Facts > Films > Bonnie and Clyde
Bonnie and Clyde (1967) Facts
| Director(s) | Arthur Penn |
| Producer(s) | Warren Beatty |
| Featured Cast | Warren Beatty, Faye Dunaway, Michael J. Pollard, Gene Hackman, Estelle Parsons |
| Total Facts | 81 |
Cher auditioned for the role of Bonnie Parker, but when her husband/manager at the time, Sonny Bono, heard about the audition, he was furious at Warren Beatty for letting his wife audition for such a "controversial film".
Morgan Woodward was originally slated to play Frank Hamer, but he was held up when filming of Cool Hand Luke fell behind, so the part was given to Denver Pyle.
Arthur Penn originally turned the script down but after various other directors did likewise - including William Wyler - Warren Beatty was compelled to take it back to Penn. The director agreed only on condition that he could make some important changes, the main one being making Clyde impotent as opposed to bisexual.
Arthur Penn was particularly fascinated with the way Akira Kurosawa handled violent action and death in his films. In particular, he drew on Kurosawa's balancing of slow motion and real time that he employed in Shichinin no samurai.
Warren Beatty really wanted his then lover Natalie Wood to play the part of Bonnie Parker but Wood wanted to concentrate on her therapy at the time. She also didn't want to work professionally with Beatty again who she considered "difficult".
Warren Beatty wanted to produce this movie in black and white. This was rejected by Warner Brothers.
Jane Fonda turned down the role of Bonnie Parker. Living in France at the time, she did not want to relocate to the U.S. for the part.
Morgan Fairchild, who was active in Dallas theatre, began her film career in this film as Faye Dunaway's stand-in.
Faye Dunaway nearly lost the part of Bonnie Parker as she had put on some weight for Hurry Sundown.
Michael J. Pollard admitted in later interviews that he borrowed his accent from Bob Dylan on the "Blonde on Blonde" album.
Michael J. Pollard didn't realize in eating scenes that you don't actually eat all the food because of the possibility of repeated takes. Sure enough, he soon regretted it in the scene in which the outlaws kidnap a couple and eat their lunch in the car. By the 12th take, Pollard was feeling decidedly ill, having had to eat 12 whole hamburgers.
Michael J. Pollard's character, C.W. Moss, is a fictional conglomeration of all of Bonnie and Clyde's minor sidekicks including: Ralph Fults (their first sidekick), William Daniel Jones (nicknamed "W.D." and "Deacon", and was an attendant at the gas station owned by Clyde's father), Ray Hamilton, and Henry Methvin (who's father made the deal with Frank Hamer to set Bonnie and Clyde up).
Gene Hackman regretted his decision to film Buck's death scene in his vest. The scene was shot several times out of sequence; when they came to complete it, winter had set in and Hackman had to play it in his vest in near-freezing conditions.
Gene Hackman was on the set one day when he noticed a guy standing behind him and staring. The man said, "Hell, Buck would've never wore a hat like that." Hackman turned around and looked at him and said, "Maybe not." He looked like an old Texas farmer. The man introduced himself and said, "Nice to meet you - I'm one of the Barrows."
Bonnie Parker was 4'10" tall, nine inches shorter than Faye Dunaway.
A crucial fact left out of the movie was that Bonnie Parker was virtually incapacitated for the last year of her life from a car wreck. Clyde Barrow was driving fast down a lonely country road in Texas when he came upon a washed-out bridge. Unable to stop in time, the car went over the edge crashed and into the creek. The force of the impact jarred Bonnie's seat forward, pinning her in the car as it began to catch fire. She received severe burns on the backs of her legs that made it difficult to walk. She would either limp or was carried by Clyde. She was, in fact, injured at the time of the nighttime tourist court shootout and the field shootout (where Buck was killed) that occur near the end of the film.
A screening for Jack L. Warner went very badly for Warren Beatty and Arthur Penn - Warner got up three times to pee. Warner initially dumped the film into drive-in and second run theaters and apparently went to his grave still hating the film.
