Meeting with Robert Benton recently to talk about Feast of Love, I also had occasion to chat with him a bit about Bonnie & Clyde (a film he co-wrote), on occasion of its 40th anniversary. The violence of that film is always talked about,
but it is kind of a love story as well, one that has in retrospect been seen and
embraced as that more and more. I asked Benton if he and David Newman thought of it in those terms when they were writing the screenplay, and his enthusiastic reply was, “Yes!”
The emulation that the movie would in turn inspire, though, is another matter. That was unforeseen.
It’s an interesting piece, isn’t it? He’s a smart guy, and I agree with some of
it, but I think the point he missed is that one of the reasons the violence
seemed so terrible is that you got to know the characters and you liked them. You had
sympathies with them, and when the violence started you were in the car with
them, and once it started, you couldn’t get out of that car. You were trapped
like their undertaker. And it was their humanity that made the violence seem
more awful. If you had looked at them as sociopaths, or psychopaths, the violence
wouldn’t have seemed as bad.”
“And the third thing is,” Benton continues, “the violence came from one
line in the script. In movies, we were so used to, when someone got shot,
seeing them clutch their chest and having a death scene and falling down, and
we said in the screenplay, when bullets strike people in this movie, they
should hurt. And what Arthur (Penn) did with that was so brilliant; he made the
beautiful slow-motion sequences that he did with (editor) Dede Allen, and they really
owe an enormous amount to Kurosawa, with Yojimbo and The Seven Samurai. Now, nobody
has accused Kurosawa of fostering a culture of violence, but it’s the same
thing. Perhaps because it’s foreign we don’t identify with that. But I think
it’s not just the beauty of those shots, I think it’s because you weren’t able
to ever put the characters at arms’ length — that seems to me the thing that
made the violence seem worse.” The films that stylistically nip from Bonnie & Clyde, of course, rarely plumb such depths of identification.
the man arrested at actor Nicolas Cage’s home in Newport Beach in the early hours of the morning on October 1, was naked except for the purloined leather coat he was wearing. Yikes. That really puts a damper on any sort of barked communication which includes the phrase, “Put. The Jacket. Down.” Furo, who
