Arthur Penn: The Miracle Worker of Bonnie and Clyde

The film’s publicity tag line told the truth: “They’re young. They’re in love. They kill people.”

Bonnie and Clyde was the movie that changed movies, for a while. A true-crime love story told with a modernist flair, this 1967 hit certified Warren Beatty as a prince among actor-producers and made a star of Faye Dunaway. Its epochally violent climax announced that Hollywood was ready to become a full-time munitions factory. The movie defined the careers of that generation’s film critics: the New York Times‘ Bosley Crowther excoriated it, and abruptly retired four months later; Newsweek‘s Joe Morgenstern panned the film one week, recanted and raved the next; a young Roger Ebert, and Pauline Kael, in one of her first New Yorker reviews, loved it. Its script, a first-time effort by Esquire staffers David Newman and Robert Benton, brought a European art-house sensibility to the very American themes of (in Kael terms) kiss-kiss and bang-bang. And it turned Arthur Penn into the director du jour.

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Penn specialized in rebel movies that were in sync with their bold times and often a little ahead of the mass audience. His 1965 Mickey One was a Kafka-Camus tale of a stand-up comic (Beatty) in a perpetual state of existential flight. Alice’s Restaurant, the 1969 film version of Arlo Guthrie’s 19-minute talking-blues FM-radio hit, was an elegy for two generations: the hippie young and the restless middle-age marrieds. The following year, in Little Big Man, he directed a comic dirge itemizing the white man’s extermination of native Americans. But Penn didn’t dress the part of a wild auteur; he kept his hair short and his manner calm. In 1956 he married the actress Peggy Mauer; 54 years later she was with him at their Manhattan home when he died Sept. 28, the day after his 88th birthday, of congestive heart failure.

Born in Philadelphia, Arthur performed in Army theater troupes in World War II, then enrolled at the experimental Black Mountain College, studied at two universities in Italy and trained at the Actors Studio. In 1953, Fred Coe, the decade’s most influential producer of dramatic anthology shows, promoted the young man to director on The Gulf Playhouse. Penn was thus a charter member of the Golden Age of TV drama, along with such future filmmakers as Sydney Pollack, John Frankenheimer, Norman Jewison and Robert Altman. In the next few years Penn would direct original plays by Paddy Chayefsky (A Gift from Cotton Mather, The Strong Woman, Catch My Boy on Sunday), Horton Foote (The Tears of My Sister, John Turner Davis) and Rod Serling (The Dark Side of the Earth). One TV play — Gore Vidal’s The Death of Billy the Kid, starring Paul Newman and originally directed by Robert Mulligan — became Penn’s first feature film. Another TV play soldered the director’s career in three media.

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William Gibson’s The Miracle Worker was a portrait of the young Helen Keller — the blind and deaf girl who rose to be an important author, suffragist and socialist — and her half-blind teacher, Annie Sullivan. Dramatists have stumbled and truckled so many times attempting true-life inspirational films and TV movies; Gibson eschewed sentiment to focus on two strong wills locked in battle. Penn, always a master at unleashing his actors’ ferocious physicality, staged one dining-room fight, in which Annie tries to impose some rudimentary table manners on the wild child, as a 10-min. siege of ultimate fighting and impeccable choreography. (At the end an exhausted Annie tells Helen’s mother, “The room’s a wreck, but her napkin is folded.”) On TV the roles were played by Patty McCormack and Teresa Wright; in the Broadway and film versions that followed, by Patty Duke and Anne Bancroft. Bancroft and Penn and Gibson and designer George Jenkins all won Tony awards. Duke and Bancroft both received Oscars for the film, and Penn the first of three Academy nominations. (The other two were for Bonnie and Clyde and Alice’s Restaurant; he never won.)

