FAVORITE MOVIE PROPS: A DREAM WISH LIST

It’s been my experience that it’s the rare film enthusiast who doesn’t also possess a passing interest in (if not an outright mania for) those fascinating objects of tangible trivia associated with the making of motion pictures. I’m speaking, of course, about movie memorabilia. And whether in the form of collecting marketing materials like posters, stills, pressbooks, and souvenir programs; attending museum exhibits displaying classic movie costumes and props; going to celebrity autograph conventions, or scouring online auction sites for items from celebrity estates or rare props and collectibles from favorite films – the motivation behind the actions are the same. It’s the desire to possess part of a dream. To rekindle and revisit the sensations inspired by a favorite film. The wish to bridge the gap between reality and the fantasy world movies.

When I was a youngster, I really had a thing for movie posters and movie poster graphic design. I loved looking at the poster display cases outside movie theaters, and even had a scrapbook where I'd paste my favorite movie poster ads clipped from the entertainment section of the newspaper. In 1970 when I was 13-years-old I purchased the original 1968 Barbarella poster for $8.50. It was my very first movie poster acquisition (I still have it, framed, in my home today) in what would grow to become a collection of movie promotional material so sizable, by 1975 I had more posters than wall space to accommodate them.display them.

My bedroom during my senior year in high school.

I moved to Los Angeles in 1978 and suddenly autograph collecting was added to my fanboy obsessions. Working at a McDonald's in Hollywood, I got Stevie Nick's autograph the night Fleetwood Mac won for Rumors (and no, she didn't order a Big Mac); working at a bookstore in Beverly Hills Diane Keaton, Steve Martin, and countless others. I still have the overflowing scrapbook.

By the late 90s, with the advent of eBay and what I perceived to be a decline in movie poster design, I wound up either selling off or donating to a local film museum the bulk of what had grown into a cumbersome movie poster and Lobby Card collection. I held onto the ones that meant the most to me: Barbarella, Rosemary’s Baby, The Day of the Locust, Bonnie & Clyde, Andy Warhol’s BAD, Myra Breckinridge, Reflections in a Golden Eye, and They Shoot Horses, Don’tThey?. The ones I regret selling?: Chinatown and Shampoo. What was I thinking? ...I must have been offered a lot of money.

The collection is gone, but my fondness for movie memorabilia of all stripes has never abated. And as one might guess, Los Angeles is a wellspring for the movie memorabilia fan. Annually, the Fashion Institute of Design and Merchandising has an exhibit of Oscar-nominated costumes, the County Museum frequently has film-related exhibits featuring props and artifacts from classic films and filmmakers; and it's a trend now for movie theaters to have have lobby displays of props and costumes of featured films.

The Only Piece of Movie Memorabilia I Own 

The weirdest (and thus coolest) gift I ever received from my partner is this plaster-cast of the right side of Liza Minnelli's face from the Paramount Studios makeup department. It was used as a form to design and fit the acid burn prosthetic makeup for her role in Otto Preminger's, Tell Me That You Love Me, Junie Moon (1970).  

It's because of my love of movie history and memorabilia that I decided to write this post after being contacted by the online auction site, Invaluable.com, and asked if I was interested in writing about what would be my dream movie prop or bit of memorabilia to find and pick up in an auction.
As I've only been to one auction in my entire life and wanted to bid on everything in sight (in 1984 Francis Ford Coppola's American Zoetrope Studios auctioned off tons of items from its films. I had my eye on all the miniature Las Vegas props from One From the Heart), I jumped at the opportunity to mount my own dream auction of movie props I would die for.


KEN'S TOP-TEN MOVIE MEMORABILIA AUCTION WISH LIST (money is no object):

1. The tannis root charm and chain from Rosemary's Baby (1968)

2. Any one of the futuristic, blatantly phallic weapons from Barbarella (1968).

3. The giant, inflatable easy chairs from Ken Russell's The Boy Friend (1971)

4. The miniature replica of the Hollywood Bowl Muse Fountain from Xanadu (1980) 

5. One of those belts worn by Judas and the angels in the musical Jesus Christ Superstar (1973). Although difficult to make out, each belt has a rhinestone buckle in the shape of the "praying angels" logo. While I'm at it, Judas' white, fringed jumpsuit wouldn't be bad, either!

