 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
Tuesday, February 11
Bonnie & Clyde
With live music from The Mud Hens
The Red Vic Movie House, San Francisco
7:15 pm and 9:35 pm - $6.50
General admission. All ages.
 |
 |
Those of us born after Bonnie and Clyde was released tend to remember two things about it (whether we’ve seen the film or not): “Foggy Mountain Breakdown” and the final hail of bullets that brings the film (and its protagonists) to an end.
But when Bonnie and Clyde hit movie screens in 1967, American filmgoers had never seen anything like it (except for those who’d been watching films of the French new wave)—the impressionistic editing, the rapid shifts from comedy to tragedy, the brutal violence, and the frank portrayal of Clyde Barrow’s sexual impotence.
Despite being panned by the critics and quickly pulled from theaters, the film became a cultural phenomenon, at first through sales of the soundtrack album, and later a Dunaway-inspired fashion craze. Roger Ebert describes the film as “the first masterpiece I saw on the job.” Critic Patrick Goldstein (with 30 years of hindsight) called it “the first modern American film.”
Director Arthur Penn and producer Warren Beatty cast unknown stage actors who would later become icons of the cinema: Faye Dunaway, Gene Hackman, even Gene Wilder, who appears briefly as a hostage of the Barrow gang. The bluegrass-laden soundtrack by Flatt & Scruggs and the Dillards combined with Burnett Guffey’s cinematography to conjure an essential image of rural America in the time of the Great Depression.
But at heart the film is about trouble—money, sex, and fame—and its ineluctable lure. Trouble that starts on a hot summer day with a Coke bottle, a pistol, and a dare.
Live pre-show music will be provided by The Mud Hens, the old-time duo of Alan and Elaine Bond.
Links