THE STRIPPER 1963

This forgotten little film has long been a favorite of mine and used to show up fairly regularly on late-night television when I was a kid. Until it resurfaced recently on YouTube, I can say it’s easily been 40 years since I last saw this last-gasp effort in Hollywood’s love affair with the works of Faulkner, O’Neill, Williams, & Inge.  

Adapted by Meade Roberts (The Fugitive Kind, Summer & Smoke) from William Inge’s little-known 1959 play A Loss of Roses, and directed by Franklin J. Schaffner (Patton, The Planet of the Apes, Sphinx); The Stripper is, like a great many of my favorite films from the '50s—especially those written in the Southern Gothic/Midwest Melodrama tradition—a heavy slice of mordant Americana served up with plenty of lost illusions and broken dreams on the side.

Joanne Woodward as Lila Green

Richard Beymer as Kenny Baird

Claire Trevor as Helen Baird

Robert Webber as Ricky Powers

Shot in somber black and white (then de rigueur for contemplatively downbeat movies), The Stripper is the so-familiar-you’ll-swear-you’ve-seen-it-before story of Lila Green (Woodward); a down-on-her-luck wannabe actress touring with a seedy theatrical troupe (The Great Renaldo & Madame Olga: Magic & Mirth Par Excellence). Abandoned mid-tour in a small Kansas town by her equally seedy boyfriend Ricky (Webber), Lila is forced to depend on the kindness of strangers. Not literal strangers, mind you, for this just happens to be the town where Lila grew up before a Betty Grable look-alike contest provided her with a second-class means of escape to Hollywood. No, the strangers Lila seeks out are merely friends from her past. Friends to whom Lila now appears as gaudy and out of place as a fur coat in July.

Kenny Thinks Lila Is Hot
And indeed, she is, for it's mid-summer in Kansas and Lila flounces about in a leopard fur coat.
Before settling on the grossly misleading The Stripper, other titles considered for this screen adaptation of A Loss of Roses were: Celebration, Woman of Summer, and A Woman in July

Lila secures temporary lodgings with Helen Baird (Trevor), a widow for whom she once babysat in her youth. Helen, now a full-time nurse pulling swing shift as a fault-finding, overprotective mother-hen to her only son Kenny (Beymer). Helen is initially glad to be of assistance to the prodigal cooch dancer, but she begins to doubt the soundness of her philanthropy when it becomes clear that the restless son she has such high hopes for has developed a major infatuation for the glamorous, at least ten-years-older new tenant in stretch pants.

Much in the same way the arrival of a train-hopping drifter shook up the small-town residents in William Inge’s Picnic, the emotional (and sexual) disruption instigated by the intrusion of Lila—a peroxided, emotionally-wounded, aging starlet with a squalid past and a childlike disposition—into the vaguely oedipal Baird household is the source of The Stripper’s central conflict.

For Lila, the return to the birthplace of so many of her unrealized dreams rekindles a desire to reclaim her lost innocence. For Kenny, irresolute in his manhood over failing to fill the idealized shoes of his late father; Lila’s age and superficially worldly charms are like a beacon of maturity. Helen, conflicted in wanting Kenny to grow up and stand on his own two feet, yet prone to clingy exclamations like "You're all I have to live for!" grows concerned when Kenny's intensifying infatuation with Lila turns to mutual attraction. 
Adding fuel to Helen's anxiety that Lila's bad influence will hasten her son's inevitable departure is the simultaneous concern that the flashy older woman will corrupt Kenny's interest in pretty Miriam Caswell (Carol Lynley), their "good girl" (aka, virginal) neighbor. In this environment, everyone seems to be looking to someone else for salvation, rescue, liberation, or redemption.

Carol Lynley as Miriam Caswell

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM
The Stripper is something of a “Best of” collection of what had become, by 1963, the over-familiar clichés in the Tennessee Williams/William Inge oeuvre (it was Williams’ The Glass Menagerie which inspired Inge to write his first play). Set in the fictional small town of Salinson, Kansas (the same town Kansas-born William Inge chose for his play, Picnic), The Stripper has it all: the emotionally fragile fallen woman; familial discord; small-town provincialism; sexual restlessness; Freudian psychology; and the eternal battle between idealism and truth. And, of course, heat and summer used as metaphors for passion.

