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
Seems like being in New York at that time must have raised your cultural antennae quite a bit.
It was raised more by what the French were doing, the Italians. Bergman and Fellini and the Nouvelle Vague in France. Godard, Resnais, Truffaut. A bunch of great filmmakers.
A great time.
It really was. There was a lot of post-war energy about it. A lot of the feeling, both in live TV and those early films, was, “you ain’t gonna tell me how to do this, no way. I’m going my way. I survived the war, I’ll do it my way.” It was a lot of arrogance that seemed to fit the new technology of TV. And, consequently, the damage that TV did to the movies, that made the movies come looking for the guys who had done TV. That’s how so many of us from the live TV world ended up making our first films in the latter sixties.
Frankenheimer, Altman—
Mulligan, George Roy Hill and so on.
You were a subversive bunch.
Sure, cause they didn’t know what they wanted! We knew that they were going to come up with the conventional, and we were going to go the other way! (Laughs)
We’ve been debating—is Bonnie & Clyde a kind of Western?
I would say it is a Western. One of the characteristics of it is, they’re redefining the law in their own terms. One can assume, as actually took place, that their own family’s homesteads were foreclosed by the banks. Well, that’s very like the old cattlemen-sheepmen stories of the West.
Here’s a bunch of guys coming in wanting to redefine that law in their own terms. So I would say it has all the characteristics of a Western. It just has a little of the specificity of the Midwest because of the automobile.
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