Quote:
The studio gave Warren an unprecedented 40% share in the movie’s
gross intake. Not because they believed in him, but because they
were certain the movie would bomb. Warren’s still raking them in nicely
from this almost 40 year old movie!
Warren was a one man promotion team. He singlehandedly assured a
second release of the movie, working tirelessly without sleep for weeks,
after the first release was hardly promoted by the studio.
Only the second time around did the movie become a success.
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As I recall, it was released in August 1967, and the critics couldn't
handle the violence at the end of it -- They trashed it to a man;
all the major critics were appalled by it.
But they didn't forget it.
Bonnie & Clyde was one of the first movies to show simulated bullet
wounds as they happened; explosions of blood were a relatively
new phenomenon, having been invented (I think) for the spaghetti
westerns that Clint Eastwood was doing in the mid-1960s.
Beatty used this new technology for
Bonnie & Clyde, and the ending
of the film is staggeringly violent. In real life, Bonnie Parker died of
over 60 bullet wounds; in the movie, it really looks it. The car is
riddled with bulletholes and so are their bodies -- the younger
generation being destroyed by the old. (The movie struck a chord with
the Summer of Love generation, who were protesting the Vietnam War.)
Cameras running at four different speeds caught the action
as we see Faye Dunaway and Warren Beatty strafed in the car.
Later, by November 1967, critics gave it a second look and found a miraculous
balance between the exhilaration of "playing" cops & robbers (accompanied
by the infectious banjo music by Flatt & Scruggs) and the shocking
bursts of violence and remorse (such as when a shop clerk comes at
Beatty with a meat cleaver, or when a middle-aged man jumps on
Clyde's running board as they're getting away and Clyde shoots him
in the face).
Roger Ebert once named it one of his ten best films of all time in a
critics' poll in
Sight & Sound magazine.