The True Story Of Bonnie & Clyde: Does The Movie Get It Right?

Arthur Penn's controversial "Bonnie and Clyde" was one of the first shots across the cultural bow at the outset of the New Hollywood revolution. This is when the major studios finally, if quite accidentally, realized a legion of moviegoers (i.e. Baby Boomers) were losing interest in historical epics, war films, and Westerns, and, desperate to save their industry, handed over the reins to artists and executives who understood what this upstart generation was craving. Rock-and-roll was over a decade old by this point, while beat poetry and protest music were all the rage. Audiences wanted movies that burned with the same dissatisfied fire that fueled all of the other art they were imbibing and inhaling at the time. They wanted to be challenged.

"Bonnie and Clyde" did more than challenge moviegoers. It shook them up. Many loved this. Some, like The New York Times' chief film critic Bosley Crowther, positively resented it.

Crowther's review has become infamous as a rant from the outgoing cultural establishment against the carefree nihilism of the burgeoning counterculture. "It is 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 cutups in 'Thoroughly Modern Millie,'" wrote Crowther. He was not the only person who hated the glorification of Bonnie Parker (Faye Dunaway) and Clyde Barrow (Warren Beatty). Historians and still-living contemporaries strongly took issue with the film in the wake of its release, and for good reason: Penn and the screenwriting duo of Robert Benton and David Newman took multiple liberties with the factual record. What did they get wrong and/or misrepresent?

One major departure from the historical record has to do with Bonnie Parker's physical state by the end of the film. In real life, she had been burned and disabled after surviving a rather gnarly car crash. This was likely elided due to makeup challenges (one account says her skin was burned off to the bone in places) and the bummer quality of the vivacious Bonnie being so badly injured. Oddly, the film's depiction of her getting shot during the escape that leads to the death of Buck Barrow (Gene Hackman) and the arrest of his wife Blanche Barrow (Estelle Parsons) was a total invention; in actuality, she escaped that scrape unharmed, and Clyde, obviously, did not kill a lawman in response to her getting shot.

Clyde did kill, however, as did Bonnie. Though they were often cordial enough to their captives (giving them money to help them get back home), they valued self-preservation first. That comes through in the film. But did they really send photographs and poetry to the press while on the run? No. Those items were all discovered posthumously, including the famous picture of Bonnie holding a shotgun on Clyde.

As for the depiction of Texas Ranger Frank Hamer (Denver Pyle) as oafish and inept, that was so off-base that his family sued the producers for defamation and settled out of court for an undisclosed sum. Also disputed is the film's final scene. Do you love that moment of silence interrupted by a rustle, the flutter of birds and a hail of gunfire? Alas, that's not how it went down in real life. According to people who were on the scene, Bonnie and Clyde were still driving the car when the Rangers began blasting away.

One other person who was upset with her portrayal was the real Blanche Barrow. Even though Parsons won an Academy Award for her performance, Blanche was none too pleased with being depicted as, in her words, "a screaming horse's ass."

Do these revelations make you think less of "Bonnie and Clyde?" They shouldn't.

As a historical drama, "Bonnie and Clyde" is true to the spirit of the outlaws' crime spree, but streamlined to better tell a propulsive story. Name a great historical film, then go digging into the scholarship around it and you'll find that significant liberties were taken in doing justice to the life and times of its subject(s).

To be sure, "Bonnie and Clyde" is a cultural argument starter, but that has nothing to with its service to the historical record. The major gripe about the movie is that, as Crowther claimed at the time of its release, it's a deeply cynical lark of a journey with a couple of kill-happy kids who were anything but Robin Hoods. I think that's the delicious danger of Penn's movie (something that was hardly novel at the time, what with Joseph H. Lewis' "Gun Crazy" and countless mob and gangster flicks in its rearview): We're enthralled by Bonnie and Clyde's brazen lawlessness from start to finish, and we do want them to escape, even though we've seen them kill at least one innocent person.

Maybe one day some brilliant young filmmaker will deliver a naturalistic, warts-and-all take on the Bonnie and Clyde legend. But for now, we've got this truth-skirting masterpiece that's still a vicarious kick 57 years later.