Director: Arthur Penn
Cast: Warren Beatty, Faye Dunaway, Gene Hackman, Michael J. Pollard
Have I Seen it Before: Never. I know. I’m behind.
Did I Like It: There’s a problem with coming up in a generation outside the film that in many ways defines it. When it premiered, Bonnie and Clyde was the vanguard of a new Hollywood. It shocked sensibilities and redefined not just the content in films, but what films could be…
Then, ten years later Star Wars (1977) came out and we all decided to go in a completely different direction. It feels like that might be a point for a different review, but Star Wars is the movie that defined my generation’ sensibilities, like it or not. there’s a debate to be had as to whether or not that’s a good bad thing, but here I feel lost. The movie is so tame.
It is violent, and in what I can only imagine is a realistic manner, but not nearly as violent as anything Quentin Tarantino would come up with in subsequent years.
It is, I suppose, brazen about sex for its time, but not in any way more scintillating than what you would find on a primetime network procedural now.
It strives to take the sheen off of Hollywood phoniness. The performances are largely naturalistic, but you can blindly stab at your Netflix queue to find films that toil in its shadow, and for all of its grittiness, it’s hard to believe people that look like Beatty and Dunaway are anything other than movie stars.
All of this is not the film’s fault, aside from the fact that I am expected to do the work of imagining what a visceral experience it must have been fifty years ago. I just wish I had seen it when it felt like the beginning of something new, not when it had long since become something quaint.