6. Those Op-Art sunglasses worn by Debbie Watson in The Cool Ones (1967)

7. One of those prop books with Faye Dunaway on the cover used in Eyes of Laura Mars (1978)

8. One of those adorable bulbous Munchkinland taxicabs from The Wiz (1978)*

9. Eve Harrington's Sarah Siddons Award from All About Eve (1950)

10. Elton John's space-age Pinball Wizard machine from Ken Russell's Tommy (1975)

The above list encompasses everything from small props to items so huge they count as art direction or automotive. But a wish list is a wish list.

I'd be curious to find out if any of you out there harbor any unrequited movie prop/memorabilia desires from any of your favorite movies.

As stated, the idea for this post idea sprung from the marketing minds of the folks at the auction house of Invaluable.com, which seems to be doing a bit of research into what kinds of items film enthusiasts might find desirable. And if this post seems like the internet version of an infomercial, it's a one-sided one. I'm getting nothing out of promoting the site for free (which does have some pretty cool stuff. I'm no Star Wars fan but a while back they auctioned off a prop gun used by Harrison Ford in the film) -save perhaps their allowing me to steal their post idea.

If you're interested in seeing what type of movie items are currently up for auction, you can visit the move memorabilia section of the site HERE.

On a closing note, here are two of the miniatures from One From the Heart  I had the opportunity to see in person back in 1984 at the American Zoetrope auction. I have no idea what they ultimately sold for, but they were featured in the film's title sequence. They couldn't have been more than 5 or 8 inches high.

*Update

Looks like one of those taxi cabs from The Wiz popped up in Atlantic Beach, NY. Story Here

MOVIE MEMORABILIA AUCTION ITEMS WISH LIST (Reader submissions):

The beaded wedding veil worn by Guenevere in the film, Excalibur (1981)
(submitted by Joel)

Doris Day's mermaid outfit from The Glass Bottom Boat (1966)
(submitted by David Kucharski) Image: thewackytacky.blogspot.com 

An original Baby Jane Doll from What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? (1961)
(submitted by Rick)

One of the Gothic ankh pendant/daggers from The Hunger (1983)
(submitted by Darin)

One of these futuristic team jerseys from Rollerball (1975)
(submitted by Mark V)

The ghost viewer given out to patrons of William Castle's 13 Ghosts in 1960.
Pictured item is an original once up for auction at theauctionfloor.com
(submitted by MDG 14450)

Not a movie prop, but this 1957 Jayne Mansfield water bottle would keep many a collector warm
(submitted by Chris)

This Everlasting Gobstopper from the 1971 film Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory was sold at auction by actress Julie Dawn Cole (Veruca Salt) in 2012 for the tidy sum of $40,000.
(submitted by John)

Copyright © Ken Anderson

WILLY WONKA & THE CHOCOLATE FACTORY 1971

Do kids really like watching other kids in movies and on TV? I certainly know I didn't. At least not what passed for kids in the TV shows and movies of my youth. My inability to relate to that hyperactive genus of freckle-faced precocity known as the child actor contributed to my childhood aversion to Disney, so-called "family entertainment," and basically any film or TV program which trained its spotlight on adorable, towheaded moppets. Hence, I was nearly in my 30s before I got around to seeing Mary Poppins, Pollyanna, The Sound of Music, or The Parent Trap; all movies I've come to adore as an adult (ultimately the demographic most invested in the sentimentalized idealization of that trauma-filled age-span known as childhood), but which held little interest for me as a kid because I simply saw no connection between myself and those miniature adult-impersonators I saw onscreen. 

Take, for example, the TV sitcoms I grew up watching: Even as a child, Beaver Cleaver of Leave it to Beaver came across to me as a pathological liar with virtually no common sense and a wobbly moral compass that could be effectively redirected by the feeble taunt of "Chicken!" Those ginger twins, Buffy & Jody of Family Affair, were like these too-good-to-be-true, animatronic wind-up dolls; Dennis the Menace was a well-intentioned but nevertheless misogynist, passive-aggressive sociopath; and don't even get me started on that mayonnaise-on-white-bread-with-Velveeta-slices Brady Bunch clan.

Either absurdly goody-goody or possessed of an annoyingly thickheaded inability to ascribe consequence to action, these characters may have warmed the hearts of nostalgia-prone adults clinging to a revisionist reverie of childhood. A time of mischievous scamps getting into adorable "scrapes" and wide-eyed cherubs spreading sunshine and rainbows wherever they went. But for all their resemblance to the pint-sized Gila monsters I went to school with in real life, these sitcom kiddies might as well have been creatures from The Twilight Zone.

