Bonnie and Clyde (film)

"We rob banks!"

"[to Buck and Clyde] Why don't y'all go back to your own cabin, if you want to play with C.W."

"[to Clyde] You're just like your brother. Ignorant, uneducated hillbilly, except the only special thing about you is your peculiar ideas about love-making, which is no love-making at all."

"I don't think he's lost. I think the bank's been offerin' extra reward money for us. I think Frank just figured on some easy pickin's, didn't ya Frank? You're no Texas Ranger. You're hardly doin' your job. You ought to be home protectin' the rights of poor folk, not out chasin' after us!"

"This here's Miss Bonnie Parker. I'm Clyde Barrow. We rob banks."

"[to Bonnie, on her poem] You know what you done there? You told my story, you told my whole story right there, right there. One time, I told you I was gonna make you somebody. That's what you done for me. You made me somebody they're gonna remember."

"Hell, you might just be the best damn girl in Texas."

"[Clyde has just shot the hat off a bank guard's head] Next time I'll aim a little lower!"

"Buck Barrow: Hey, you wanna hear a story 'bout this boy? He owned a dairy farm, see. And his ol' Ma, she was kinda sick, you know. And the doctor, he had called him come over, and said, uh, "Uhh listen, your Ma, she's lyin' there, she's just so sick and she's weakly, and uh, uh I want ya to try to persuade her to take a little brandy," you see. Just to pick her spirits up, ya know. And "Ma's a teetotaler," he says. "She wouldn't touch a drop." "Well, I'll tell ya whatcha do, uh,"—the doc -- "I'll tell ya whatcha do, you bring in a fresh quart of milk every day and you put some brandy in it, see. And see. You try that." So he did. And he doctored it all up with the brandy, fresh milk, and he gave it to his Mom. And she drank a little bit of it, you know. So next day, he brought it in again and she drank a little more, you know. And so they went on that way for the third day and just a little more, and the fourth day, she was, you know, took a little bit more - and then finally, one week later, he gave her the milk and she just drank it down. Boy, she swallowed the whole, whole, whole thing, you know. And she called him over and she said, "Son, whatever you do, don't sell that cow!""

"Farmer: All I can say is, they did right by me — and I'm bringin' me and a mess of flowers to their funeral."

"Blanche Barrow: [about getting a cut of the loot] Well why not? I earned my share same as everybody. Well, I coulda got killed same as everybody. And I'm wanted by the law same as everybody... I'm a nervous wreck and that's the truth. I have to take sass from Miss Bonnie Parker all the time. I deserve mine."

"When Bonnie and Clyde opened the 1967 Montreal Film Festival, the audience went wild—with the exception of one prominent film critic. Apparently the New York Timess Bosley Crowther was expecting to see a gangster film in the same vein as Little Caesar and Scarface, but instead he saw (in his words) a "wild, jazzy farce melodrama" that "amusedly and sympathetically recounts the bank-robbing degradations" of Barrow and Parker. One week later, Crowther wrote a scathing review in which he berated the filmmakers for turning the lives of two cold-blooded killers into a "cheap piece of bald-face slapstick . . . loaded with farcical hold-ups, [and] screaming chases in stolen getaway cars that have the antique appearance and speeded up movement of the clumsy vehicles of the Keystone Cops." While he was not impressed by [[w:Warren Beatty|[Warren] Beatty]]'s portrayal of Clyde ("clowning broadly as the killer") and Faye Dunaway's Bonnie ("squirming grossly as his thrill-seeking sex-starved mole"), it was the "blending of farce and brutal killings" that he found "as pointless as it is lacking in taste, since it makes no valid commentary upon the already travestied truth.""

"Crowther's reviews sparked a national debate among critics, who were divided over the film. Like Crowther, many critics accused the filmmakers of glorifying the couple's violent, criminal lifestyle. Time magazine accused Beatty and Penn of reducing Bonnie and Clyde’s story to a "strange and purposeless mingling of fact and claptrap that teeters easily on the brink of burlesque." In his review for Films in Review, Page Cook dismissed the film as "incompetently written, acted, directed and produced" and accused the filmmakers of promoting the idea that "sociopathology is art." Newsweeks Joe Morgenstern initially panned the film, calling it "a squalid shoot ’em-up for the moron trade." But then he did something rare for a critic—he retracted his own review. His second review starts with an apology: "I am sorry to say I consider that review grossly unfair and regrettably inaccurate. I am sorrier to say that I wrote it." Although he still believed the film’s "gore goes too far," he acknowledged the value of the film's violent content: "But art can certainly reflect life, clarify and improve life; and since most of humanity teeters on the edge of violence every day, there is no earthly reason why art should not turn violence to its own good ends, showing us what we do and why.""

"In their original treatment for the film, screenwriters Robert Benton and David Newman conceived the world of Bonnie and Clyde as a reflection of American life in the late 1960s: This is a movie about criminals only incidentally. Crime in the ’30s was the strange, the exotic, the different. This is a movie about two people, lovers, movers, and operators. They’re "hung up," like many people are today. They moved in odd, unpredictable ways which can be viewed, with an existential eye, as classic . . . . They are not Crooks. They are people, and this film is, in many ways, about what’s going on now."

"If Bonnie and Clyde had a critical cheerleader, it was the New Yorkers Pauline Kael, who reveled in the "contemporary feeling" emanating from the "most excitingly American movie since The Manchurian Candidate, which "brings into the almost frightening public world of-movies things that people have been feeling and saying and writing about." Kael compared the film to the gangster movies and crime dramas of the 1930s and 1940s (like Nicholas Ray's They Live By Night [1948]) to illustrate how the film deviates from the classical Hollywood mode, particularly in terms of its lack of a "secure basis for identification" for the audience, who "are made to feel but are not told how to feel." Kael's point is certainly a valid one. In classical gangster films, we identify with the "bad guy," who lives in a black-and-white, Manichaean world of good vs. evil. While morality dictates that Tommy Powers and Scarface must be eliminated in the end, there is a cloud of moral ambiguity that hovers over Bonnie and Clyde. The film's humor and stylization, particularly early in the film, gives us a window of time to identify with the couple, pledge our allegiance to them, and accept their values. But in the second half of the film, those values are called into question as the film's tone changes from comical to serious and people start to get shot and killed."

"Faye Dunaway — Bonnie Parker"

"Warren Beatty — Clyde Barrow"

"Michael J. Pollard — C.W. Moss"

"Gene Hackman — Buck Barrow"

"Estelle Parsons — Blanche Barrow"

"Mabel Cavitt — Bonnie's Mother"