Arthur Penn (September 27, 1922 - September 28, 2010)

This is my tribute to Arthur Penn, director of the landmark movie “Bonnie and Clyde,” who died September 28, 2010. I first saw “Bonnie and Clyde” when I was fourteen. It was 1967; my father and I went to see it at the old Kent Theatre in Saint John, N.B. It was my first encounter with an art film, although I didn't think of it that way at the time. All I knew, leaving the theatre that night, was that I’d seen something astonishing – not just the violence, which is what everyone was talking about, but the slow-motion ending and the acting, yes, above all the acting, particularly the performances of the supporting cast: Gene Hackman, Estelle Parsons, Michael J. Pollard, and Gene Wilder. Going into that movie, if you’d asked me to name a movie director, any movie director, about the only one I might’ve come up with is Alfred Hitchcock. But leaving the Kent that long-ago evening (this is sounding more and more like nostalgia, I realize, but when you reach my age, what isn’t nostalgia?), I’d learned the name of another director, a name that I would never forget: Arthur Penn. For me the idea of a director’s movie begins with Penn’s “Bonnie and Clyde.” His later pictures don’t come close to achieving “Bonnie and Clyde” ’s impact; there’s a great dropping off. But that’s irrelevant. Penn lives in one work, “Bonnie and Clyde”, and it is, as Pauline Kael says, “a work of art.” My encounter with it initiated me into the world of movies; for the next twenty years, I was a movie obsessive. The New Yorker has published two wonderful pieces about “Bonnie and Clyde”: Kael’s magnificent defence of it, entitled “Bonnie and Clyde” (October 21, 1967; included in her collections “Kiss Kiss Bang Bang” and “For Keeps”) and Louis Menand’s excellent “Paris, Texas” (February 17 & 24, 2003), which traces the French New Wave sources of the movie. Rereading these two great essays provides the pleasure of recalling the excitement of seeing "Bonnie and Clyde" for the first time. They remind me, too, of the genius of the man who directed it.