Of course, there were a few rare exceptions. Given my own dark disposition, I had no problem with the refreshingly odd Pugsly and Wednesday Addams on The Addams Family. And I took considerable pleasure in Jane Withers as the hilariously bratty antithesis to the sugary Shirley Temple in 1934's Bright Eyes ("My psychoanalyst told me there ain't any Santa Clause or fairies or giants or anything like that!"). On the other hand, I was most impressed by Patty McCormack's Rhoda Penmark in The Bad Seed, who was basically James Cagney in a pinafore. And, of course, one of my all-time favorites was the 1968 musical Oliver! with its ragtag cast of underage pickpockets, thieves, and swindlers.

If anything is to be gleaned from this, it's that, as a child, I longed for an alternative to these antiseptic images of childhood just as my parents yearned for something beyond the Father Knows Best/The Donna Reed Show model of family. Sure, kids can be sugar and spice and all that, but kids are also self-centered, very sharp, and crueler than most adults would like to admit. And childhood, while certainly a (perceived) joyous and carefree time when viewed from the perspective of adult responsibility and stress, is nonetheless a very scary period of life, fraught with anxieties and insecurities.

Redeemed by resilience, curiosity, and a limitless capacity for hope and dreams, I've long held that children, in essence, aren't really that different from adults. And if authentically rendered, they're infinitely more interesting than the fantasy concept of children fed to us in most entertainments intended for the young set. Author Roald Dahl understood this, and that is why the ofttimes frightening, marvelously witty and acerbic Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory (adapted from his 1964 book, Charlie & the Chocolate Factory) stands out as one of the few children's movies from my childhood I recall with a great deal of fondness. Finally, here was a terribly sweet children's movie that didn't need the artificial sugar-coating.

Gene Wilder as Willy Wonka

Peter Ostrum as Charlie Bucket

Jack Albertson as Grandpa Joe

Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory is a straightforward fairy tale - complete with a moral and a happy ending - that takes place in a world where the fantastic and magical exist side by side with the prosaic and practical; in other words, the world as kids see it until we adults start to stick our noses in.

One day Willy Wonka, an eccentric, reclusive candy manufacturer around whose identity swarms mysterious, Gatsby-like legends, decides to open the doors of his wondrous candy factory to five lucky winners of  Golden Tickets he's hidden in Wonka Bars shipped all over the globe. The winners and one guest receive a tour of his factory and a lifetime supply of chocolate. The winners:

Germany
The gluttonous Augustus Gloop (Michael Bollner) and his mother
 (Ursula Reit, who always reminds me of an off-diet Elke Sommer)

England
Spoiled Veruca Salt (Julie Dawn Cole) and her salted peanut
magnate father, Henry (the wonderful Roy Kinnear)

America
Ill-mannered Violet Beauregarde (Denise Nickerson) and her
pushy, used-car salesman dad, Sam (Leonard Stone)

America
Rambunctious TV addict Mike Teevee (Paris Themmen) 
and his schoolteacher mom (Nora Denney)

...and most deserving, poor-as-a-church-mouse Charlie Bucket, who takes his beloved
 Grandpa Joe with him (and not his hardworking mom, but more about that later)

The four initial winners of the Golden Ticket are all comfortably well-off children (save for Veruca, who's loaded) whose want for the prize stems mainly from a kind of entitled greed indigenous to comfortably well-off children. Only poverty-stricken Charlie (who has to attend school AND help his mother support four bedridden grandparents by delivering newspapers) harbors a dream of winning the ticket to improve his family's lot. Thus, with sweet-natured Charlie tagged as the parable's obvious hero; rival candy manufacturer Arthur Slugworth (Gunter Meisner) assigned the role of villain; and the four "naughty, nasty little children" standing as emissaries of the film's moral (our behavior and our hearts are the architects of our fate), only their unpredictable and mischievous host, Mr. Willy Wonka remains, as the fairy tale's element of surprise (and chaos).