According to Warren Beatty in the Special Addition DVD documentary, in the death scene, the make up department fixed a fake scalp over his real hair with a line so that while he was being shot, it would look like his head was being blown off. Beatty says that partially the reason why he had the fruit in his hand was that the moment he squeezed the fruit was supposed to signal the make up artist to pull the line and rip the scalp off. However, when the scene was being filmed, the artist was so nervous that he forgot to pull the line. By the same token, Faye Dunaway mentions that the make up artists also put appliances over her face that were also wired so that when she was being shot they would yank off the flesh colored covers.
According to the film makers in the Special Edition DVD Documentary, the scene in which Clyde shoots the man on the running board marks the first time in film in which the shot being fired and the man being shot are both in the same frame.
According to the film's editor Dede Allen, the climactic massacre was meant to evoke Abraham Zapruder's footage of John F. Kennedy's assassination. As Clyde Barrow (Warren Beatty) goes to the ground in slow-motion, a fragment of his skull is dislodged by a bullet hit, a similar head shot captured by Zapruder's footage of the JFK assassination.
After François Truffaut's departure from the project, the producers approached Jean-Luc Godard. Some sources claim Godard didn't trust Hollywood and refused; other allege he planned to change Bonnie and Clyde to teenagers and relocate the story to Japan, prompting the film's investors to force him off the project.
Although technically still the only film rated "M" by the MPAA (the early equivalent of the later "PG", introduced in 1973), since this rating no longer exists, all home video and DVD versions released after 1973 are marked "Not Rated".
At the time, this was Warner Brothers' second highest grossing film, after My Fair Lady.
Before deciding to play the role himself, producer Warren Beatty's first choice for the role of Clyde Barrow was musician and composer Bob Dylan, who resembled the actual Barrow more strongly than Beatty.
Bonnie's family reunion near the end was shot through a window screen to give it a hazy, nostalgic effect.
C.W. Moss mentions, in the first scene with Buck and Blanche, that Myrna Loy is his favorite movie star. Loy was supposedly a favorite actress of John Dillinger. In fact, when he was gunned down outside the Biograph Theater in Chicago, the film he had just seen was Manhattan Melodrama, in which Loy starred.
Cinematographer Burnett Guffey was dismissed during this production due to artistic clashes with director Arthur Penn (Guffey wanted more light - Penn wanted a more subdued tone). In the meantime, veteran cinematographer Ellsworth Fredericks replaced Guffey, but only for a brief period. Penn, realizing that he'd misjudged Guffey, ultimately reinstated him and Guffey went on to win a second Oscar for Best Cinematography for his efforts.
Co-writer Robert Benton got the idea for his script from his father who had actually attended the separate funerals of Parker and Barrow.
Contrary to the film's portrayal of Blanche Barrow inadvertently divulging the identity of C.W. Moss to Texas Ranger Frank Hamer, thereby setting Bonnie and Clyde's deaths in motion, in real life Hamer found Bonnie and Clyde through simple tracking methods. Hamer knew that they traveled in a loop. They would routinely start in Dallas, move north through Oklahoma and Kansas, cut east to Missouri, south to Arkansas and Louisiana, and west back to Dallas. Knowing that gang member Henry Methvin (on whom the C.W. Moss character is partly based) had family in Louisiana, Hamer struck a deal with Methvin's father (as seen in the movie) to set up Bonnie and Clyde.
Costume designer Theadora Van Runkle had to deal with Warren Beatty's worries (6'4") that he would be upstaged by Faye Dunaway(who stood 5'7"). This is why Van Runkle kept Dunaway in flat shoes throughout the film.
Debut of Gene Wilder.
During one of the bank robberies, Buck Barrow (Gene Hackman) does a leap over the tellers' cage. This was a stunt routinely pulled by John Dillinger, who in turn learned it from watching Douglas Fairbanks in the "Zorro" movies.
For the climactic massacre, Faye Dunaway's leg had to be tied to the gear shift to prevent her from falling completely out of the rocking car
Future film maker Curtis Hanson, who began his career as a photographer, took a series of modeling photos of Faye Dunaway which helped to get her the job as Bonnie Parker. According to Hanson on the Special Edition DVD Documentary, when Dunaway came under consideration, Warren Beatty called him and asked Hanson to bring a slide show presentation of the photos to show to both Beatty and Arthur Penn. After viewing the photos, Dunaway was cast. According to Hanson, Warren Beatty wanted to pay him for the photos but Hanson instead asked to accompany them to Texas so he could observe the filming to which Beatty agreed.
