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TechnoTV - Bonnie & Clyde
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List Price: $14.98
Our Price: $6.96
Your Save: $ 8.02 ( 54% )
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Manufacturer: Warner Brothers/Seven Arts
Starring: Warren Beatty, Faye Dunaway, Michael J. Pollard, Gene Hackman, Estelle Parsons
Directed By: Arthur Penn
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Average Customer Rating:  
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Audience Rating: R (Restricted)
Binding: VHS Tape
EAN: 9786304039526
Format: Closed-captioned
ISBN: 6304039522
Label: Warner Brothers/Seven Arts
Manufacturer: Warner Brothers/Seven Arts
Number Of Items: 1
Publisher: Warner Brothers/Seven Arts
Release Date: 1996-06-18
Running Time: 112
Studio: Warner Brothers/Seven Arts
Theatrical Release Date: 1967-08-13
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Spotlight customer reviews:
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Customer Rating: 
Summary: Beautiful, but misses a lot of the real story
Comment: As our nation teeters on the brink of what may be another Great Depression, it's poignant to look back on the last one. This movie was visually beautiful and artistically ground breaking, but the real story was much richer and darker.
They did not meet when Clyde was trying to steal Emma Parker's car; they met at a gathering of mutual friends and relatives when Bonnie was out of work.
Clyde was not gay or impotent, but an accomplished Cassanova who had serveral girlfriends, some serious, before he ever met Bonnie. Everyone who actually knew him testified to that. Also, banks were not his favorite target; convenience stores, gas stations, drug stores, and fruit stands were more his speed. He kept moving like a haunted man; when the owner got the death car back, she found he'd averaged 300 miles a day on the odometer. He was brutalized and sodomized at Eastham prison farm, and this experience gave him a mission he eventually carried out (which is not depicted in the movie): to go back and free as many cons as he could. It was the killing of a prison guard by a man he freed that set in motion the task force that would eventually ambush him. They never kidnapped or humiliated Frank Hammer, he never saw them till the day he helped kill them.
Clyde's gang was much bigger than the movie showed. C. W. Moss was a composite of W. D. Jones (a teenager who didn't drive as much as the movie showed), and Henry Methvin. Henry and his family would eventually betray Bonnie and Clyde in return for a plea bargain. We also don't see Raymond Hamilton, the gentleman bandit, or his unpopular girlfriend Mary O'Dare. It was she who was obnoxious and demanded a share of the loot, not Blanche. Hamilton was eventually captured and went to the Texas electric chair at 21, right after Joe Palmer who had killed the guard at Eastham. Ralph Fults, Floyd Hamilton, and many others are not mentioned in the movie. We also don't see Bonnie's limp from a horrendous burn in a car accident.
Blanche Barrow was much younger, slimmer, prettier and more charming than Estelle Parsons played her. She did wear riding breaches towards the end. In her memoirs there were two occasions where she pointed out to Clyde that people were acting funny, but he brushed her off. The gunfights at Platte City and Joplin could have been evaded if they'd listened to her. When Buck and Blanche went to meet Clyde, Buck had a full pardon and a paid-for car. If they'd left one day sooner, they could have died of old age together. Buck did not die at Dexfield, but five days later in a hospital, of infection following surgery. Blanche did time in prison where she wrote her memoirs, was eventually parolled, and remarried.
After Clyde got out of prison, and he did chop off two toes to escape Eastham farm duty, the Dallas police hassled him so frequently he couldn't hold a job. Clyde, Bonnie, Buck, and Blanche were slim, tiny people, and Clyde felt that this might be why there was so much violence around them, because they weren't taken seriously. Also there was no mention of the rabbit Bonnie got for her mother and carried around for a time. ("Keep him away from the police - he's been in two gunfights" when she handed him over)
The movie also didn't include the ghastly postmortem exam and embalming, the mobs at the funerals, and the harboring trial where even the moms got jail time. Bonnie's sister who nursed her burns, Henry Barrow the hard working ex-share cropper, and many other key figures were also absent. Faye Dunnaway did not look or dress at all like Bonnie. All in all, a warning of how NOT to cope with hard times.