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM

I love the setup and structure of Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. The film's first half is rooted in reality...well, a charming kind of storybook reality. After all, we're asked to accept that Charlie's four grandparents have not set foot out of the bed they all share for twenty years. The second half of the film is a pure flight of fantasy wherein a common childhood dream comes to life: a visit to a magical Candyland that's part Disneyland, part amusement park funhouse, and part house of horrors (adults tend to forget how much kids enjoy being frightened and gleefully grossed-out).
From the start, the film does a great job of piquing interest in Wonka by having him discussed, Citizen Kane fashion, at length before he even makes an appearance. It also gives us a likable and sympathetic hero to root for in Charlie, who's saved from being a totally pathetic character by being blessed with a loving, if oddball, family. Conflict rears its head in the form of the other four Golden Ticket winners, who may be amplified versions of archetypal bratty kids, but, with the possible exception of Veruca, are not malicious or mean-spirited, just self-centered. (Even the awful Mike Teevee precurses questions to his host with a polite, "Mr. Wonka….")

Touring the candy factory in the S.S. Wonkatania

The two halves of the film complement one another nicely. The first half is appropriately dingy and sentimental (bordering on cloying), setting the stage for the second half, which, mirroring Wonka's unpredictable spirit, explodes into a colorful, colorful, anarchic phantasmagoria that plays gleeful havoc with the genre expectations of the children's movie.

In fact, one of my favorite things about Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory is that it is such a sublimely nasty twist on the traditional tolerant celebration of childhood precocity that fuels so many films intended for children. Wonka's factory‒ a place where anything is possible…an environment wherein the laws of reason, logic, or physics don't apply‒ recall those marvelously anarchic Warner Bros. cartoons. The at-odds, adversarial byplay between Wonka and the kids evoked the comic clashes between Bugs Bunny (unflappable, always one step ahead, just a little screwy) and Daffy Duck (unchecked id combined with brazen self-interest).

While panic reigns, Wonka watches Augustus Gloop's probable drowning in the chocolate river with detached, intellectual curiosity. However, Mrs. Gloop's outburst, "You terrible man!" never fails to crack me up.

PERFORMANCES

People are fond of pointing out that Roald Dahl was not very fond of Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, no doubt due to the extensive rewrites his adapted screenplay was subjected to by an unbilled David Seltzer (The Omen) and the shift of the story's focus from Charlie to Wonka. This point would be persuasive save for two things: 1) Dahl's heirs stated he would have liked the 2005 Tim Burton version (a film I found to be irredeemably wretched, so, so much for taste), and 2) With rare exceptions, an author's ability to write a book doesn't mean a hill of jellybeans when it comes to understanding what makes a film work (see: Ayn Rand, Vladimir Nabokov, and Stephen King). As far as I'm concerned, to place the focus on anyone but Wonka would have been sheer folly, especially if you're lucky enough to land an actor as inspired as Gene Wilder to take on the role. 

As personified by Wilder, Willy Wonka lives up to the alliterative suggestion of his name by being quite wonky indeed. Dressed in anachronistic high style, he sports a madman's mane of wiry locks yet keeps his wits about him at all times; he is enthusiastic and excitable as a child, yet remains unflappable and unflustered at even the most life-threatening (to the children, anyway) occurrences; and has bright, inquisitive eyes that can be warm and paternal one moment, wild and certifiably insane the next. A genial host, he's witty, sharp, sarcastic, and not particularly child-friendly. He seems singularly disinterested in being the surrogate parent and disciplinarian for the transgressions of his misbehaving guests.

"What is this, a freak-out?"
The brilliance of Wilder's portrayal is that we expect the mystery surrounding Wonka to be cleared up when we meet him, but instead, it only increases. I don't care how many times or in how many ways Warner Bros tries to wring income out of Dahl's book; Gene Wilder is the one and only Willy Wonka

Blazing Saddles and Young Frankenstein (both 1974) would expose Wilder's comic genius to a broader audience, but even at this relatively early juncture in his career, his performance is nothing short of Oscar-worthy. Creating an unforgettable, one-of-a-kind character (his Wonka is loveable and scary, frequently simultaneously), Wilder is the main reason the film works at all and the primary factor in why it has endured for so long after its initial flop release. Thanks to Gene Wilder's ingenious brand of insanity, Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory has become a genuine children's classic. (Although Wilder was nominated for a Golden Globe, the film received only one Oscar nomination: Best Original Score.)

