Arthur Penn: A tribute to the ‘Bonnie and Clyde’ director: I suddenly feel raving

And I suppose this one’s no different — after all, it’s a classic, a psychologically rich and bullet-riddled movie that revolutionized the depiction of sex and violence in Hollywood at a time when the movie industry was trying to figure out what it could and couldn’t get away with. But Penn’s influence isn’t primarily on cinema or the stage or television (all mediums he worked in during his long and brilliant career). LOS ANGELES (Reuters) – Film, stage and television director Arthur Penn, whose works include the 1967 movie “Bonnie and Clyde”, has died at the age of 88, his friend and accountant said on Wednesday. Bell said Penn had been sick for about a year. He did not disclose the cause of death. Director Arthur Penn died quietly at home on Tuesday night, a day after his 88th birthday. And he completed his cycle as a triple threat in Hollywood, where he adapted that hit play into an Oscar-winning film in 1962. The making of the film, which is definitively chronicled in EW contributor Mark Harris’ 2008 book Pictures at a Revolution , was in many ways as influential as the movie itself. “But that was simply the most successful of these highly individual, often idiosyncratic, films that he made in his heyday.” Because of his relatively small number of films, most of which were made before the 1980s, Penn “has a somewhat neglected reputation at this point,” said film critic Peter Rainer. The first killing in Bonnie and Clyde begins as farce when the gang’s dim-witted driver parks the getaway car and the robbers are unable to find it when they burst from the bank. “A society would be wise to pay attention to the people who do not belong if it wants to find out … where it’s failing,” Penn once said.

“I think he’s up there with Sidney Lumet and several others who really understand acting and know how to get the best out of a performer,” he said. Penn’s playful, muscular style of directing would prove a major influence on the 70s generation of film-makers that followed. Enter Penn, a man who knew how to summon great, unexpected performances — which is exactly what he got out of the baby-faced Beatty and his ravenous and ravishing partner in crime, Faye Dunaway. “And I think he, as opposed to a lot of directors who have theatrical origins, had a real cinematic sense. Penn followed up with “Alice’s Restaurant”, the Native American epic “Little Big Man” starring Dustin Hoffman, and “The Missouri Breaks” with Marlon Brando. Penn was most identified with “Bonnie and Clyde,” although it wasn’t a project he initiated or, at first, wanted.

At the end of his life, Old Lodge Skins, the venerable Cheyenne chief, scales a mountain and squats with great dignity to await his call to the Happy Hunting Ground. Penn’s 1962 film version of “The Miracle Worker” earned him his first Oscar nomination as a director, and Bancroft and Duke won Oscars for their performances. But film lovers, especially those who’d spent long afternoons in the darkness of big-city art houses, rejoiced. The robbers’ horrifying death, a shooting gallery that took four days to film and ran for less than a minute, only intensified their appeal. Never mind that Penn’s film only won two statuettes (for cinematography and Estelle Parsons’ supporting turn), its impact was unerasable. The graphically violent ending, shot with four cameras running at different speeds, was Penn’s primary reason for directing the film. None of them may have cast the same long shadow that Bonnie and Clyde did, but sparking one revolution in a lifetime seems more than enough to etch Penn’s place in movie history.

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