I see that 1967′s Bonnie and Clyde is tomorrow night’s selection for TCM’s “The Essentials” movie slot, and I couldn’t agree more.  B&C is one of those select few movies about which I can honestly say it changed my life and the way I think about everything.  I have such clear memories of watching this movie in the theater when it first came out — I was thirteen — and of the way it blew me away and captured my intellect and my imagination.  It’s remained one of my favorite movies, frequently revisted and never forgotten, and I’ll be watching tomorrow night if I’m home.  We all know that movies seen when you’re younger often take hold in mysterious ways, and boy, did Bonnie and Clyde have that effect on me.

I don’t recall going to see it with a parent, nor even who I went with (and I might have gone alone), but I know I went at least twice.  I have a completely clear and vivid memory of walking out of the theater (the Avenue theater in Downey, California, I think, not the Meralta which was down the street) but pausing before I went into the lobby to stand and listen to Charles Strouse’s melancholy exit music, played over a black screen.  I really remember that moment — weird how some odd experiences can stand out – because the movie obviously got to me and I simply could not leave while anything connected to the movie was still being shown.  I knew it was something special, even though I also knew that most of my friends weren’t even allowed to go see it.  As somebody who more or less had already seen it all — TV in my room from an early age, always on, and you’d be surprised how many interesting things used to be on back then – and with my parents newly-divorced (and the only divorced parents anywhere that I knew), I was already an oddball and clearly immune to further corruption. 

I was also a history buff, and did know that it was based on real people, though not slavishly so.  I got that; I knew that bank robbers in the 1930s really didn’t wear nice clothes like that and have their bankrobbing shenanigans set to music by Flatt & Scruggs (I knew them from their appearances on The Beverly Hillbillies, of course).  Somehow I also understood Bonnie’s frustration with her smalltown life, Clyde’s awkward sexual ambivalence, the pastor’s daughter Blanche Barrow’s deep love for her ex-con husband Buck, C.W. Moss’s shame when he botched the getaway, resulting in Clyde killing a man, lawman Frank Hamer’s (Denver Pyle) seething hatred of the Barrow Gang after their humiliation of him, Bonnie’s mother’s bleak assessment of her daughter’s chances of survival, and everything else that made such an impression on me. 

I didn’t want to be Bonnie, or Clyde, or anybody else in the movie — their existence was cramped, brief, pain-filled, violent, grimy, tense, desperate and pathetic, but I couldn’t look away from the screen for a second.  I bought the record of the movie score, which contained copius sections of dialogue, and memorized it all.  I bought books — the movie novelization and many other paperbacks that capitalized on the movie’s popularity, with the story of the real-life Bonnie and Clyde sometimes as told by people who actually knew them.  Fascinating stuff — even more grimy and desperate that the movie’s account — and to someone falling in love with history, a wonderful introduction to the Depression. 

Bonnie and Clyde also helped me become familiar with old movies, through the sequence after the murderous getaway ride, when Bonnie, Clyde and C.W. duck inside a movie theater showing Gold Diggers of 1933.  The contrast between the Busby Berkeley choreography with Ginger Rogers singing “We’re In The Money” — Clyde, angry and so scared, chewing out CW, hitting him with his hat –C.W. sniveling and feeling awful and just taking it in — and Bonnie mesmerized with the movie and impatiently shushing her fellow gangmembers is a stunning sequence.  (Almost touching is the way Bonnie goes back to their ratty room and tries to sing the song as she dresses.)  Though I used to watch older features on TV — of course! — Bonnie and Clyde propelled me into an appreciation of musicals and all classic films, thanks to that sequence.  It was after seeing the movie, and understanding that the director really meant something to a film, that I bought my first copy of “Movies on TV” and went through it looking up Arthur Penn’s work, and sought out The Miracle Worker and The Left-Handed Gun, especially, on TV.  The movie changed the way I consumed entertainment, took it to another level.  I’m sure we all have similar moments where we realize we’re not just watching a movie and having a good time, we’re appreciating it.  Big difference, and a crucial one, and good to get to that point early in life so you can orient yourself in the right direction.

Because I’ve always had a morbid streak I was particularly captivated by the horrific sequence where Buck Barrow — Gene Hackman, so good — is shot in the head as the gang tries to escape ambush at a motor court, and by the way he’s moaning, you know it’s really, really, really bad.  The fleeing gang struggles with a mattress, trying to shield themselves, as Buck is screaming bloody murder and somewhere in there Blanche (Oscar-winner Estelle Parsons) gets glass in her eye and is temporarily blinded.  They manage to pile into a couple of cars but it’s awful, futile, everybody is banged up, some are mortally wounded, and so much for Bonnie and Clyde being a glamorized version of crime.  It was gruesome, and pitiful and nothing more so than when the law surrounds them and Buck is alone, dying Buck, blind, his head blown open, in agony, lying in the middle of a field while he dies.  And Blanche is there, blind, captured, held from going to her husband and comforting him — “It didn’t happen, Daddy” she has been telling him, using a pet name — and he dies a miserable death.  Yikes.  So incredibly powerful and full of such raw emotion that it’s burned into my memory forever.  I would never want to forget a scene like that.

What else got to me?  Anything Michael J. Pollard did — he was a frequent TV guest performer but to see him here, sort of homuncular, shambling, not quite bumbling but so funny in his introductory sequence, when he reacts to their famous “We rob banks” line and then when he tosses the cash register money into the Barrows’ car after they urge him to join them. (I just love the way Bonnie says his name — “Mr. C.W. Moss” she purrs.)  Another priceless CW moment, when he first meets Buck and Blanche, and goes to the car in his underwear to inquire about Blanche’s movie magazine with Myrna Loy.  And when he goes against his hillbilly father (Dub Taylor) who hates Bonnie and Clyde — great sequence.  He’s marvelous and deserved his Best Supporting Actor nomination, for sure. 

Who wasn’t amazing in Bonnie and Clyde?  Everybody was.  Beatty as Clyde was fierce, likeable, troubled, doomed — Dunaway as Bonnie was stunning, too pretty for words, tough, amazing-looking in those Theadora Van Runkle costumes, under-appreciated (and Clyde knew it), with literary aspirations which were maybe naive but also sort of touching.   What about all those great scenes?  When Bonnie and Clyde hand their gun to the displaced black sharecropper so he can blast a window out — sentimental but it really works; the first meeting of Bonnie and Clyde, seen below, as they weirdly flirt – Clyde brags about his axed-off toe — after Bonnie has flashed him from her upstairs window as he tries to steal her mama’s car.  Plenty of gun-stroking and so forth, which did not exactly go over the head of a budding teenage girl, but it was such a striking scene, with such an enticing lackadaisical rhythm that you were drawn in immediately.  Very funny, too.

What’s not to like?  Nothing.  I think Bonnie and Clyde is perfect, and I always will.  So if you haven’t seen it in a while, tune in tomorrow night to see Robert Osborne and the wonderful — really, is there anybody else as cogent and funny and complicated? – Alec Baldwin make Bonnie and Clyde one of “The Essentials” for TCM viewers.  Wow.  I can’t wait.