How One ’60s Movie Changed Hollywood Forever
On August 14, 1967, film critic Bosley Crowther did the same thing he had been doing several times a week for more than a quarter-century: He published a film review in The New York Times. The subject of his latest piece was director Arthur Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde, starring Warren Beatty (who also produced) and Faye Dunaway. To say that the picture was not to Crowther’s liking would be putting it lightly. “This blending of farce with brutal killings is as pointless as it is lacking in taste,” he wrote in a particularly ferocious passage, “since it makes no valid commentary upon the already travestied truth. And it leaves an astonished critic wondering just what purpose Mr. Penn and Mr. Beatty think they serve with this strangely antique, sentimental claptrap.”
Crowther had no way of knowing it, but this was to be one of the most significant movie reviews ever written — albeit not for reasons that reflected favorably on him. Bonnie and Clyde heralded a new tide that had just begun rising in Hollywood, one that would leave Crowther and others with old-fashioned sensibilities in its wake.
Throughout his decades-long tenure at the Times, during which time he rose to prominence as one of the most respected voices on film, Crowther cultivated a reputation as something of a moralist. Despite the fact that he was an early proponent of such foreign auteurs as Ingmar Bergman and Akira Kurosawa, and was also openly critical of Senator Joseph McCarthy and the Hollywood blacklist, Crowther’s readership was nevertheless beginning to turn against his increasingly out-of-touch ways. A negative review of a film that, by and large, had done rather poorly in terms of critical reception was unremarkable in and of itself. What attracted so much publicity was Crowther's sustained attack against it.
In the months following Bonnie and Clyde’s initial release, he wrote two more negative reviews and went out of his way to blast it in critiques of other movies, as well as in published responses to letters he received from unhappy Times readers. He was far from alone in his displeasure — Bonnie and Clyde was also panned by TIME and Newsweek, to cite two of the more high-profile outlets to bash it — but what he was alone in was his refusal to move on. The critical consensus was so negative that Warner Bros. decided to pull the film from theaters after a few short weeks in order to put it out of its misery. At the behest of Beatty a few months later, they re-released Bonnie and Clyde in theaters after launching a new promotional campaign.
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On October 21, a freelance contributor to The New Yorker named Pauline Kael wrote a 9,000-word review — really a defense — of the beleaguered film. “Bonnie and Clyde is the most excitingly American American movie since The Manchurian Candidate,” she proclaimed. “The audience is alive to it. Our experience as we watch it has some connection with the way we reacted to movies in childhood: with how we came to love them and to feel they were ours — not an art that we learned over the years to appreciate but simply and immediately ours.”
These oppositional responses created a domino effect that sealed the fate of both writers. Kael’s response led to other reevaluations of the film, including a cover story in TIME in December of the same year, in which the magazine reversed its opinion, and the following mea culpa from Newsweek's Joe Morgenstern: “I am sorry to say I consider that review grossly unfair and regrettably inaccurate. I am sorrier to say I wrote it.” Crowther was forced into retirement by the end of 1967, by which time the tide had turned squarely against him, and Kael was officially taken on as a staff critic at The New Yorker around the same time. She worked there for another 23 years, and is widely considered one of the most influential film critics of all time.
To better understand the extreme responses — both immediate and prolonged — elicited by the film, we must first understand the Hollywood climate of the time. Bonnie and Clyde has long been regarded as a watershed event that in many ways marked the arrival of what we now call New Hollywood. Also known as the American New Wave, the movement was a delayed reaction to the “horrible decade” for the film industry that was the 1950s and everything it represented: stagnation in the wake of Hollywood’s golden age. Studio filmmaking had become too safe, the thinking went, and the success of Bonnie and Clyde helped usher in a new era of creative freedom, in which directors exerted more control over their films than ever before. The studios didn’t cede that control out of the goodness of their heart, of course; they did it because the historical epics and musicals they’d relied on for so long were finally losing money as the younger crowds who now made up a larger share of their audience craved something new.
Bonnie and Clyde wasn’t the first of its kind — Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove (1964), Mike Nichols’ Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966), and Norman Jewison’s In the Heat of the Night (1967) were equally important exemplars of the movement — but the controversy surrounding its release exemplified its role in bringing about a sea change in the industry. Many other audacious pictures followed in the next two years, from The Graduate and Rosemary’s Baby to Easy Rider and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, and by the 1970s, New Hollywood was in full force. Nearly all of that decade’s defining films are considered part of New Hollywood, in part because they’re synonymous with their directors: Francis Ford Coppola made The Godfather, William Friedkin made The Exorcist, Woody Allen made Annie Hall, and so on and so forth.
Most of these filmmakers were young, influenced by foreign directors whose sensibilities were far beyond those of the studios, and took novel approaches to telling stories — including a propensity for more downbeat narratives than we associate with the typical Hollywood ending. All of this ran counter to conventional wisdom in Tinseltown, but because so many of them proved to be massively successful, they were allowed to explore their idiosyncratic visions with less studio meddling than ever before.
Bonnie and Clyde went on to gross $70 million against a $2.5 million budget and was nominated for 10 Oscars, including Best Picture and Best Director, winning for Supporting Actress and Cinematography. That it didn’t win any of the major prizes was in some ways good for its reputation:Being fully embraced by the establishment from the outset would have been antithetical to its place in the counterculture the film helped usher in and define.