Half a dozen of the cars used in the movie, including the one stolen from Gene Wilder's character were loaned to the studio by a private owner who specialized in the restoration of Model A's, Roadsters, and Model T's, Mr. Seng of Castro Valley, California. His only requirement in loaning the studio his cars was that they were not to be shot up.
Heavily influenced by the French New Wave directors, mainly through its rapid shifts of tone and its choppy editing.
In 2007, the American Film Institute ranked this as the #42 Greatest Movie of All Time.
In a 1968 interview, Warren Beatty mentioned that his last conversation with ex-girlfriend Natalie Wood took place in the summer of 1966 when he tried unsuccessfully to get her to play Bonnie Parker in his film. Later that evening, she attempted to take her own life and was discovered by her live-in housekeeper.
In a TV interview director Arthur Penn pointed out that this film shows for the first time the firing of a gun and the consequences in one single frame. Before that you would see a gun being fired, then cut and the next scene shows the bleeding body. In Bonnie and Clyde you see a gun being fired into the face of a person without inter cut. This was incredible at the time and would have been censored in the past. (Such a shot had, however, had already been used in all three of the films Sergio Leone's "Dollars" trilogy.)
In one scene, while holding up a bank, Clyde Barrow tells a farmer he can keep his own money. ("Is that your money or the bank's?" "It's mine." "You keep it then.") In real life, it was bank robber Pretty Boy Floyd who allowed a farmer to keep his own money during a holdup.
In real life Blanche Barrow did not run from the Joplin apartment screaming with a spatula. In fact she helped Clyde push one of the police cars out of the driveway which was down hill. The car started rolling faster and rolled across the street into a large tree. They both were dragged by the momentum and that is what witnesses saw. Clyde was shot at that time and Blanche let out one yelp and kept moving to get out of the line of fire. That was about the last shot since the officer shooting ran out of ammo so Buck called her back and she returned to get into the escape car in front of the apartment rather than being picked up down the street as the movie portrayed.
In real life, by the time Clyde Barrow died at the age of 24, he had been responsible - both directly and indirectly - for the deaths of at least 14 people.
In real life, Clyde Barrow was a highly dangerous marksman who had mastered most firearms including the Browning Automatic Rifle and the Thompson Sub Machine Gun. The lawmen chasing him were well aware of his ability with a gun which partly explains the ruthlessness behind the way he was gunned down.
In reality, Buck Barrow's death was much more brutal. After being shot repeatedly, a police officer stepped on his face and was about to deliver the killer shot before Blanche's screaming alerted him to what he was actually doing.
In reality, the bank robbers picked up about three people in their travels. This was merged into one character in the form of C.W. Moss.
In the Special Edition DVD Documentary, Estelle Parsons says she was the only member of the cast who actually researched the history of the Barrow Gang. She also says that early in the filming, she wanted to meet the real Blanche Barrow but Warren Beatty, in his capacity as the producer, was against the idea. Finally, after a week, Warren relented and set up a meeting with Blanche, but at that point Parsons lost interest and never met Blanche. In fact, Warren Beatty brought the script to Blanche for her to read for her approval before she would give permission to use her name. She agreed the script was factual and approved it. While there he played her piano and sang for her. She was very fond of Warren even though the director completely changed the script to make her look as in her own words, "A screaming Horse's Ass." She took her third husband Eddie to see the movie with her for the first time and nearly died of embarrassment.
Leading Newsweek film critic Joseph Morgenstern hated the film when he first saw it, but then later took the unprecedented step of admitting that his original review was completely wrong. His revised version raved about the film.
Many consider one of the reasons why the film was so successful was because of its anti-establishment stance. At the time, disillusionment with America's involvement in Vietnam was gaining ground.
Near the end of the film, Bonnie and Clyde are lying in bed discussing marriage. It is interesting to note that in real life, Bonnie was already married. She had married her high school sweetheart, Roy Thorton before meeting Clyde. Thorton was a petty criminal who was sent to prison for life for murder. Despite his conviction, Bonnie never divorced him and to the day she died, Bonnie Parker was officially "Mrs. Roy Thorton". Bonnie was still wearing Thornton's ring when she was killed.
Once Warren Beatty came on board, one of the first things deleted from Robert Benton and David Newman's script was a homosexual affair between Clyde and Moss.