FREE: VHS BONNIE & CLYDE, WARREN BEATTY, FAYE DUNAWAY, 1967.

The listing, VHS BONNIE & CLYDE, WARREN BEATTY, FAYE DUNAWAY, 1967. has ended.

This movie ignited critics and the public alike when it was first released in theatres. Much discussion centered around the movie's graphic violence (which was considered shocking by 1967 standards --- two years later "The Wild Bunch" would raise the ante even higher); there was also considerable hullaballoo over the film's glamorization of its lawless true-life anti-heroes (which was in fact an old Hollywood tradition best exemplified by a handful of late 1930's and early 1940's biographical Westerns including "Jesse James", "Belle Starr", "Billy the Kid", etc. in which beautiful actors portrayed the murderous title characters as Technicolored lads and ladies).
35 years later the fires of debate have burned out, and what remains notable about "Bonnie and Clyde" is neither its cutting-edge violence nor its historical inaccuracies, but instead the fine craftsmanship that went into its creation. The performances are uniformly outstanding; the cinematography is evocative of a time and place that can still be glimpsed in parts of the Ozarks, Oklahoma, and North Texas; the editing is clean and well-paced; the direction is innovative and assured, even poetic in some sequences (the initial acquaintance of Barrow and Parker, the reunion of Bonnie's family, the final ambush scene). This film is the telling of legend, not the chronicle of biographical scholarship, and it unfolds its story masterfully.