Soon after, Bonnie met Clyde, and although the pair fell in love, she never divorced Thornton. Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow in a photograph from the early s. Library of Congress. During her school days, Bonnie excelled at creative writing and penning verses. As a teenager, Clyde attempted to enlist in the U. Navy , but lingering effects from a serious boyhood illness, possibly malaria or yellow fever, resulted in his medical rejection.
The notorious criminal was first arrested in for automobile theft after failing to return a car he had rented in Dallas to visit an estranged high school girlfriend.
Although often depicted as Depression -era Robin Hoods who stole from rich and powerful financial institutions, Bonnie and Clyde staged far more robberies of mom-and-pop gas stations and grocery stores than bank heists. While serving a year sentence in Texas for robbery and automobile theft in January , Clyde decided he could no longer endure the unforgiving work and brutal conditions at the notoriously tough Eastham Prison Farm.
In the American experience, the miseries of the Depression are funny in the way that the Army is funny to draftees—a shared catastrophe, a levelling, forming part of our common background.
Those too young to remember the Depression have heard about it from their parents. The movie becomes dreamy-soft where it should be hard and hard-edged. If there is such a thing as an American tragedy, it must be funny. Our heroes pick up the wrong fork, and the basic figure of fun in the American theatre and American movies is the man who puts on airs. Bonnie and Clyde and their partners in crime are comically bad bank robbers, and the backdrop of poverty makes their holdups seem pathetically tacky, yet they rob banks and kill people; Clyde and his good-natured brother are so shallow they never think much about anything, yet they suffer and die.
Melodramas and gangster movies and comedies were always more our speed than prestigious, distinguished pictures; the French directors who grew up on American pictures found poetry in our fast action, laconic speech, plain gestures. The scene that shows the gnomish gang member called C. In many ways, this method is more effective; we feel the violence more because so much is left to our imaginations.
The dirty reality of death—not suggestions but blood and holes—is necessary. It is a kind of violence that says something to us; it is something that movies must be free to use. And it is just because artists must be free to use violence—a legal right that is beginning to come under attack—that we must also defend the legal rights of those filmmakers who use violence to sell tickets, for it is not the province of the law to decide that one man is an artist and another man a no-talent.
Too many people—including some movie reviewers—want the law to take over the job of movie criticism; perhaps what they really want is for their own criticisms to have the force of law. They look at the world and blame the movies. We see that killers are not a different breed but are us without the insight or understanding or self-control that works of art strengthen. Mayer did not turn us into a nation of Andy Hardys, and if, in a film, we see a frightened man wantonly take the life of another, it does not encourage us to do the same, any more than seeing an ivory hunter shoot an elephant makes us want to shoot one.
It may, on the contrary, so sensitize us that we get a pang in the gut if we accidentally step on a moth. Do they, as some people have charged, confer glamour on violence? Nobody in the movie gets pleasure from violence.
Is the charge based on the notion that simply by their presence in the movie Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway make crime attractive? Would having criminals played by dwarfs or fatties discourage crime? It seems rather doubtful. The accusation that the beauty of movie stars makes the anti-social acts of their characters dangerously attractive is the kind of contrived argument we get from people who are bothered by something and are clutching at straws.
Actors and actresses are usually more beautiful than ordinary people. And why not? We did not want her to be ordinary-looking. Why should we be deprived of the pleasure of beauty? Garbo could be all women in love because, being more beautiful than life, she could more beautifully express emotions. It is a supreme asset for actors and actresses to be beautiful; it gives them greater range and greater possibilities for expressiveness.
The handsomer they are, the more roles they can play; Olivier can be anything, but who would want to see Ralph Richardson, great as he is, play Antony? Actors and actresses who are beautiful start with an enormous advantage, because we love to look at them. The joke in the glamour charge is that Faye Dunaway has the magazine-illustration look of countless uninterestingly pretty girls, and Warren Beatty has the kind of high-school good looks that are generally lost fast.
Good roles do that for actors. His business sense may have improved his timing. The role of Clyde Barrow seems to have released something in him. It is, however, a tribute to his performance that one singles this failure out.
Actors before Brando did not mumble and scratch and show their sweat; dramatists before Tennessee Williams did not make explicit a particular substratum of American erotic fantasy; movie directors before Orson Welles did not dramatize the techniques of filmmaking; directors before Richard Lester did not lay out the whole movie as cleverly as the opening credits; actresses before Marilyn Monroe did not make an asset of their ineptitude by turning faltering misreadings into an appealing style.
Each, in a large way, did something that people had always enjoyed and were often embarrassed or ashamed about enjoying.
Here the script seems weak. Sometimes they would return for visits multiple times in one month. When Bonnie and Clyde had money, their families benefited from their largesse; when they were struggling, wounded or destitute, their families helped them with clean clothes and small amounts of money. At the time of his death, Clyde was attempting to purchase land for his mother and father in Louisiana.
Eventually, several members of the Barrow family would serve short jail terms for aiding and abetting their famous relatives. Barrow gang member Henry Methvin seemed to share a similar devotion to his family.
Clyde and Bonnie took this as evidence of Henry's trustworthiness and did all they could to make sure he saw his own family as often as possible. Henry, however, conspired with his father to betray Bonnie and Clyde by alerting the police to their whereabouts in return for his own pardon. On the run constantly, Bonnie and Clyde could never rest easy; there was always a chance that someone would become aware of their presence, notify the police, and create the opportunity for bloodshed.
This happened over and over through their short and violent career—violent because, once cornered, Clyde would kill anyone in order to avoid capture and a return to prison. Fourteen lawmen died along the way. If it were possible, however, Clyde would more often abduct someone sometimes a cop , make a getaway, and then release the person somewhere down the line. In more than one instance, he gave the unharmed kidnapped victim money to get back home. Public opinion turned against Bonnie and Clyde after reports of the murder of two motorcycle cops on Easter Sunday, Sleeping late in their car near Grapevine, Texas, Bonnie, Clyde and Henry Methvin were taken by surprise by the policemen, who suspected a car of drunks.
The situation beyond saving, Clyde fired on the other cop, a rookie named H. Murphy, whose first day it was on the job. The public, who had often cheered the brash and brazen outlaws, now wanted to see them caught—alive or dead. Bonnie and Clyde famously died in a hailstorm of bullets shot at their car by an assembled posse of Texas and Louisiana lawmen.
Approximately rounds later, Bonnie and Clyde lay dead in their car, which was pockmarked with several holes. Her hand still held part of the half-eaten sandwich that would be her last meal. Unofficially, there may have been many more. Bailey, the undertaker assigned to preserve the bodies for the funerals, found that the bodies had so many holes in them in so many different places that it was difficult to keep embalming fluid in them.
Little did Clyde and Bonnie know when they gave Darby five dollars and released him that day that he would indeed attend to them after death. In school, Bonnie liked to make up songs and stories. She also liked to write poems. Once she was on the run with Clyde, she had plenty of new material to write about. Bonnie continued to write her poems as the Barrow gang moved towards its inevitable end.
Bonnie and Clyde did go down together, her head at rest on his shoulder in their death car, but they were buried separately. Frank Hamer and Maney Gault killed the infamous s crime duo in a torrent of bullets. In August , the first group of notorious inmates arrived at the Big House on the Bay.
We take a look at a few of the most notorious. To remember FDR, who profoundly changed America with his New Deal programs, take a look at some fascinating facts about his life and legacy.
0コメント