I love Bonnie & Clyde. I have seen it a gazillion times and the ending always hits me like a baseball bat to the gut. I believe it's the best, and certainly the most influential, American movie of my lifetime.*But tonight, I'm not watching my new Bonnie and Clyde DVD. I'm watching the second, extras disc and I'm enjoying it enormously. Deleted scenes, Beatty's wardrobe tests, a documentary on the real -- and nowhere near as gorgeous -- Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker. Before today, I didn't know Morgan Fairchild had been Faye Dunaway's stand in! God, I love the extras when they're about a movie I love!
* Think of The Godfather and Sonny Corleone's last moments at the tollbooth. Consider the chasm it explores between money/power on one hand and respectability on the other. The visuals and the themes in The Godfather owe so very much to Bonnie & Clyde. And that's just the most obvious movie that springs to mind.
The real B & C as you say were nowhere as glam as Beatty and Dunaway. Bonnie was pint sized and badly scarred from a fire she was in. But what struck me most about the case, and the movie, was how they were shot down -- no trial, no opportunity to surrender. Law enforcement then was every bit as homicidal as the criminals.
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