Any fan of The Bad Seed should find Julie Dawn Cole's vitriolic Veruca Salt a sheer delight

THE STUFF OF FANTASY

By the way, did I mention Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory is a musical? No, I didn't, but that's because I was saving it for this section. At a time when movie musicals were becoming as bloated as Violet Beauregarde at maximum blueberry transformation, Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory successfully bucked the trend toward entertainment elephantiasis (as much as a film deemed to be a boxoffice flop upon release can be called a success). They came up with an appealing, bite-size musical that, for once, didn't overwhelm its story and characters.
The songwriting team of Anthony Newly and Leslie Bricusse (Goodbye Mr. Chips, Scrooge!) reined in their usual tendency toward over-sophisticated melodies (although Cheer Up, Charlie, a real snoozer and always my cue to visit the snack bar, somehow made the cut) and came up with a score of tuneful, engaging songs possessing the simple, sing-song lilt of nursery rhymes and grade school. Best of all, each is staged in a clever, intimate scale that avoids bringing the proceedings to a halt and instead draws you deeper into the characters and storyline.

Director Mel Stuart wisely rejected the suggestion to expand the rousing "I've Got a Golden Ticket" into a large-scale production number that spilled out into the streets, a la 1968s Oliver!

Those around in 1971 can attest to the unavoidability of Sammy Davis Jr.'s grooved-up version of "The Candy Man" played 'round the clock on the radio at the time. And though it reached No.1 on the charts and became one of Davis' signature songs, its popularity, and omnipresence failed to garner the song an Oscar nomination (for that matter, neither did the splendid "Pure Imagination") or boost public interest in the poorly-promoted film. (Willy Wonka's visually unappealing initial-release poster and non-existent marketing campaign clearly reveal that Paramount didn't have a clue how to sell it).

"The Candy Man" is sung by Aubrey Woods (here shown giving an inadvertent jaw realignment to a little girl who didn't know her cues) as Bill, the candy shop proprietor. A role both Anthony Newley and Sammy Davis, Jr. had angled for. Once again, can we give it up for the wise decisions of Mel Stuart?

THE STUFF OF DREAMS

I saw Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory in 1971 when it was released, largely at my older sister's prodding. Then being unfamiliar with either Roald Dahl or the book (which I've since read, and, as much as I love it, I find the film to be a vast improvement), the title Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory sounded far too much like Toby Tyler: or Ten Weeks with a Circus, a cornball 1960 film serialized on The Wonderful World of Disney that exemplified a great many of the things I hated about children's movies. I was 13-years-old at the time, realism was all the rage, and the movies I most wanted to see in 1971 were Klute, Carnal Knowledge, Straw Dogs, The Devils, and Play Misty for Me; certainly not a treacly kiddie musical set in a candy factory.

Those catchy Oompa-Loompa songs are near impossible to dislodge from one's memory

Lucky for me, my parents put their foot down; it was either Willy Wonka or stay home. And, as this post attests, Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory became one of the happiest surprises of my youth. It's a children's movie made by people who, like me, had perhaps grown tired of the conventions of the genre. It's funny in a lot of sharp, adult-centric ways (the Wonka-mania vignettes are real gems), its dialogue is witty, and its characterizations frequently laugh-out-loud hilarious. And while the story has a great deal of sweetness and sentimentality, it never feels forced or phony. Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory never ever made me cry when I was a kid. But now, as an adult, each and every time I watch it, I get an attack of waterworks when Wonka, Charlie, and Grandpa Joe are flying over the city in the Wonkavator.

Nowadays, when children indulging in bad behavior are rewarded with reality-TV contracts or celebrated by YouTube hits, I guess a movie like Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory really pushes a few nostalgia buttons of my own. In today's culture-of-cruelty climate, where reality shows teach us that the-end-justifies-the-means if that end is fame or fortune, I can grow pretty sentimental about a story where a child is actually rewarded for doing the right thing.

Wonka: But Charlie... don't forget what happened to the man who suddenly got everything he always wanted.

Charlie: What happened?

Clip from "Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory"  1971

BONUS MATERIAL
Fans of Joan Crawford's 1967 circus epic, Berserk, will recognize Bruno the clown (George Claydon) as one of Wonka's Oompa Loompas.

Fans of Lost Horizon (1973)....those with good ears, anyway...will recognize the dubbed singing voice of Charlie's mother to also be that of Liv Ullmann. The singer is Diana Lee.

In 2013 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory became a West End musical. Although the title suggests little or no connection with the film, the show's original music score includes the Newley/Bricusse composition. "Pure Imagination."

Many sites are devoted to trivia, production info, and hidden-joke theories surrounding Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. My favorite is the groundswell movement dedicated to proving that Charlie's beloved Grandpa Joe is basically a selfish, lazy slob without a conscience. Precipitated by the character-revealing remark he volunteers to Charlie being asked where he got the loaf of bread for dinner (suitable for a banquet, I'm sad to say): "What difference does it make where he got it? The point is, he got it!" Combined with his "magical" ability to get out of bed when there's something fun to do (aka, not work), a persuasive case is made against lovable Grandpa Joe throughout the web. 

