Bonnie and Clyde

Director: Arthur Penn

1967 / 111min / 35mm

Dede Allen owes no small part of her reputation as an unsurpassed poet of screen violence to her work on Penn’s New Hollywood watershed, the rough-and-ready, sepia-tinted retelling of the Depression Era crime spree undertaken by Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker, hillbilly antiheroes embodied here by Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway. While widely mythologized for its Production Code-shattering scenes of bloodletting, including its unforgettable concluding bullet ballet, Bonnie and Clyde is also a film of real rustic poetry—two flipsides of the same coin that Allen handles with equal panache.