Historical Background

Besides the title characters, the filmmakers introduced numerous devices to create an illusion of the 1930s. The clothing styles (which, after the movie became a hit, caused a craze for Thirties' fashions) and automobile models (4-cylinder Ford coupe) establish a veneer that "dates" the movie. Other background clues place the movie in the 1930s: the song, "We're in the Money," from the film, Gold Diggers of 1933 (1933); scenes of foreclosed farms and bankrupted banks; Burma Shave billboards on the rural landscape. There are also explicit political messages from the 1930s: posters of President Franklin D. Roosevelt; an NRA Eagle sticker of the New Deal's National Recovery Administration; a newspaper headline that says, "Farmers Attack AAA Policy." [See AJ, First New Deal Overview, Agricultural Adjustment Act, National Recovery Administration.] (The Blue Eagle window sign showed that a business was cooperating with the wage and price guidelines under the National Recovery Act of 1933. [See AJ, NRA Eagle.] The AAA was one of the Roosevelt administration's New Deal "alphabet" agencies, officially known as the Agricultural Adjustment Administration, which attempted to assist impoverished farmers.)

These icons of popular culture represent the "hard times" of the 1930s. More subtly, one scene shows Bonnie and Clyde obtaining food and water from a group of dispossessed farm workers heading for California who look like they stepped directly out of the pages of Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath.

Such stylized images of the 1930s serve not only as a historical background for the film, but also establish the movie's major themes that appealed to audiences of the 1960s. Against a setting of unrelenting hard times, Bonnie and Clyde appear not as ruthless robbers and killers, but as wayward youth and cultural rebels who can't escape from their real world economic problems, lack of opportunity, and the failure of traditional values. Sympathizing with a foreclosed sharecropper and his African American helper, for instance, the outlaws encourage them to shoot out the windows of their foreclosed home. In a gesture unlikely to have happened in the 1930s but highly significant in the civil rights conscious 1960s, Clyde extends a warm handshake to the black worker.

The power of the movie and the source of its popularity emerge from its ability to tap into the emotional issues facing the nation during the 1960s. As the so-called baby boomers (those born in the U.S. between 1945-1957) began to come of age, they formed a youth culture marked by its disrespect for traditional authority and demanding a more "natural" way of living. As young Americans celebrated new electronic forms of rock 'n roll, consumed mood enhancing drugs such as marijuana and LSD, took advantage of modern birth control, rejected cultural censorship, and demanded political equality for minorities, women, and people under the age of 21, they abandoned loyalties to traditional institutions--marriage, religion, and political parties. Public leaders and the media lamented a growing "generation gap," but the continuing crisis of the Vietnam War and civil rights protests undermined the old moral authority.

No wonder, then, that young people saw in Bonnie & Clyde an autonomous, mobile community of youth that was unbound by tradition. "If Bonnie and Clyde were here today, they would be hip," declared the film's screenwriter's David Newman and Robert Benton. "Their values have been assimilated in much of our culture--not robbing banks and killing people, of course, but their style, their sexuality, their bravado, their delicacy, their cultivated arrogance, their narcissistic insecurity, their curious ambition have relevance to the way we live."

Consider, for example, the character of Bonnie as an emerging woman. While adult middle class women made a bestseller of Betty Friedan's feminist book, The Feminine Mystique (1963), which exposed the problems of the nation's housewives, Bonnie wakes up one morning in West Dallas, Texas, and wants to escape--anywhere. [See AJ, Betty Friedan; Excerpt from The Feminine Mystique.] Her "identity crisis," to use a term popular in the 1960s, leads her to seek an alternative life, even though she continues to allow a man, Clyde Barrow, to determine her outcome. Yet Bonnie is more sexually liberated than Clyde, fitting the model of the 1960s "sexual revolution." Unconcerned about pregnancy, she seeks her own satisfaction.

The movie opened in August 1967, during a "long, hot summer" of civil disorder as African American rioters vandalized the ghetto neighborhoods of Detroit and Newark. Three months later, while the film was still attracting theater audiences, hundreds of thousands of anti-war protesters converged in Washington, D.C. to demand an end to the Vietnam War. Such social violence and civil disobedience alarmed traditional leaders who launched "law and order" campaigns to silence dissent. Bonnie & Clyde's romantic presentation of outlaw behavior and its implicit condemnation of "overkill" by vengeful police, led conservative critics, such as the New York Times's Bosley Crowther, to condemn the movie.

Others praised the film for making the past relevant to contemporary concerns. Unlike most victims of the 1930s Depression, who typically blamed themselves for their economic failures, the characters of the 1960s movie blame their troubles on the economic and political system, not on themselves. At a time when commentators were denouncing Washington politicians for lying to the public--they referred to a "credibility gap"--Clyde Barrow excuses his manly ineptness by saying, "At least I ain't a liar."

Bonnie and Clyde