Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway star as the legendary real-life bank robbers in Arthur Penn’s volatile Bonnie and Clyde. With its anti-hero point of view and graphic violence, this film helped lead the charge for grittier, more realistic fare that cropped up throughout the ’70s. While the film certainly sensationalizes the criminals, it also humanizes them. It’s easy to see how a bored waitress like Bonnie Parker would fall for a handsome bad boy like Clyde Barrow (I mean, who wouldn’t get in a car with smoking-hot Warren Beatty?) And since the two only robbed banks, they became folk heroes to a working class destroyed by foreclosures. I also like that the film suggests Clyde is impotent. It’s refreshing to see a tough guy with flaws and foibles, and it also makes the romantic relationship more interesting than most.
James Dean received the first posthumous acting nomination from the Academy Awards for his performance as the troubled Cal in East of Eden, his first major film role. (He would die tragically just a few months after the film was released.) It’s a riveting performance, one of the most vulnerable and moving I’ve ever seen. The film, directed with style and elegance by Elia Kazan, is based on the last quarter of John Steinbeck’s sprawling novel. Steinbeck believed the power of storytelling was in its ability to remind us of our own humanity, and when I learned that, it helped me understand why I’ve loved this movie for so long.
