Rife with complex sexuality and searing ultraviolence, 1967's Bonnie and Clyde drew a bright, bleeding line between the studio-centric assembly line ethos of Old Hollywood and the auteur-driven personal filmmaking of New Hollywood. The vision of its star and producer Warren Beatty (otherwise known as George Clooney Mark I), the picture was among the first major American movies to reflect the influence of the French New Wave, wherein enterprising filmmakers like Jean-Luc Godard and Jean-Pierre Melville had taken the pulpy atmospherics of 1940's cheapie Hollywood noir and reflected them back through a kaleidoscope of wit, glamour, and impeccable stylishness. Nowhere was this transatlantic conversation more evident than in Faye Dunaway's megawatt portrayal of Bonnie Parker: she opens the film standing nude at her window, hollering at Beatty's Clyde Barrow, then a recently-paroled two-bit ex-con, to keep away from her mother's car; after a few moments of sexually-charged back-and-forth, she goads him into the spontaneous robbery that sets the pair on their fateful trajectory across the Depression-era landscape. By herself, Dunaway would elevate the film into the realm of the iconic, but it is director Arthur Penn's masterful depiction of the pair's gruesome finale that cemented Bonnie and Clyde in the upper stratosphere of our cinema, rejecting genteel precedent in favor of founding a new vocabulary grounded firmly in the tumult of its age.
