Bonnie and Clyde-in relation to film criticism

The problem with Bosley Crowther’s critique of Bonnie and Clyde is that the reviewer is not evaluating the film in any depth.
The reason this doesn’t happen is because the reviewer felt at the time that the film was below the level of proper evaluative criticism. The importance of evaluation is that it inevitably leads to constructive criticism. Constructive criticism is an important tool for a writer to have because it can help the filmmaker’s learn from their mistakes for their future endeavors.
Crowther had such disrespect for Bonnie and Clyde that he simply wrote a scathing review. In my opinion, nothing is learned in the process of simply panning a movie. Personally, I feel one’s opinion of a movie is not relevant. Rather, what is relevant is the evaluative process. I understand that a film can be so bad that it’s not worth discussing in any depth. However, Bonnie and Clyde is not that type of movie. Whether one feels it is a good film or not is irrelevant. Rather, what should be discussed is what a pertinent film Bonnie and Clyde is in terms of the times in which it came out of. Bonnie and Clyde was a very important part of the sociological zeitgeist of the 1960’s, and it should be written as such. It ushered in a new style of filmmaking that was free of censorship constraint, and simple filmmaking convention. To not see this as a critic is ludicrous, and this is where Crowther stubles as a critic and Pauline Kael succeeds. She was perceptive enough to see what a pertinent movie Bonnie and Clyde was, irrelevant of whether or not it was a good or bad film. She saw how the film impacted culture, opposed to simply brushing it off as just another reprehensible movie.
Crowther was simply too much of an old vanguard to realize that a new age of filmmaking was coming in, and that Bonnie and Clyde represented a start to that change. He simply concentrates on how accurate the film is in terms of representing the Barrow gang. His is a simple argument, because it has no basis in terms of what the filmmaker’s statement is in the movie.
Bonnie and Clyde is not a documentary, and quite frankly, how would making the film more realistic add value to the movie in anyway? Another problem with Crowther’s review is that he doesn’t have any interesting salient points whatsoever. He is simply sticking to a one dimensional form of evaluation; the performers are not good in anyway, ect. Kael was trying to get at something deeper in her evaluation of the film. She tried to describe in great detail why the film was so disturbing to someone like Crowther (he certainly couldn’t), and why that disturbing element was what made the film interesting thematically, opposed to it being a reprehensible element. “Suddenly, in the last few years, our view of the world has gone beyond ‘good taste.’ Tasteful suggestions of violence would at this point be a more grotesque form of comedy than Bonnie and Clyde attempts” (The New Yorker, pg. 161). Kael is welcoming change in an artform. She is not restrictive of violence, as long as it pertains to the subject matter at hand. Crowther can’t go outside of his comfort zone in this regard. He does not evaluate the film in any meaningful way because he is not a critic that welcomes change, but rather is condemnatory of what he dislikes and laudatory of what he likes. He doesn’t necessarily want to think about what he dislikes. At the end of Crowther’s review he states that the film, “…leaves an astonished critic wondering just what purpose Mr. Penn and Mr. Beatty think they serve…” (The New York Times). A critic should figure out the filmmaker’s purpose, regardless of whether they agree with the filmmaker’s intentions or not. This man was simply too afraid to do so.
A.O.Scott’s reinterpretation of Crowther’s review is interesting because it has so much more depth than Crowther’s review. The critic is finding the purpose of why the film is disturbing, and more importantly, why the film made such an impact to
the culture. (To not see that the film is pertinent in anyway is ludicrous; this was Crowther’s dilemma at the time, which lead to his firing.) Scott is arguing for the importance of examining whether violence in movies is exploitive or not. Violence, in this day and age and in regards to mass entertainment, is such a given that audiences have become sensitized to it. He basically blames films like Bonnie and Clyde for making violence redeemable for the sake of art. Scott feels that we should question that practice because it has lead to the reprehensible actions of today’s violent filmmakers. I respect Scott’s article because it writes about more pertinent subjects than whether or not Bonnie and Clyde is a good film. However, I don’t agree with Scott’s feeling that Crowther was an innocent victim. Crowther was a critic who didn’t ask the questions that are raised in this article; he merely had initial impressions divorced from any pertinent evaluation. He was very much how many in today’s culture are in relation to the question of violence. He was simply the inverse of that phenomenon; the prude who doesn’t ask the relevant questions.
There is a key sentence in Kolker’s article that struck me and that is when he states that, “Penn is concerned with the contradictions inherent in the representation of violence” (Kolker, pg. 55). Kolker states that Penn is aware that what he is doing in his depiction of violence is unsettling and morally troubling. My response to that, and I feel Kolker would agree with me, is that what Penn does in Bonnie and Clyde is the best way to start a conversation about what is taboo in the arts, which ultimately makes the arts more stimulating and thought provoking. Challenging films are what make the art form more progressive (Kael) rather than retrogressive (Crowther).

Works Cited
1. Kolker, Robert Phillip. A Cinema of Loneliness. Second Edition. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998. 2. Kael, Pauline. Bonnie and Clyde. New Yorker. Vol. 43, Oct. 21, 1967. 3. Crowther, Bosley. Bonnie and Clyde. The New York Times. April 14, 1967.