Copyright © Ken Anderson   2009 - 20014

BONNIE & CLYDE 1967

Bonnie & Clyde is one of my “staple films.” A staple film being any movie that tops my acquisition list whenever technological advancements make it necessary for me to restock my film library. Back in the dark ages, when I got my first VCR machine, Bonnie & Clyde, Rosemary’s Baby, and Midnight Cowboy were the first VHS movies I ever purchased. These same films also became the first DVDs I ever owned when video cassettes became obsolete. It wasn’t particularly planned that way, they were just the three films I was most excited about owning in disc format. As of yet, I haven’t jumped on the Blu-ray bandwagon, but if and when I ultimately make that leap, it’s a sure bet which three films will be essential to have...again.

Arthur Penn’s Bonnie & Clyde is a film that has arguably become as legendary and folkloric as its real-life subjects. Released at the height of the hippie movement (ironically enough, in August of the Summer of Love) Bonnie & Clyde, in its myth-making depiction of two small-time Depression-era outlaws, managed to hit America right between the eyes.

What captured our imaginations about Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow in 1967 is most likely what captured the nation’s imagination in the 1930s. They were young (he was 21, she 19); women in crime were rare; as opposed to being a “gang,” Bonnie and Clyde were perceived as a “couple” and as such, suitable for romantic projection; and lastly, but perhaps most significantly, they were famous. Indeed, they are among the earliest American “celebrity” criminals: self-aware and image-conscious; knowledgeable of and taking delight in the notoriety and fame their criminal activity brought them.

Had Arthur Penn’s film been less artful, say, a Roger Corman exploitationer or an American-International cheapie like1958s The Bonnie Parker Story (an absolutely must-see howler starring  Dorothy Provine), no one would likely have batted an eye on its release. But Penn’s Bonnie & Clyde comingled French New Wave arthouse stylization with America’s romanticism of rebellion, preoccupation with violence, and attraction to mythmaking,  and in doing so captured the absolute essence of a particular moment in time. Not America in the 1930s, but America in the late 1960s.

Warren Beatty as Clyde Barrow

Faye Dunaway as Bonnie Parker

Michael J. Pollard as C.W. Moss

Gene Hackman as Buck Barrow

Estelle Parsons as Blanche Barrow

I saw Bonnie & Clyde in 1968 at the Castro Theater in San Francisco, and it absolutely blew me away. I was eleven at the time and I still recall the impact it had on me and the audience. As I headed for my seat, I vividly remember encountering this huge, literally life-size lobby display that totally freaked me out. It was the iconic poster art* featuring the eerily unsettling image of Dunaway and Beatty laughing behind a bullet-hole riddled windshield. Under this was written: They’re young…they’re in love…and they kill people. Yikes! I almost peed myself.

(I literally had no business being in the theater at that age, but precocious kids who make it their business to see movies too mature for their age can’t really complain about the subsequent nightmares and kindertrauma.) *I now own a framed Bonnie & Clyde poster which hangs where I can see it as I write. No longer a terrifying image, it inspires me and reminds me of the time when I thought movies were art and magic combined.

I had seen lots of crime dramas before this, but they were all pretty cut-and-dried, morally speaking. Crime didn’t pay, the good guys won, and the bad guys deserved what they got. I was not at all prepared for Bonnie & Clyde’s alternating tones of comedy, romance, lyricism, drama, and in-your-face violence used in telling the story of a duo many believed to have been little more than a couple of hayseed sociopaths.

Following Clyde's murder of an unarmed man, Bonnie, Clyde, and C.W. lay low in a movie theater. Clyde is visibly upset, C.W. is nearly in tears, but Bonnie is unaffected and absorbed in watching a musical number from "Golddiggers of 1933" (We're in the Money). My sister and I were just preteens when we saw Bonnie & Clyde and at this point in the film she leaned over and asked, "Is Bonnie supposed to be mentally ill?"

Years later, I read a review of the film by critic John Simon wherein he alludes to the scene as indicative of Bonnie being somewhat infantile and childlike. The seriousness of death and crime hadn't really sunk in for Bonnie. Like the kids today who wield guns in the playground and think of death and gunplay as nothing more serious than a 3D video game.

