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Salient. Victoria University of Wellington Student's Newspaper. Volume 31, Number 3. March 19 1968

Dementia praecox

Dementia praecox

And this is something else that is unacceptable to Page Cook and cronies—the fact Bonnie and Clyde is a spirited evocation of one aspect of mythical Americana.

Nevertheless, in its own way the review is something of a collector's item—the emphases were in the original.

"Bonnie and Clyde is so incompetently written, acted, directed and produced it would not be worth noticing were a claque not attempting to promote the idea that its sociopathy is art.

The claque even succeeded in having Bonnie and Clyde as the opening night picture at Montreal's recent International Film Festival.

"The script of Bonnie and Clyde, by David Newman and Robert Benton, is dementia praecox of the most pointless sort—that is it endeavours to do simultaneously such antithetical things as—

• 'explain' the Barrow gang of real-life punks who killed 18 people in the course of Texas-Oklahoma holdups in the depression days of the 30s,

• kid those real-life hold-ups and murders via slap-stick (very amateurishly)

• deploy male impotence (Clyde's) through the film as an apnrodisiac for pathics of both sexes,

• wallow in sado-masochism (the camera dwells on an eye as it is shot from its socket, on a head that is blown apart),

• arouse sympathy for Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker when the police ultimately ambush and gun them down.

"Who is the producer of so adolescently ignorant a film? Warren Beatty, who also plays Clyde, and, in doing so, adds his own ignorances to the character-inconsistencies of the script.

"Who directed? Arthur Penn whose artistic integrity is about on the level of Beatty's acting ability—i.e. close to zero.