The Big Screen (65 page)

In the
New York Times
, Bosley Crowther began what became a campaign against
Bonnie and Clyde
. He called it “a cheap piece of bald-faced slapstick comedy that treats the hideous depredations of that sleazy, moronic pair as though they were as full of fun and frolic as the jazz-age cut-ups in
Thoroughly Modern Millie
.” Crowther was sixty-two and he had been at the
Times
over twenty-five years. He was also increasingly distressed by the violence in movies: “The film critic,” he said, “is performing a function akin to a pastor—he is a counselor of a community about the values of a picture.” A lot of educated people were scared in the 1960s.

In
Newsweek
, Joe Morgenstern was half-impressed but half-troubled: it's “a squalid shoot-'em-up for the moron trade,” he wrote. But he felt uneasy. So he asked his wife, the actress Piper Laurie, if she'd care to see the film in a theater. What they found—and this is a lesson for us all—was that the movie that had seemed squalid and rowdy in a sedate screening room had a packed house excited. So Morgenstern tried another, friendlier review—second thoughts from a film critic?

That's when Pauline Kael jumped in, with Bonnie Parker's flourish. She had planned a long essay for
The New Republic
. When they turned it down, Kael went to
The New Yorker
(where she had appeared just once before). This was her own career being built, and why should that not help her love the film more? She identified with the kids and with Beatty! (Ten years later, in a wild misstep, she would go to work for him in Los Angeles.) She did a seven-thousand-word piece (revolutionary in its length) and she uttered a sweeping cry such as we heard in the
Last Tango
review. She was at the cultural barricade, going over the top:

“
Bonnie and Clyde
brings into the almost frighteningly public world of movies things that people have been feeling and saying and writing about…
Bonnie and Clyde
needs violence; violence is its meaning.”

At
Time
, Stefan Kanfer overthrew the magazine's first dismal notice and supplied a rave for which editors ordered up a cover collage by Robert Rauschenberg. By the end of the year,
Bonnie and Clyde
was not just a rerelease hit but a cultural talking point.

Over forty years later the violence in
Bonnie and Clyde
may prompt nostalgia. The picture is farther away now than the Barrow gang was in 1967. But in its moment, it split age groups and attitudes to the cinema. Kael was on the mark in divining the passionate involvement some people felt for the characters and the film's effrontery in a time when public danger seemed out of control. Antiwar marches were on television news, including clashes with police. One outrage in
Bonnie and Clyde
was its contempt for those nasty Texas Rangers. When Bonnie kissed Ranger Frank Hamer, on or in the mouth, he spat in her face—it was an iconographic incident for the 1960s, separating those who wanted satisfaction from those embarrassed at its prospect.

“You know what you done? You told my story!” Clyde's epiphany was infinite and embracing: a deft glamorization of the 1930s had caught a current longing in America. This dream may have been fanciful, yet no sillier and no less potent than what
Casablanca
had meant in 1942–43. Beatty became a role model for a changing industry. The film clawed its way back into the light, after being withdrawn by Warners in early October. It would end up with rental income to Warner Bros. of $22 million. Pauline Kael was established at
The New Yorker
, not that that eased her insecurity. And the film can be regarded now as a halcyon moment, when American movies mattered.

Who did it? Benton and Newman saw the opening, and Beatty insisted on its happening. He came out of his shell as an actor (he was usually too guarded and smart to give that much of himself). Dunaway was uncannily present—but was she ever there again? Arthur Penn deserves credit for that as much as for Estelle Parsons's wailing discord and Michael Pollard's sleepy-boy mumbling. The music and the clothes became marketable. Careers were launched for Benton and Newman, Gene Hackman, and several others.

But it was the audience that made the picture and would not abide by Bosley Crowther's counsel. The critic was replaced at the
Times
in 1968—not that he was simply wrong. (Renata Adler held the job for a year, and then Vincent Canby took over.) Jack Warner had sold his interest in the family company to Seven Arts. It was a heady moment, though the long-term consequences of liberated violence would one day spill beyond control. Of course, 1967 was also the year of
The Graduate
(a cool, ironic show over which many lost kids identified with Dustin Hoffman and allowed the deadpan first two thirds to dissolve into a daft escapist ending). But
In the Heat of the Night
won Best Picture, with racial liberalism and narrative predictability. That was a “statement” film the Academy could congratulate itself on.

Bonnie and Clyde
was nominated for ten Oscars, but it won only for Estelle Parsons and for Burnett Guffey's photography. In the Best Actress category, Katharine Hepburn in
Guess Who's Coming to Dinner?
beat out Faye Dunaway's Bonnie—which one would you take home to meet your parents? But which one wrote the poem in your dreams? The past has always lingered at the Academy. Dede Allen was not even nominated for the editing. The old guard of Hollywood was in shock from the alarming rhythms she'd put in the film, but America knew the pacing already from television's montage.

A Hollywood window opened as many moguls took their big sleep. The owners and the new corporations in American pictures were less likely to grasp the power and the knack of making movies that made an audience say, “You told my story!” Instead of taking the public's money and hearing their reactions afterward, the new leaders had been to law school and business school. They would treat pictures as actuarial case studies. A sensation was at risk of being organized. So in history, we have to see how this pivotal moment called
Bonnie and Clyde
had glimpsed the exit sign as well as the modern orgy.