As embodied by the impossibly (implausibly?) beautiful and stylish duo of Beatty and Dunaway, Bonnie and Clyde are a pair of unsophisticated social misfits dreaming of a better life beyond the dustbowl Texas poverty that surrounds them. Warren Beatty’s Clyde is a kind of guileless, career-criminal with malice towards none (the film casts the Great Depression as the ultimate villain) who sees in Bonnie a yearning soul, not unlike his own. The film seems to allude that, possibly with education or opportunity, this pair might have made something useful of their lives. But lacking either and left with nothing but a nagging sense of the pent-up hopelessness of their lives, they made the choice of antisocial rebellion.

A pretty nice name for a murderous crime spree. 

And therein lay the cornerstone of the controversy surrounding Bonnie & Clyde when it was first released. Critics and audiences alike didn’t know what to make of a film that not only intentionally altered (some might say manipulated) historical fact for the purpose of dramatic effect, but cast its anti-heroes in a decidedly heroic, romantic light that to some negated the very real pain and suffering this real-life couple brought to others.

Director Arthur Penn has always maintained that he had bigger fish to fry in Bonnie & Clyde and had no interest in offering a documentary with a moral. In the wonderful but out-of-print volume, The Bonnie & Clyde Book by Sandra Wake and Nicola Hayden, Penn is quoted as saying: “I don’t think the original Bonnie and Clyde are very important except insofar as they motivated the writing of a script and our making of a movie. This is not a case study of Bonnie and Clyde; we don’t go into them in any kind of depth.”

Instead, Penn asserts that he intended Bonnie & Clyde as a kind of post - Kennedy assassination / Vietnam war–era take on the death of the American Dream as manifest in the nation’s fascination with violence and mythmaking, and the resultant anti-authority/anti-social rebellion.

The communal "Hoovervilles", "Hobo Jungles" and "Shanty Towns" of the Great Depression evoked the hippie communes that were springing up all over the country in 1967. The nomadic, anti-establishment rebel  lives of Bonnie & Clyde struck a chord with young audiences of the 60s  

So if turning a couple of remorseless murderers into a pair of sympathetic, glamorous, near-mythic tragic lovers was seen by some as amoral, young '60s audiences didn’t seem to care. While critics like The New York Times’ Bosley Crowther pilloried Bonnie & Clyde as “…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 cut-ups in Thoroughly  Modern Millie,” young people across the country responded (as they would two years later to Easy Rider’s motorcycle-riding drug dealers) to the rebellious, anti-establishment spirit at the film’s core.

Disenfranchised '60s youth - targeted for the draft, denied the vote, lacking a social presence - identified with the Barrow Gang's attempt to create for themselves a non-traditional family 

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM

Putting aside arguments of amorality, I really admire how Bonnie & Clyde captures something I find to be very true about human nature: that the villains and monsters of the world don’t necessarily perceive themselves to be such. Movies and pulp literature have taught us that bad guys are well aware of how evil they are; literally reveling in their wickedness and lack of conscience (to believe so is reassuring when you find yourself rooting for their demise). Yet life experience and election-year observations have led me to conclude that some of the most heinous people in our culture actually seem to maintain a perception of themselves as being basically good and “just folks.”  

So-called "respectable" and educated people today engage in all matter of pernicious behavior,  preaching and legislating hate and ill-will...yet feel, deep within their hearts, that they are good, decent people. The news is full of individuals who have killed, bombed, or marched about carrying signs spewing venomous hate; but in their own minds, they are good Christians, or defenders of family values, pro-lifers, or lovers of America and the American way of life. The conveyance of this sad-but-true cultural fact is where Bonnie & Clyde achieves a kind of brilliance and does something really remarkable with the gangster genre.

It makes perfect sense to me that neither Bonnie nor Clyde would ever see themselves as bad guys. Dunaway and Beatty’s scenes together depict the two as marginalized loners—zeroes in the eyes of the world—whose dead-end lives converge and create a kind of pitiful, doomed hope. They are a sadsack Romeo & Juliet made stronger and more significant in their union than they could ever be on their own.

