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NameDateIntellectual Devotional Modern Culture Reading: Bonnie and Clyde. Please use this reading on the legendary American film “Bonnie and Clyde,” about the equally legendary bank robbers and lovers, to answer the reading comprehension questions on the worksheet that accompanies it.“We rob banks.”Faye Dunaway as Bonnie ParkerWhen director Arthur Penn’s feature film on the murderous Depression-era bank robbers Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow came out, most film critics didn’t understand what they were seeing—but they knew they didn’t like it. Upon its release in the summer of 1967, Bonnie and Clyde was almost universally panned for glamorizing violence and for blending killings with comedy, The movie quickly left theaters and appeared to be a disaster for Penn (1922-2010) and Warren Beatty (1937-), the producer and star.But in its short initial release, the film made an impact on America’s youth culture. A bluegrass song by Flatt and Scruggs on the sound track went to the top of the charts; fashions influenced by the film started catching on; and a twenty-five-year-old critic named Roger Ebert, representing a new generation of filmgoers, championed the film as “a milestone in the history of American movies, a work of truth and brilliance.”Soon enough attitudes changed, and Bonnie and Clyde went on to revolutionize American cinema—and gross $50 million.Along with The Graduate (1967), Bonnie and Clyde tapped into a disaffection with American society that many in the 1960s were feeling; the film historian Robert Sklar writes that American kids saw in Bonnie and Clyde a “doomed lawlessness as a metaphor for their own social alienation.”As the film’s tagline says, Bonnie and Clyde rob banks and kill people. Borrowing a nihilist sensibility from the films of the French New Wave (particularly the work of Francois Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard), they rob and kill because they can, because they’re bored, and because they don’t care about anything.Penn’s overt use of sex and violence, which may seem tame by today’s standards, shocked audiences in 1967. It also ushered in an era known as the New Hollywood, in which an young generation of writers, directors, and actors—many of them film-school educated—pulled Hollywood away from old-fashioned studio pictures, such as musicals and historical epics, toward more personal and modern films.Additional FactsBonnie and Clyde received ten Academy Award nominations, with wins for Estelle Parsons (best supporting actress) and Burnett Guffey (best cinematography).Among the fashion trends set by the film were berets and maxiskirts for women and 1930s gangster outfits (fedoras, double-breasted suits) for men.The film helped launch the careers of principal players Faye Dunaway, Gene Hackman, and Parsons, as well as Gene Wilder, who had a small role.Adapted from: Kidder, David S, and Noah Oppenheim. The Intellectual Devotional Modern Culture: Converse Confidently about Society and the Arts. Emmaus PA: Modern Times, 2008. ................
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