Bonnie And Clyde

The New Hollywood was a period in American film history where new and rising filmmakers stretched, bent, and broke the rules of Classical Hollywood. Many of these films, with their more open, risqué, and graphic content, appealed to younger audiences. Two films that typify this New Hollywood style are Bonnie and Clyde and Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, released in 1967 and 1974 respectively. Ostensibly, these films seem extremely different. Bonnie and Clyde is a period piece set during the Great Depression that centers on life and eventual death of Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow as they commit a spree of bank robberies. Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, on the other hand, focuses on the exploits of Alice, a recently widowed woman who, with
The ineffectiveness of Bonnie and Clyde’s rebellion is set up throughout the film, but there are two critical scenes that really highlight how useless their actions have been. First, is the scene where Bonnie, Clyde, and the rest of the Barrow gang visit with Bonnie’s family. Throughout this reunion scene, the coming doom of the entire gang is foreshadowed. We open on the scene through a long shot of Bonnie’s family and the gang gathered together outdoors. A close-up of Bonnie’s smiling face is followed by a close up of her mother’s smiling face, but her mother’s smile is tinged with sadness. Her mother realizes that Bonnie’s future is hopeless and that the rebellious path she is on can only lead to ruin. Later in the scene, we cut to a shot of a child rolling down a hill almost in slow motion. A sharp cut shows Bonnie at the bottom of the hill looking momentarily worried over the child’s body, but the boy pops up and dashes off. The slow motion rolling is very reminiscent of the rolling of Clyde’s dead body in the final shots of the film. This rolling body foreshadows the deaths to come. The colors of the entire scene are a washed out palate with a nostalgic home-video feel. This is the last bit of nostalgia and family that Bonnie and Clyde will enjoy, as their rebellion is set to lead them
Even from early childhood, Alice is shown to have a bit of spunky rebellion inside her. The film opens with a display of nostalgic splendor. First with the brightly colored opening credits in the classical Hollywood style, which soon transitions into a red tinged Wizard of Oz mise-en-scene. Young Alice strolls down the road telling herself that she’ll be a singer one day and that anyone else that says otherwise “can blow it out their ass”. The frame shrinks and spins and we are literally thrown from that scene into Alice’s current existence as a bored middle-aged housewife. This establishes the huge contrast between Alice’s idealized past where singing is her dream and her current banal life. When Alice’s husband dies, she seizes the opportunity to rebel against her current life as a housewife and try and make it as a singer. She struggles throughout the film to stay afloat as an independent woman and single mother. She gets a job as a singer but is forced to flee after she gets involved with a violent and abusive man. After she flees, she cannot find work as a singer, so she is forced to work as a waitress. Alive tries to make her way in the world and is consistently punished throughout the film, because she has