Seeing the film again after so many years, it’s so clear to me why I was all over this genre when I was young. First, they were situationally accessible to my limited frame of knowledge and experience. Unlike James Bond movies which took place all over the world, or exotic action adventures featuring acts of derring-do and non-stop danger; these films took place in the familiar, low-tech settings of town and neighborhood. The drama was often operatically over-the-top, yet human-scale enough in that it concerned itself with relationships, family tensions, and the applicable-at-any-age struggle with how our character flaws work to keep happiness at bay. 

Legendary real-life stripper Gypsy Rose Lee as Madam Olga St. Valentine
Louis Nye as Ronnie "The Great Renaldo" Cavendish

On the more “entertaining” side, not only were these films “daring” and “sex-obsessed” in ways suitable to a young person’s comprehension level (aka, all talk and no action), but the main characters were invariably women who could just as well have been gay men. Overwrought, theatrically histrionic gay men. I of course wasn’t aware of it then, but due to the times, Williams and Inge (both closeted gay playwrights during a time when homosexuality was criminalized in most states) were only able to express their truth through their female characters. Thus, their female protagonists were often imbued with a depth and dimensionality lacking in most roles for women written during this period.

As a youngster, the stoic, heteronormative macho leading man never spoke to any reality I knew. But I did recognize parts of myself in the bruised, vulnerable, idealistic outsiders Inge and Williams wrote so empathetically about.

Dreamers
Lila shows Kenny her prized possession: Film clips of her failed Hollywood screen test
 for the 1955 Fred Astaire musical Daddy Long Legs

THE STUFF OF DREAMS

As much as I enjoy this film, I’m inclined to agree when I encounter reviews labeling this movie “lesser Inge.” The Stripper has a lack of subtlety and obviousness of intent that made me think it was early William Inge (it's a little like an episode from one of those '60s anthology TV programs like Playhouse 90). In reality, it’s one of Inge's late-career career misfires. One of the playwright’s first Broadway flops following a string of unbroken successes starting with Dark at the Top of the Stairs (1945), Come Back Little Sheba (1950), Picnic (1953), and Bus Stop (1955). 

Indeed, as A Loss of Roses signaled the beginning of a reversal trend in Inge’s career, the problematic play has a legacy of misfortune surrounding it rivaling that of Shakespeare’s Macbeth.

Michael J. Pollard as Geoffrey "Jelly" Beamis
Pollard and Webber are the only members of the original Broadway cast to recreate their roles in the film

The first victim was Shirley Booth, who had previously won both a Tony and an Oscar for her work in Inge’s Come Back Little Sheba, and accepted the role in A Loss of Roses when promised the character of Helen would be made more prominent. Alas, Booth wound up quitting the show just days before its Broadway debut for the rumored reason that Inge was shifting the production to favor a Broadway neophyte he had developed a crush on: an actor by the name of Warren Beatty, making his Broadway debut.

The second victim was William Inge himself. For although he had faith in the play and expressed the belief that A Loss of Roses was a “sure thing,” the play opened to disastrous reviews and closed after a mere 25 performances. It was Inge’s first flop, and one that so devastated him, he never had another stage success again.

The third victim was Warren Beatty. For although his performance in the play garnered a Tony Award nomination, the experience was so unpleasant, it is said to be the reason he has never appeared onstage again. On the plus side, Inge's enduring crush on Beatty (when Jane Fonda met Beatty for the first time in New York, she thought he was Inge's boyfriend) gave the young actor a foot-up in Hollywood. He made his film debut in Inge's Splendor in the Grass, and starred in the Inge-penned All Fall Down, a 1962 film with an older woman/younger man theme similar to The Stripper.

Victim number four was 20^th Century Fox production head, Buddy Adler, who, on the strength of Inge's reputation and track record, purchased the rights to A Loss of Roses for a whopping $400,000 (in 1950s dollars, yet!) before it even opened on Broadway. As he told columnist Louella Parsons at the time: “Yes, we paid a big price, but Inge writes only hits. He wrote 'Bus Stop,' 'Picnic,' and 'Dark at the Top of the Stairs.' There were a number of producers trying to get 'A Loss of Roses' so we were lucky to get it.” 

