Pictures at a Revolution

by Mark Harris

  In almost every movie house, the slap drew cheers. “Applause in the movies…seems to have some belligerence in it, an assertion of will,” wrote Renata Adler in The New York Times. “People applaud at movies, I think, because they want to insist on seeing more of something…. The enthusiasm for [Poitier’s] small act of violence also contains a strong awareness of his real situation. He is playing once again, patiently, angrily, that young Negro…which he has managed to turn, over the years, into a kind of deliberate, type-cast, reverse racial stereotype…. This reinforces the sense of outrage at the abuse which, until the point of the liberating slap, he has had to take in role after role…. The reaction is shock and pure relief.”64

  TWENTY-SIX

  Oh shit,” Arthur Penn said to himself. “Here we go.”

  It was August 5, the second day of the 1967 Montreal Film Festival, the Saturday morning after a capacity crowd of two thousand at the Expo Theater had attended the opening night premiere of Bonnie and Clyde and responded with laughter, cheers, and clearly heartfelt applause. Penn and Beatty, listening to the response, knew the movie had had exactly the effect they hoped it would. At a press conference, the director calmly fielded questions about the picture’s comedy, violence, antiheroism, and “relevance,” all of which had gotten the first-nighters buzzing. “I don’t think the original Bonnie and Clyde are very important except insofar as they motivated the writing of a script and the making of the movie,” he told reporters. The film’s approach, he explained, was that, at a time when “very rural people were suffering the terrors of a depression…Bonnie and Clyde [became] folk heroes, violators of the status quo. And in that context, one finds oneself…confronted with the terrible irony that we root for somebody…who, in the course of [a] good cause, is called upon to commit acts of violence which repel us.” Penn spoke about the “constant correlative” of humor and bloodshed and explained that as the movie unfolds, “the murders get less and less funny because they begin to be identified with the murderers…. With respect to Bonnie and Clyde and my other films…I would have to say that I think violence is a part of the American character.”1

  After the press conference, Penn saw Bosley Crowther, the New York Times critic who delighted in being a kingmaker—and sometimes an executioner—at international film festivals. Crowther had been at the Expo Theater the night before, and he was appalled; the audience’s enthusiastic reaction and Penn’s pro-insurrection rhetorical flourishes in front of reporters had only affronted him more. “He sort of warned me that he was really going to attack it,” says Penn, “and I thought, well, here it comes.”2

  Bonnie and Clyde was scheduled to open in New York City on August 13—a Sunday—but Crowther couldn’t contain his wrath even for a week. Immediately after Penn’s remarks, he filed a dispatch that ran in the Times the next day. “Hollywood moviemakers seem to have a knack of putting the worst foot forward at international film festivals,” he began. “Now they’ve done it again.” Bonnie and Clyde, he fumed, “whips through the saga of the cheapjack bandits as though it were funny instead of sordid and grim.” And while he sullenly acknowledged that most of those in attendance had liked the movie, “some more sober visitors from the United States,” whom he did not identify, “were wagging their heads in dismay and exasperation that so callous and callow a film should represent their country in these critical times.”3 Five days later, Crowther went after the movie again, claiming it had sullied the festival for him and was even tarnishing the image of Expo 67. “Was the audience reaction a true expression of appreciation for the film or…a sort of rocking along with a form of camp?” he wondered.4 By the time he filed his official review on opening day, his indignation had swollen into outrage. Bonnie and Clyde, he wrote, “is a cheap piece of bald-faced slapstick comedy that treats the hideous depredations of that sleazy, moronic pair as though they were as full of fun and frolic as the jazz-age cut-ups in Thoroughly Modern Millie.” He called the performances “ridiculous, camp-tinctured travesties” and said he found the violence “as pointless as it is lacking in taste.”5

