With most movies of that time, this would have been the end of the story, but Warren Beatty wasn’t willing to let his baby die. The actor had taken 40 percent of the gross instead of an acting or producing fee and believed he had a great movie that would be a hit if it could find its audience. Beatty fought for a small re-release and got his way. The movie appeared before critics again and something changed. Young critics like Pauline Kael and Roger Ebert championed the film as a misunderstood masterpiece and younger audiences started showing up at the theaters. Slowly but surely it became a huge hit, making over $70 million dollars in an era when $100 million was a pipe dream. Beatty got rich and became a star, Oscar nominations piled up and critics began retracting their original reviews. Bonnie And Clyde was a cultural phenomenon and played a major role in changing Hollywood forever.

In the 1960s the studios started to loose touch with young audiences. They were pushing morally righteous escapism like The Sound Of Music while American youths were growing their hair long, experimenting with drugs, and enjoying the benefits of the sexual revolution. Since the youth market has always been the primary target for Hollywood, the studios were floundering without those audiences. Executives started retiring and selling off their backlots. No one knew what to do. Then in 1967, Bonnie And Clyde and The Graduate became huge hits despite low budgets. Both movies were created by filmmakers more interested in the art form than box office tallies and embraced a sense of moral ambiguity and stylistic experimentation that mirrored the times and appealed to the absent young audiences. Studios executives didn’t understand why these movies were hits and had no clue how to recapture the success.

Over the next few years movies like 2001: A Space Odessy and Easy Rider found similar success while traditional big budget studio fair continued to fail. Out of desperation, executives began green lighting bizarre, dark, violent and sexually explicit movies by crazy young directors with big beards, long hair, and wild ambitions. These were directors like Martin Scorsese, William Friedkin and Francis Ford Coppolla, guys who talked about names like Bergman and Kurosawa rather than Wayne or Bogart. These directors experienced tremendous success and produced some for the greatest movies ever made. Films like The Godfather, Taxi Driver, and The French Connection simply wouldn’t have been produced without Bonnie And Clyde. The surprise success of that movie quite literally changed the industry.

Watching Bonnie And Clyde today is not even close to the same experience that it was in 1967. Decades of violent crime films and dark comedies have made what seemed so shocking and original at the time seem surprisingly quaint and classic. But that doesn’t mean that the movie no longer works. Now that the superficial shock-factor is gone, it’s easier to appreciate the subtly of the characters, the eccentric nuances of the storytelling, the uniformly excellent performances, and the gentle comedy that permeates throughout the movie. While Bonnie And Clyde has certainly aged, it has not died. The movie is an undeniable classic now. It is one of the most influential films ever made and no self respecting DVD collection should be without it. If you don’t own Bonnie And Clyde you need to hang your head in shame and should run out to the store immediately to pick up a copy. Go on. Do it now. I’ll wait. –PB, News Extensions