Something's Gotta Give
As she strips, Lila sings the 1954 Johnny Mercer song Fred Astaire introduced in Daddy Long Legs--the movie she unsuccessfully screen-tested for. Ironically, the song is also the title (grammatically cleaned up as Something's Got to Give) of Marilyn Monroe's last film. The Stripper was released a year after Monroe's death in August of 1962, and the movie is loaded with reminders of its originally being a Monroe vehicle.

Victim number five was Fox Studios. Adler purchased A Loss of Roses for then-under contract Marilyn Monroe, and teen heartthrob Pat Boone (!). Both turned the film down. Monroe (who enjoyed great success with the film version of Inge’s Bus Stop in 1956) likely found the Lila character - a stripper with lousy taste in men, who at one time tried to kill herself and was institutionalized - a tad too close to home; while Boone objected on moral grounds, finding the illicit affair between the young man and slightly pathetic stripper all wrong for his image.

Victim number six was actor Richard Beymer. Boosted to leading man stardom after West Side Story (1961), The Stripper jinx apparently hit a bullseye, for this was his last major motion picture.

Finally, victim number 7, Joanne Woodward. An Academy Award winner for The Three Faces of Eve (1957), Woodward retired from the screen not long after marrying Paul Newman and having two children. The Stripper was to be her comeback vehicle, but its DOA performance at the boxoffice got her career reemergence off to a rocky start from which it never fully recovered.

Helen Interprets Kenny's Birthday Gift as a Gesture to Replace his Father
A great many of the unhealthier aspects of the mother-son relationship in
A Loss of Roses were excised when it became The Stripper

PERFORMANCES

While many found fault with Inge’s original play and Meade Roberts' considerably less sordid adaptation, critics were largely in agreement over the quality of Joanne Woodward’s performance. Overcoming a stiff, blonde, cotton candy wig that always appears to hover at least an inch above her scalp, Woodward has some really remarkable moments playing a character who’s part Blanche DuBois and part Charity Hope Valentine.

Looking pretty spectacular in her Travilla wardrobe (Monroe’s designer), Woodward occasionally falls prey to the gimmicky tricks of smart actors trying to play dumb (laying it on a bit thick). But she truly shines in the film’s final scenes and achieves several moments of heartrending poignancy.

"I want my roses back."
Promotional stills of several sequences not in the film suggest the already problematic storyline
of The Stripper underwent a significant amount of post-production editing.
Below, a segment of an 1891 Emily Dickinson poem quoted in the film: 

I’m nobody! Who are you?

Are you nobody too?

Then there’s a pair of us - don’t tell!

They’d banish us, you know.

The rest of the cast is solid, if perhaps let down a bit by a script that doesn't offer supporting characters much beyond making a quick superficial impression. Richard Beymer is good as the juvenile, but never succeeds in getting me to understand Kenny's darker, brooding side. The always-welcome Claire Trevor is a standout as the mother who fills an empty life with overconcern for her nearly-adult son.
Carol Lynley doesn't get much of a chance to be anything but gorgeous in a thankless "girlfriend" role, and there really is far too little of the quirky Michael J. Pollard and the Auntie Mame-ish Gypsy Rose Lee. TV stalwart Robert Webber is convincingly oily.

In spite of the film's sensationalist title, Woodward makes for a very covered-up stripper.
Happily, the same can't be said for her co-star

THE STUFF OF FANTASY 

In all these years I have never forgotten The Stripper's opening, pre-title sequence. It's just that terrific. It promises a level of camp sleaze the movie never delivers, but how can you lose with a movie that opens with a shot of the original, iconic Myra Breckinridge showgirl billboard?

Bus Driver: "We are approaching the world-famous Sunset Strip. Here you will see in the flesh the great names of show business you've only watched on the screen before." 

Tourist #1: "Look! There's Jayne Mansfield!"
Tourist #2: "No it isn't, it's Kim Novak!"

Bus Driver: "No it isn't, lady."
Tourist #1: "Then who is it?"

Bus Driver: "Nobody."

BONUS MATERIAL
"The Stripper" Watch the complete film on YouTube. HERE

The Stripper's sole Oscar nomination was for the costume designs of William Travilla (Valley of the Dolls, Black Widow, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes). 

"It's what I want more than anything. More than winning contests or being a movie star,
or anything like that. 'Cause if you know you've got one person who loves and respects you,
then you don't need love from a lot of people, do you?"

Copyright © Ken Anderson   2009 - 2015

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