Clyde's gang was much bigger than the movie showed. C. W. Moss was a composite of W. D. Jones (a teenager who didn't drive as much as the movie showed), and Henry Methvin. Henry and his family would eventually betray Bonnie and Clyde in return for a plea bargain. We also don't see Raymond Hamilton, the gentleman bandit, or his unpopular girlfriend Mary O'Dare. It was she who was obnoxious and demanded a share of the loot, not Blanche. Hamilton was eventually captured and went to the Texas electric chair at 21, right after Joe Palmer who had killed the guard at Eastham. Ralph Fults, Floyd Hamilton, and many others are not mentioned in the movie. We also don't see Bonnie's limp from a horrendous burn in a car accident.
Blanche Barrow was much younger, slimmer, prettier and more charming than Estelle Parsons played her. She did wear riding breaches towards the end. In her memoirs there were two occasions where she pointed out to Clyde that people were acting funny, but he brushed her off. The gunfights at Platte City and Joplin could have been evaded if they'd listened to her. When Buck and Blanche went to meet Clyde, Buck had a full pardon and a paid-for car. If they'd left one day sooner, they could have died of old age together. Buck did not die at Dexfield, but five days later in a hospital, of infection following surgery. Blanche did time in prison where she wrote her memoirs, was eventually parolled, and remarried.
After Clyde got out of prison, and he did chop off two toes to escape Eastham farm duty, the Dallas police hassled him so frequently he couldn't hold a job. Clyde, Bonnie, Buck, and Blanche were slim, tiny people, and Clyde felt that this might be why there was so much violence around them, because they weren't taken seriously. Also there was no mention of the rabbit Bonnie got for her mother and carried around for a time. ("Keep him away from the police - he's been in two gunfights" when she handed him over)
The movie also didn't include the ghastly postmortem exam and embalming, the mobs at the funerals, and the harboring trial where even the moms got jail time. Bonnie's sister who nursed her burns, Henry Barrow the hard working ex-share cropper, and many other key figures were also absent. Faye Dunnaway did not look or dress at all like Bonnie. All in all, a warning of how NOT to cope with hard times.
My Life With Bonnie And Clyde Running With Bonnie and Clyde: The Ten Fast Years of Ralph Fults Depression Desperado: The Chronicle of Raymond Hamilton The Family Story of Bonnie and Clyde The true story of Bonnie & Clyde, (A Signet book, P-3437) Bonnie and Clyde: A Twenty-First-Century Update
once-controversial film (2008-11-19)
Customer Review : 5
I bought this when I was collecting Gene Wilder movies. Turns out, it was his film debut. I hadn't seen this before, but I do remember all the controversy around it when it first came out. Funny, it seems so tame now.
Warren Beatty is Clyde Barrow; Faye Dunaway is Bonnie Parker. They rob banks during the depression, and they're joined by Clyde's brother Buck (Gene Hackman), Buck's wife Blanche (Estelle Parsons), and a young gas station attendant (Michael J. Pollard) they recruit as a driver.
They go on their merry way, with preacher's daughter Blanche's protests their only problem, until things start to catch up with them.
It's a wonderful blend of exciting action, humor, and pathos--the sort-of lovers racing gleefully toward their doom. Clyde in particular is almost innocently childlike in his self-centeredness and lack of consideration of the consequences of his actions, not to mention his ambiguous sexuality. I'm not that well-versed in evaluating acting performances, but I believed all these characters.
Which is not to say that I believe Beatty and Dunaway were just like the actual Barrow and Parker. Far from it, I'd say--rather than a portrayal of actual fact, the movie is more fiction based on the true story.
Oh, and Gene Wilder? He was wonderful as a man who's briefly caught up in the gang when they steal his car.
|
|