Their world may be narrow and their thinking delusional, but they long for the same things we all do. We identify with their taking offense at the injustice of poor people being put out of their homes by banks, and we maybe even applaud their standing up for the “little people” in the small criminal ways they flout authority. Yet at the same time we are repulsed by their callous disregard for life. Or rather, a certain kind of life. In their world, the death of a lawman does not hold the same weight as the death of a loved one or average citizen. A trenchant twist on the way death is militarized by our “civilized society” (The death of an officer in battle does not hold the same weight as the death of a soldier; the death of a lawman in the line of duty does not hold the same weight as that of the average citizen, etc.) Small wonder that 60s youths - their lives valuable in terms of the draft, valueless when it came to the right to vote - found in Bonnie & Clyde a relevant parable for the times. Depicted as a pair of counterculture outlaws, at least Bonnie and Clyde were choosing to die on their own terms.

Gene Wilder (making his film debut) and Evans Evans appear briefly as unwitting provocateurs of the Barrow Gang. It's one of my favorite sequences in the film. There was a time when I would collapse into paroxysms of  laughter if anyone even whispered the phrase, "Step on it, Velma!"

PERFORMANCES

In some ways, the channeling of a specific, defined persona into role after role is the essence of what being a movie star (as opposed to an actor) is all about. Diane Keaton trademarked the lovable, semi-inarticulate ditz; Robert Redford the sensitive All-American jock; and Warren Beatty always seemed to play some variation on the not-very-bright, overgrown boy with big ideas (McCabe & Mrs. Miller, The Only Game in Town, Shampoo). Notwithstanding Beatty’s appealingly debauched beauty as a man, his screen persona has often left me wanting. Not so in Bonnie & Clyde. Here he mines the mother lode of his star charisma and is marvelously alive and interesting. Especially in the scenes where Clyde explodes into violent rages that erupt into a terrifyingly real physicality. Beatty playing aw-shucks humble has always been a little boring. Beatty as a temperamental nutjob  (Bugsy) is a sight to behold.

There’s a kind of wistfulness that comes over me whenever I see Faye Dunaway in Bonnie & Clyde. Part of it’s nostalgia because I fell in love with her in this movie; part of it’s due to her being so damned good that I’m forced to admit that I’ve let it become far too easy over the years to forget what a marvelous actress she is. You see her here and you know in an instant that there was no way this woman wasn’t going to be a star. Her Bonnie Parker is funny and tough and oh, so heartbreaking. Hers is a classic, one-of-a-kind performance and Dunaway OWNS the role as far as I’m concerned. Any planned remakes would do well to distance themselves from the Penn film and save all prospective Bonnies from the inevitable embarrassing comparisons to Dunaway. 

Impotent Clyde seduces Bonnie with a phallic substitute

THE STUFF OF FANTASY

While the sympathetic light Bonnie and Clyde are presented in represents an insurmountable hurdle for some (personally, I don’t see it as sympathetic so much as human. A moral imperative overrides everything that happens in the film), I find myself grateful for being allowed to take in the events of the story without being forced by the script to adopt an attitude about the pair until I’m ready.

One good example of this is the scene where Clyde says to a poor farmer whose house has been foreclosed upon, “We rob banks!” And in that split second, we see an aimless man giving his life purpose. A few scenes later Bonnie says these same words to gas attendant C.W. Moss, and in her delivery, we see that she at last has discovered an identity for herself, as well.

These two moments of empowerment for Bonnie and Clyde are perhaps pathetic and delusional to us, the viewer, but they are defining moments for the characters. What seems like the film striking an amoral stance is actually, I believe, the film merely establishing its point of view. The film presumes we are adult enough to be shown Bonnie and Clyde’s self-serving view of the world and themselves (misjudged folk heroes like Robin & Maid Marian) without insisting we accept it.

THE STUFF OF DREAMS

Or rather, the stuff of nightmares. In this, I’m referring to Bonnie & Clyde’s groundbreaking, much-discussed, heavily-debated, then-unprecedented depiction of violence. Modern audiences may find it tame (me, I still have a hard time watching the final ambush scene) but everything you’ve read about it is true when it comes to how it affected audiences on its initial release. I still can remember how ear-shatteringly loud the shots sounded in the theater, and how deadly quiet the theater was when the film was over. People walked out of the film like they were in a daze. Nobody knew quite how to take what they had seen. There were the obvious few, made so nervous that they had to start saying ANYTHING quick, but I remember my family and me leaving the theater and actually feeling afraid to say anything. As if in opening our mouths we weren’t sure what would come out…a cry or a scream.

Bonnie & Clyde: Laughing and dying
"The killing gets less impersonal and, consequently, less funny." Arthur Penn

Copyright © Ken Anderson  2009 - 2012