Critics and commentators on film who came into their own in the years from 1967 to 1976 (roughly from
Bonnie and Clyde
to
Taxi Driver
) often refer to the period as a “silver age.” That is meant to balance the golden age, which is more or less from sound until the end of the war. But in American film studies, any attribution of an “age,” with the promise of shared attitudes or consistency, is loaded with danger. Yes, it's true that the brief span of time saw the arrival of a band of new filmmakers, many of whom were at least wary friends. (Film is always a competition.) It would include Bob Rafelson, Robert Altman, Martin Scorsese, Alan Pakula, Sam Peckinpah, Francis Ford Coppola, Steven Spielberg, Brian De Palma, Hal Ashby, George Lucas, Dennis Hopper and Peter Fonda, Peter Bogdanovich, William Friedkin, and tangential or visiting figures such as Roman Polanski, Bernardo Bertolucci, John Schlesinger, John Boorman, Milos Forman, Bob Fosse, John Cassavetes, and that recurring American in Hertfordshire, Stanley Kubrick.

You don't have to like all the silver age films, but the grouping that follows is such a departure from pictures of the early 1960s. It is marked by a concern with current realities, with bleak endings and a mounting unease over the state of America. It is a new attitude toward movie entertainment, more challenging, less universal. Still, several of these films made serious money:
Easy Rider
(1969),
Five Easy Pieces
(1970),
The Last Picture Show
(1971),
The Long Goodbye
(1973),
The Wild Bunch
(1969),
Mean Streets
(1973),
A Woman Under the Influence
(1974),
Klute
(1971),
Chinatown
(1974),
Jaws
(1975),
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
(1975), and the most intricate and ambivalent of them all,
The Godfather
(1972).

At first, it seems enticing to view that group as the result of youngish, robust talents (many of whom had been to film school or some equivalent) stepping into the wreckage of the studio system and taking power for themselves in a way that meant looking at their world “for real” and seeing it accurately. It was something to be excited about. Alas, in time it led to the reassertion of business reorganization in American film—and for the worse. Moreover, it coincided with technological developments—the culture of special effects and the onset of video—that few could foresee or control. In addition, the “silver age” also had its share of films that had nothing to do with reality and every sign of playing the old game of reassurance that a mass medium took as its duty:
Doctor Dolittle
(1967),
Guess Who's Coming to Dinner?
(1967),
The Lion in Winter
(1968),
Oliver!
(1968),
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid
(1969),
Airport
(1970),
Love Story
(1970),
Patton
(1970),
The Sting
(1973),
The Towering Inferno
(1974),
Rocky
(1976), and even
Jaws.

Yes,
Jaws
is on both lists, and a sign of how tricky it is to read trends. Everyone agreed that
Jaws
was a very frightening film, but the source of its fear was a ridiculous rubber toy and a concocted threat. As a rule, that's how Hollywood handled fear directly. It was rare for a movie, like
Psycho
, to offer lurid “horror” as a mask for the inner dread of loneliness, or like
Chinatown
, which used a murder mystery and a nasty case of incest to highlight the way Los Angeles had always been a show run by the bosses. Sharks and scandalous incest can be games for the huddled masses that may divert their attention from political and economic failure, from racism and unnecessary wars. Combat war games sometimes serve to make us bored with the real thing. Worrying films often give us the wrong thing to worry about. Thus, the lasting question in
The Godfather
, both parts, was whether we ended up loathing the Corleones or wanting to be part of their protective family. It was said, fairly enough, that Michael Corleone, the most fascinating character of the silver age, carried a hint of Nixon. But was the film liberal or conservative?

When it came to the second part of
The Godfather
, in 1974, Coppola offered a thank-you, from a movie kid to a one-time patron. He gave Roger Corman a small part in the picture.

Born in 1926, Corman was educated at Stanford and Oxford. But he was a messenger boy at Fox in the late 1940s, and he couldn't forget the thrill. So he went back to Hollywood and started to direct low-budget action movies—Westerns, horror, rock music, bikers, gangsters. He worked fast, cheap, with Hollywood stars on the slide, good technicians, and the new breed of film students to help out for next to nothing and the chance to see a picture being made. His movies had titles such as
Swamp Women
(1956),
Gunslinger
(1956),
It Conquered the World
(1956),
Attack of the Crab Monsters
(1957),
Machine-Gun Kelly
(1958; that was early Charles Bronson),
A Bucket of Blood
(1959),
House of Usher
(1960; that was Vincent Price in Edgar Allan Poe, the closest Corman came to respectability).

Along the way, if he trusted a novice, he would let him make a picture if it was very, very inexpensive. The unofficial “school” he presided over had an impressive group of students: Irvin Kershner made
Stakeout on Dope Street
(1958), Monte Hellman did
Beast from Haunted Cave
(1959), Coppola directed
Dementia 13
(1963), Peter Bogdanovich's debut was
Targets
(1968), and Martin Scorsese made
Boxcar Bertha
(1972).