Close-Ups on the Outcasts
Arthur Penn discusses the first “revisionist” Western and Bonnie & Clyde’s link to the genre.
By: Henry Cabot Beck 05/01/2008
The one time Brando’s character speaks without affectation is in the scene when he kills Harry Dean Stanton. It’s actually touching.
I think so. It’s also at the end of his killing.
Was there ever anyone who looked more authentic in a hat and moustache than Harry Dean?
No. Nobody. He’s wonderful. And he’s a wonderful actor. Just terrific.
Something I noticed in Little Big Man is that, for once, Dustin Hoffman is the straight man; a passive observer.
He’s being tossed around by the crazy nature of history, of the events of that period. You know, you of the West know that well.
You directed your first Western, The Left Handed Gun, right at the time when the Western was a huge TV genre. Seems like an interesting moment to be making one of the first anti-western Westerns.
It certainly was. We were not gonna make a Western per se. We were operating on the thesis that what was happening in the West was being exploited by the yellow press in the East when they were publishing early scandalous writing and making, in fact, the people out in the West into heroes. And that was where the development of Billy the Kid came from. It didn’t originate with Bonney out there; it originated with the versions as told by the yellow press. That’s what the Hurd Hatfield character is in The Left Handed Gun. He comes out adoring Bill Bonney and then, by the end of it, feels betrayed by him and, consequently, betrays him.
These characters cared a great deal about how the press depicted them.
Yeah, exactly. That’s what Faye Dunaway’s—Bonnie’s—poem was designed to do [in Bonnie & Clyde], to celebrate them. And she sent it to the newspapers.
They certainly had a desire for fame. Most antisocial guys, gangsters, murderers, even rapists have a desire to be recognized, and I think that’s what went on with these people to a degree.
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