  Crowther’s displeasure with the film came as less of a surprise than the ferocity and persistence of his attacks on it. After twenty-seven years on the job, he was a staid traditionalist with a harrumphing aversion to anything he found “sensationalistic” and a particular distaste for violence that went unpunished on screen. As far back as The Killers in 1946 and White Heat in 1949, he chided Hollywood for its eagerness to make movies about criminals and worried that the industry’s emphasis on “malevolence” and “sadistic thrills” would generate “unhealthy stimulation”6 in moviegoers, whom he viewed as an impressionable and easily corrupted stratum of consumer society. In the month before Bonnie and Clyde opened, the success of The Dirty Dozen had shocked Crowther; he called Aldrich’s movie “astonishingly wanton…a studied indulgence of sadism that is morbid and disgusting beyond words.”7 And he had been equally horrified by two other recently released films that demolished the tradition of the western as thoroughly as The Dirty Dozen had upended the war-movie genre. Sergio Leone’s A Fistful of Dollars had opened in Europe in 1964, and its sequel, For a Few Dollars More, had followed in 1965. But only in the last few months had the films, which introduced movie audiences to TV cowboy Clint Eastwood, reached the United States; in 1967, United Artists released them in rapid succession in order to build an audience for the third picture in the series, The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. Crowther had little fondness for moral ambiguity; he felt that Leone’s movies, which featured Eastwood as a gunslinger who keeps his allegiances to himself and which UA’s executives crowed “made money beyond all our hopes,”8 were “constructed to endorse the exercise of murderers” and offer “fantasies of killing contrived…for emotional escapism.”9 Shortly before Bonnie and Clyde’s opening, he wrote a column called “Movies to Kill People By” that began, “Something is happening in movies that has me alarmed and disturbed. Movie-makers and moviegoers are agreeing that killing is fun.” He concluded by calling The Dirty Dozen and the Leone pictures “as socially decadent and dangerous as LSD.”10 One of the last reviews he filed before leaving for Montreal to see Bonnie and Clyde was a pan of Roger Corman’s The St. Valentine’s Day Massacre, which had beaten Penn’s film into theaters by just a couple of weeks and which, he wrote, “artificializes and confuses the tawdry history it is supposed to relate.”11

  In person, Crowther, according to his colleagues at the Times and his contemporaries in movie criticism, was a mild, soft-spoken gentleman, not lacking in perspective or a sense of humor. But in print, huffiness and sanctimony would often get the better of him. “The film critic is performing a function akin to a pastor—he is a counselor of a community about the values of a picture,” he told Richard Schickel, then the reviewer for Life. “[Bonnie and Clyde] is immoral, and we have to say so.”12 Unfortunately for Crowther, whenever he took umbrage at something, his prose, which was never smooth to begin with, would gnarl itself into incomprehensibility. “He was very amiable,” says Joseph Morgenstern, who was then beginning his job as Newsweek’s movie critic. “But he was a know-nothing, fuddy-duddy, Puritan, turgid writer. Remember Arthur Krock, the New York Times columnist? There was a joke that nobody ever finished reading a whole Arthur Krock column. The same could have been said of Crowther, although he was immensely powerful, and people did read far enough to know what he thought.”13

  In 1967, the opinion of The New York Times’ film critic didn’t represent the last word on a movie, but it did tend to start the conversation, and Crowther’s triple attack on Bonnie and Clyde was especially damaging because it echoed the contempt in which Jack Warner and Ben Kalmenson already held the movie. If they had been indifferent to its fate before, the Times certainly offered no reason for them to change their minds. And Crowther was hardly alone in his assessment; Time magazine handed the assignment of critiquing Bonnie and Clyde to its music reviewer, Alan Rich, who snidely dismissed Beatty’s “long-unawaited debut as a produ
cer” as “a strange and purposeless mingling of fact and claptrap.”14 When it first opened, Life didn’t bother to review it at all. Even Andrew Sarris, a champion of the Nouvelle Vague films that had inspired the screenplay in the first place, had mixed feelings about the movie, saying it “oscillates between the distancing of period legend and the close-ups of contemporary psychology.”15 “Sarris’s review, which was not good, was very smart,” says Robert Benton. “He said, this is a self-conscious movie, and he was right to note that the New Wave had created a kind of self-consciousness that would mark the American films that were about to come out. But it was a pretty devastating time.”16

  When Joe Morgenstern went to Warner Brothers’ Fifth Avenue screening room to watch Bonnie and Clyde for Newsweek, he was rattled to find Beatty sitting in the back row next to him. “I felt that he was trying to peer at my notes,” he says. “It was a little unnerving, but that’s not really an excuse.” Morgenstern went back to his office and filed what he called a “pissy” review,17 in which he wrote that although the movie had “interesting” elements and “some beauty, suggestions of humanity and even some legitimate humor,” it devolved into “a squalid shoot-’em-up for the moron trade…In Cold Blood played as a William Inge comedy.”18

