They’re young, they’re in love, and they kill people.” That was the famous tag-line for Arthur Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde (1967), as unforgettable now as it was then. The film was about Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker who, as an FBI website reports, killed 13 people in a “crime spree” that lasted 18 months and captured the imagination of a public hungry for the exploits of various “Robin Hoods” as they robbed the “greedy” banks.
There’s no denying that “young and in love” plays well, perhaps especially for gangsters. Fifty-two years ago Penn wisely cast two glamorous leads, Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway, and showed them, at least part of the time, loving and laughing their way from one murder to the next, each death filmed with an unromantic realism that was unprecedented at the time and can still make viewers wince.