My Life With Bonnie And Clyde Running With Bonnie and Clyde: The Ten Fast Years of Ralph Fults Depression Desperado: The Chronicle of Raymond Hamilton The Family Story of Bonnie and Clyde The true story of Bonnie & Clyde, (A Signet book, P-3437) Bonnie and Clyde: A Twenty-First-Century Update
Customer Rating:
Summary: once-controversial film
Comment: I bought this when I was collecting Gene Wilder movies. Turns out, it was his film debut. I hadn't seen this before, but I do remember all the controversy around it when it first came out. Funny, it seems so tame now.
Warren Beatty is Clyde Barrow; Faye Dunaway is Bonnie Parker. They rob banks during the depression, and they're joined by Clyde's brother Buck (Gene Hackman), Buck's wife Blanche (Estelle Parsons), and a young gas station attendant (Michael J. Pollard) they recruit as a driver.
They go on their merry way, with preacher's daughter Blanche's protests their only problem, until things start to catch up with them.
It's a wonderful blend of exciting action, humor, and pathos--the sort-of lovers racing gleefully toward their doom. Clyde in particular is almost innocently childlike in his self-centeredness and lack of consideration of the consequences of his actions, not to mention his ambiguous sexuality. I'm not that well-versed in evaluating acting performances, but I believed all these characters.
Which is not to say that I believe Beatty and Dunaway were just like the actual Barrow and Parker. Far from it, I'd say--rather than a portrayal of actual fact, the movie is more fiction based on the true story.
Oh, and Gene Wilder? He was wonderful as a man who's briefly caught up in the gang when they steal his car.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Crime Doesn't Pay
Comment: The story line appears to have told the story of Bonnie and Clyde as it
really happened, i.e. how two average people can join together and make
a go of it. Still, regardless of how well they performed their chosen
field of endeavour it remains that it is a field not to be followed nor
encouraged since "Crime Doesn't Pay!"
Customer Rating:
Summary: a must have for the film buffs
Comment: A bargain at twice the price. This is a preview of the renegade filmmaking that would dominate the 70's and it is a must see. The extras are wonderful but it is the film itself that ranks as a masterpiece. Warren Beatty's first production effort shows he wasn't just a pretty boy anymore.
Customer Rating:
Summary: A rare Gangster Film.
Comment: This movie was before the craze, mobster, super-gore film Pulp Fiction so I suppose it was almost impossible to suspect while being engrossed in Academy Award-like performances that such a horrendous fate would lie in wait for the characters of Bonnie and Clyde; Just as twistedly surprised as for the almost unsuspecting duo as well. The fates of all the ill fated characters in more traditional mob movies such as the very movie which set the bar for all others: The Godfather (Widescreen Edition) had a ticker for its characters and their ends, while shockingly delivered, were all part of the live by the gun die by the gun rule. But this film has you romantically envolved in its characters, to the point where villain and proctagonist are blurred and you wait for your tear-filled happy ending. The ending punishes you and dispells the step-by-step way about doing a Hollywood film. As brave as the legendary Director Stanley Kubrick in all his glory. A Glowing achievement for Warren Beaty and all responsible for this great movie.
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Editorial Reviews:
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One of the landmark films of the 1960s, Bonnie and Clyde changed the course of American cinema. Setting a milestone for screen violence that paved the way for Sam Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch, this exercise in mythologized biography should not be labeled as a bloodbath; as critic Pauline Kael wrote in her rave review, "it's the absence of sadism that throws the audience off balance." The film is more of a poetic ode to the Great Depression, starring the dream team of Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway as the titular antiheroes, who barrel across the South and Midwest robbing banks with Clyde's brother Buck (Gene Hackman), Buck's frantic wife Blanche (Estelle Parsons), and their faithful accomplice C.W. Moss (the inimitable Michael J. Pollard). Bonnie and Clyde is an unforgettable classic that has lost none of its power since the 1967 release. --Jeff Shannon
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