  “I got it wrong,” he says. “I was not ready for the violence and kind of shrank from it.” Morgenstern didn’t give much thought to his piece after he filed it; “however upset or disoriented I had been by the movie,” he says, “in my mind, that was all the more reason for me to move on.” But as Friday approached, Morgenstern found himself suggesting to his wife, actress Piper Laurie, that they see it in a theater. “She looked at me kind of peculiarly and said, ‘I thought you didn’t like it.’ This was on the weekend—my review wouldn’t be published until Monday. And I said, somewhat illogically, ‘Well, you’ll like it—the costumes, the Flatt and Scruggs music….’ We went to see the movie that afternoon, and the audience just went crazy. It had a big crowd, despite Bosley Crowther’s review. I just got this cold sweat on the back of my neck and thought, ‘Oh shit, I’ve missed the boat.’ I turned to my wife, who loved it, and said, ‘Do you have anything to write with?’ and she found a pad and pen, and I started frantically taking notes. I suddenly realized what I had missed.”19

  Morgenstern was too late to prevent his review from running, but that Monday, when it hit newsstands, he walked into the office of Newsweek editor Osborn Elliott, told him with a nervous attempt at casualness that he had “some other thoughts” on Bonnie and Clyde, and asked him if he could write about it again. “The only thing I was thinking about at that point was digging myself out of a hole that I’d fallen into. I was a deeply troubled soul that week. I thought I could get away with just a reconsideration, not a retraction. But I started to write, and I was as blocked as I’ve ever been. And then I thought, ‘I’ve gotta come clean.’ And I wrote the lead of the new piece.” A few days later, Morgenstern and Laurie had dinner with Pauline Kael, who was then working on a long article about the movie for The New Republic, where she had been freelancing recently. “Pauline wasted no time in telling me smugly, ‘You really missed the boat,’ and I said, trying my best to imitate her smugness, ‘Well, I may have more to say,’ already knowing what I had written.”20

  “Last week this magazine said that Bonnie and Clyde, a tale of two young bank robbers in the 1930s, turns into a ‘squalid shoot-’em-up for the moron trade’ because it does not know what to make of its own violence,” Morgenstern’s second review began. “I am sorry to say I consider that review grossly unfair and regrettably inaccurate. I am sorrier to say I wrote it.” Morgenstern went on to praise “scene after scene of dazzling artistry…[that] has the power to both enthrall and appall.” The film, he wrote, “makes a cogent statement…that violence is not necessarily perpetrated by shambling cavemen or quivering psychopaths but may also be the casual, easy expression of only slightly aberrated citizens, of jes’ folks.” And the movie’s audience, he added, was “enjoying itself almost to the point of rapture.”21

  Morgenstern’s mea culpa—“my Andy Warhol moment,” he says wryly22—was infinitely more valuable to Bonnie and Clyde than a mere rave would have been: Suddenly the studio had a controversy it could exploit. “After the first set of reviews, I thought, it won’t even last a week in theaters,” says Robert Benton. “But when Joe Morgenstern changed his mind, that pivoted it. It made news—and from there, the movie started to have a life of its own.”23 When Bonnie and Clyde first opened, Warner Brothers had run an ad with quotes from the critics who had seen the film in Montreal and liked it—Judith Crist, whose enthusiastic recommendation had gotten the movie into the festival in the first place and who wrote about it for Vogue, Gene Shalit in Ladies’ Home Journal, and Cue’s William Wolf. (The film also drew support from an unlikely quarter: “It works,” wrote the reviewer for the Catholic Film Newsletter. “You can say it should not. You can insist it does not decide what it is: semidocumentary, ballad, love story, social comment, comedy, psychological study or tragedy. But it works.”)24 But now the studio had something juicier to sell—a movie that had made a critic think twice.

