|
Article Excerpt
... when a text fails to respond to the rules applied to it, it is not always clear whether the text or the reader is at fault.
--Peter Rabinowitz, Before Reading, 211
In general, divergence of readings is more interesting than convergence....
--Jonathan Culler, The Pursuit of Signs, 51
Arthur Penn's Bonnie and Clyde is arguably the Hollywood movie that generated the widest range of responses from reviewers. The unfavorable reviews in some of the most estimable newspapers and magazines of the day--Newsweek, Time, Life, The Saturday Review, The New York Times-were sufficiently damning to prompt the distributor, Warner Brothers-Seven Arts, to pull the film from circulation not long after its release in the fall of 1967. (1) The favorable reviews--most famously Pauline Kael's lengthy defense in The New Yorker and, in a reversal of position for Time, Stefan Kanfer's story accompanying a Robert Rauschenberg Bonnie and Clyde collage cover--were so laudatory in their assessments that the producer, Warren Beatty, reportedly used them in his successful attempt to convince the studio to re-release the film. (2) Its re-release coincided with the day Academy Award nominations were announced, and a film that had been characterized as "incompetently written, acted, directed and produced" (Cook 505) received ten nominations. Perhaps equally important for the studio, a film that had been first viewed in August, opened nation-wide in September, and, according to a Warner Brothers marketing executive, "was finished by the end of October," went on to become one of the top-grossing films of its time. (3)
Bonnie and Clyde did not simply draw a variety of responses from reviewers; on occasion, it drew a variety of responses from the same reviewer. Newsweek joined Time in reversing its original negative judgment. Time's change of heart was apparently more institutional than personal. In its initial notice Time's anonymous reviewer characterizes it as "a strange and purposeless mingling of fact and claptrap that teeters uneasily on the brink of burlesque" (Aug. 25, 1967, p. 78). A few months later the cover story by Stefan Kanfer, presumably not the author of the first review, calls it the best movie of the year (Dec. 8, 1967, p. 66). Newsweek's change of heart is even more remarkable, perhaps unprecedented in the short history of the movie review. In the August 21 issue Joseph Morgenstern in a harsh review finds that the movie "does not know what to make of its own violence" and concludes that it is nothing more than "a squalid shoot-'em for the moron trade" (65). His review the following week begins with a reference to these judgments and continues, "I am sorry to say I consider that review grossly unfair and regrettably inaccurate. I am sorrier to say I wrote it" (82). Having seen the film a second time, Morgenstern now believes not only that it "knows perfectly well what to make of its violence," but that the statement it makes is "cogent," presented in "scene after scene of dazzling artistry" (82). Life's reviewer, Richard Schickel, also had occasion to rethink his initial judgment. In an unfavorable review in October of 1967 Schickel concludes that "[w]hat might have been a breakthrough of sorts for the American screen falls back in confusion at the final barriers of self-realization" (142). Reprinting the piece in 1972 in his collection Second Sight, Schickel appends a review of his own review, the first sentence of which says simply, "Wrong" (143).
Even when they did not feel compelled to admit to errors of judgment, reviewers kept returning to Bonnie and Clyde. Typical are John Simon's two notices in The New Leader. The first, which may be the single most abrasive appraisal the film received, characterizes it as "clever trash," "hayseed comedy," "sentimental pop-Freudianism," and "slop," concluding that "the whole thing stinks," its "facile shock effects" an "added dishonesty" (Film 67/68, 29-30). The second, three months later, notes the "second-thought" phenomenon generated by the film: "Since it seems to be customary to have second thoughts on Bonnie and Clyde, here are mine." Unlike other reviewers, Simon does not wish to change his position; he does, however, feel compelled to amplify his earlier views, which he feels were stated with "excessive laconism" (30). What follows is a longer and more thoughtful discussion of the film which acknowledges, at least implicitly, that whatever the final verdict the film cannot be dismissed quite so lightly as his first review insinuated.
Of those who could not let go of Bonnie and Clyde, the most conspicuous was the man credited with being the preeminent movie reviewer in the country, the New York Times' Bosley Crowther. Studies of the film which allude to its bad press inevitably refer to Crowther's three negative reviews. In fact, he managed to damn Bonnie and Clyde in seven separate reviews between August 7, the day after it was first shown at the International Film Festival of Montreal, and December 17. Four of these are substantial discussions (the most extended a defense of his original judgment directed to angry letter-writers); in the other three, Bonnie and Clyde is inserted, to its disadvantage, into discussions of other films. So extreme and persistent was Crowther's condemnation that other reviewers, some of whom were not enthusiastic about the film, felt obliged to respond. In The Village Voice Andrew Sarris, who is troubled by Penn's oscillation between period legend and contemporary psychology and who characterizes it finally as "half-baked pathos," nevertheless questions Crowther's "use [of] the pages of the New York Times for a personal vendetta against a director and actor [he] doesn't like" (222). Pauline Kael's vigorous defense is almost certainly directed against the unnamed Crowther, since it answers in detail the objections he raises in his seven attacks.
The extremity of these attacks and defenses had other consequences, some of them practical. Only months after his reviews of Bonnie and Clyde Crowther was replaced as the New York Times reviewer, and it was speculated that his tenacious attack on the movie had played a large part in his removal, showing him out of touch with his audience. When Kael wrote her defense, on the other hand, she was not connected to a magazine. (Penelope Gilliatt was The New Yorker's film critic, and had given Bonnie and Clyde a favorable review.) Kael had written the review for The New Republic as a freelancer, but when The New Republic decided against running it, she placed it with The New Yorker. (4) A few months later the magazine employed her as film critic in part on the strength of the review, which by this point had attracted a great deal of attention. In her long stint at The New Yorker (she retired from the magazine in 1991) she came to occupy the position vacated by Crowther, abruptly silenced as "the most powerful voice in film criticism at that time" (Friedman, 23).
Other engaging ironies and anecdotes are associated with the film's stormy release, but it is not the social or cultural impact of Bonnie and Clyde that I wish to pursue, nor the fashions it inaugurated, nor its influence on subsequent Hollywood films, its place in the "New American Cinema," its role in initiating the Hollywood Film Renaissance, its links to the French New Wave, or its part in launching the successful Hollywood careers of its writers, producer, editor, cinematographer, and players. What interests me here is an issue that may seem oddly marginal to an admirer of the film. Is it possible to determine why the range of initial critical responses to the film was so extraordinarily wide? Versions of this question have been asked before--what is it about the film that produced such disparate responses? Or what is it about its sixties audience that produced such disparate responses? The first leads to examination of such issues as Penn's unusual coupling of comedy and atrocity or the film's attitude toward its own violence. The second involves scrutiny of such matters as the film's relationship to the mood of the sixties, the generational gap, the anti-establishment "youth audience." The questions I want to raise focus neither on the film itself nor its mass audience, but on the expectations, conventions, and strategies of a relatively small circle of professional viewers who first saw it and left a written record of their responses, their published reviews....
|
