bonnie and clyde (d. arthur penn, w. david newman, robert benton, robert towne)

1. Acting. Dunaway and Beatty offer one of those rare masterclasses in how to elevate a role through the use of innate charisma onto an epic level. In some ways Penn’s movie is reminiscent of The Getaway, with McQueen and MacGraw, where the sexual tension between the two leads offers the story an extra dimension. Only in this film, the brave choice is made to explore Clyde Barrow’s impotence and push this as far as they can, showing how their love affair flowered in spite of this. It feels like a very modern choice, foregrounding the relationship problem, which helps both actors give such nuanced performances.

2. History. The story of Bonnie and Clyde takes place against the backdrop of the recession. The first bank they plan to rob is actually bankrupt, there’s nothing there. The film carefully locates the story within this social milieu. It’s nothing extraordinary but at the same time it feels different. Bonnie and Clyde and the film itself become part of the counter-culture. Nowhere more so than in a scene that might have come out of a Midwest Vineland, when they arrive, bloodied and wounded, at a small lakeside community of people who appear to have been made destitute, but who offer the mythical criminals what little they have, recognising and confirming them as folk heroes. This chapter of the American dream tends to be glossed over, the Mice and Men moment, by the narrative of post-war prosperity, but the US has always had an underclass, looking for champions, and the film engages with its characters’ stories on a mythic level.

3. Myth. Nowadays, Hollywood myths are constructed around comic book characters. Big budget films run shy of humans. The division between the real and the idealised imaginary has rarely been greater and every new offering from the popcorn stable reinforces it. The sixties and early seventies, for some reason, bucked this trend. It is not fanciful to think that the drift towards an ahuman politics, a turbo-charged mechanistic vision of capitalist nirvana, embodied by the current US president and the by the country’s role within the world, has been facilitated by this abstention on the imaginary scale by the country’s most powerful myth makers. 

the man with the golden arm (d. otto preminger, w. walter newman, lewis meltzer, nelson algren)

In the olden days you went to Cinemateca half expecting that the projector might break down and the film would struggle to get to the end. Those days have gone, just like the old salas have gone, but this screening was a throwback. Half way through, the film gave up the ghost, and even though valiant efforts were made to resuscitate it, I ended up watching the final hour in a much better print on YouTube.

Given all this, it’s worth noting that the screening was part of a season of alternative films that managed to sneak under the radar. Preminger’s Chicago, full of sleaze balls, femmes fatales, and flop houses, not to mention the junk, is beautifully realised. It feels like something out of Gorky, the lower depths, a place where the crushing  inevitability of poverty is bound to get you in the end. In the midst of this, Sinatra gives a bravura performance, part junkie, part matinee idol. The operatic notes of the direction clearly play to his hand, but we perceive another man in his performance to the smooth entertainer he became. The desperation of his character, Frankie Machine, is completely credible, which perhaps hints at another life Sinatra might have lived had the gods not smiled on him.