  In the weeks that followed, Crowther’s unwillingness to let up on Bonnie and Clyde began to backfire; his obstinacy turned what had been long-simmering annoyance with him into open warfare. Crowther had been disdained by many of his colleagues for years. In 1963, his slack-jawed rave for Cleopatra, about which he repeatedly used the word brilliant, had been publicly mocked by Sarris and had even drawn groans from within the Times; the paper’s movie business reporter Murray Schumach complained to his bosses that the review was just one more example of Crowther’s tendency to coddle big, expensive studio films, and editors Arthur Gelb and Turner Catledge were embarrassed by the fulsomeness of his praise for a film that they themselves thought was overblown trash.25 In the last year, critics had begun to mass against Crowther, not for his determinedly middlebrow taste, but for his propensity to bully anyone who didn’t share it. Crowther’s contempt for a small movie could kill it in its first week and sometimes prevent it from even having a first week. When he saw Orson Welles’s Falstaff (Chimes at Midnight) at the 1966 Cannes Film Festival, he made his hatred of the picture so plain that its U.S. distributor, the small company Peppercorn-Wormser, tried for almost a year to avoid opening it in New York. (“Crowther, Please Stay Home,” Variety pleaded in a story about his ability to keep audiences away from art-house movies.)26 When Falstaff finally arrived, many critics found Crowther’s review malicious. In the Village Voice, Sarris called him a “power-oriented critic…. What I object to is the implication that he is going to punish the distributors for bringing Falstaff to America against his express wishes.” He added that Crowther “can call [Welles] old-fashioned and dated and used-up, as if critics stayed young forever and only directors became senile.”27

  “He was a very good man, especially on civil rights and politics, but he had a withering effect on foreign films and art films,” says Sarris. “As films got more difficult, he gave courage to people who wanted to believe that if a movie was difficult to understand, it probably wasn’t any good. That was particularly pernicious. But I was involved in a lot of critical feuds back then, and being at the Times and having a kind of philistine-ish style, he was an easy target, and we took advantage of it.”28

  In late 1966, Sarris, Morgenstern, John Simon, Hollis Alpert, and seven other reviewers formed the National Society of Film Critics, an awards-giving group intended to counterbalance the New York Film Critics Circle, which at the time was dominated by Crowther and a number of stodgy hacks from daily newspapers who tended to follow his lead. (In the National Society’s first year, its membership awarded Best Picture and Best Director to Blow-Up, while the New York group gave its top prizes to A Man for All Seasons.) When Crowther aimed his fusillade at Bonnie and Clyde, he suddenly found himself the target of increasingly personal and public counterattacks. Praising its treatment of violence as “thoughtful an
d piercing,” The New Yorker’s Penelope Gilliatt, among the first major critics to review the movie positively, wrote that “Bonnie and Clyde could look like a celebration of gangster glamour only to a man with a head full of wood shavings.”29 And Sarris, though he was not a particular fan of the film, went after Crowther, too: “To use the pages of the New York Times for a personal vendetta against a director and actor one doesn’t like is questionable enough. To incite the lurking forces of censorship and repression with inflammatory diatribes against violence on the screen is downright mischievous…. The slanders in the Times emerge as exercises in dull spite.”30 By the end of August, Variety had taken notice and wondered if Crowther’s negative review had “hurt the cause of serious filmmaking in America by shooting down a work of art…. These concerns over violence might spark a return to the…days of movie-making when every ‘commercial’ picture had to make an explicit statement of its point.”31

  Whatever his other failings, Crowther had not called for a return to a more restrictive Production Code in any of his pieces. He had in fact spent thirty years fighting film censorship harder than almost anyone else in his profession; his reviews were even cited in the 1952 Supreme Court decision that ruled that movies were protected by the First Amendment.32 He was stunned and hurt by accusations that he was advocating a return to a more restrictive era, and he lashed out. Even the Times began to exploit the controversy, running a flurry of letters from readers who called Crowther “blinded” and “insensitive” and excitedly praised Bonnie and Clyde as “deep—deep” and “a totally new thing—it’s real and unreal.”33 Crowther responded with a fourth attack, expressing bewilderment at the “upsurge of passionate expressions of admiration” for a “deliberately buffoonized picture” that he felt was defined by a “kind of cheating with the bare and ugly truth.” He concluded by digging himself a deep rhetorical hole, comparing Bonnie and Clyde to a movie that attempted to treat Lee Harvey Oswald or Adolf Hitler sympathetically.34 “There came a certain point when the more he went after us, the more we enjoyed it,” says Benton. “Bosley Crowther was far from the worst critic out there, but what he wasn’t prepared for was something that would undermine the good, traditional, craftsmanlike, ‘well made’ movie, not only morally, but stylistically. It pushed some button in him. And it became impossible for him to stop.”35