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In the early ’60s Penn was considered a prominent theater director who dabbled in movies. In addition to The Miracle Worker, he staged Gibson’s Two for the Seasaw, Lillian Hellman’s Toys in the Attic, the Broadway debut of the comedy sketch duo Mike Nichols and Elaine May, the musical Golden Boy and, in 1966, Frederic Knott’s thriller Wait Until Dark — another blind girl in peril. Jenkins later recalled standing in the lobby with Penn during that play’s tryout and hearing, inside, the audience’s collective scream when the villain (Robert Duvall) leaped out of the shadows to attack the heroine (Lee Remick). The director and the designer hadn’t realized this frisson would have such a visceral, audible impact. A year later, Penn would give moviegoers a more seismic shock with Bonnie and Clyde.

When showered with acclaim, Penn would not take the safe road but the rough one. The Miracle Worker confirmed his success, but instead of going Hollywood he went indie. Mickey One, from a script by Alan Surgal, was the story of a rebel without applause: a flailing stand-up comic (Beatty) who flees Detroit for Chicago when his life is threatened. “Hiding from you-don’t-know-who, for a crime you’re not even sure you committed?” asks the sympathetic Alexandra Stewart. “And the only thing I know,” Beatty says, “I’m guilty.” Guilty of what? “Of not bein’ innocent.” A performer for whom the spotlight has the blinding intensity of a third-degree interrogation or the awful radiance of a demon deity, Mickey does one last stand-up routine under the gun. “Is there any word?” he calls out to the person — perhaps his soon-to-be killer — manning that spotlight. Silence. “So this is the word.” The end.

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In this hipster crime movie, Penn shows he has appropriated, if not quite assimilated, the tropes of mid-period Orson Welles (shots in distorting mirrors or through ornamental grates, garish carnival creatures) and of the French New Wave (jump cuts, non-naturalistic sound, a braying jazz score by Eddie Sauter and Stan Getz). His cinematographer, between gigs for Louis Malle (The Fire Within) and Robert Bresson (Mouchette), was Ghislain Cloquet, who wove a web of fatality with a mixture of punishing closeups and infinitesimal long shots. Mickey One might have been an immensely influential film, if anybody had seen it. Well, Beatty had. The actor was ready to produce a movie; and after Penn suffered through a big Hollywood production, The Chase (which was recut by its producer, Sam Spiegel), Beatty offered him Bonnie and Clyde.

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Bonnie and Clyde writers Benton, an art director, and Newman, a staff writer, had helped create the Dubious Achievement Awards feature that made Esquire the hot magazine of the ’60s. They also loved movies, foreign ones mostly, and wrote a Barrow Gang script in the style of New Wave crime movies by Jean-Luc Godard (Breathless) and Francois Truffaut (Shoot the Piano Player). Both French directors were offered the project but said no; then Beatty bought it. At Penn’s encouragement, Benton and Newman streamlined the plot and emphasized the film’s connection to the American movies that Barrow and Parker might have seen.

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The rags-to-riches stories of the early talkies era primarily involved gangsters (Little Caesar, The Public Enemy, Scarface) and performers (Applause, 42nd Street, the Gold Diggers series). Bonnie and Clyde fit both categories. Their models are the fast talkers and snappy dressers whose appealing arrogance defined young people on the move, whether to Broadway or the morgue. The Barrow gang’s bank-robbing m.o. is pure showbiz: some professional choreography (Buck Barrow, played by Gene Hackman in another career-making turn, clears a teller’s window in three graceful steps, catching Clyde’s satchel in one hand), a touch of Hollywood humanism (they steal only from the haves), and a catchy tag line (“We’re the Barrow gang!”). They work harder on building a seductive movie image than on acquiring a fat bankroll. They are their own scriptwriters, directors and publicists; and they seem to be auditioning to play themselves in the movie version — if only they’d live long enough.

A period bio-pic made by New York sharpies, Bonnie and Clyde had the same amused, obsessed, lightly derisive view of old, hick, rural Texas that Nichols’ The Graduate — the other game-changing film of 1967 — took toward the new, plasticized Los Angeles. The movie also paraded its daring by establishing Clyde as a sexual naïf whose gun is his most imposing phallic symbol. (Bonnie strokes it; that was a big deal back then.) When he and Bonnie finally make love successfully, she says, “You did just perfect,” and he observes, with a grin that betrays his surprise, “I did, didn’t I?” Shortly thereafter, they’re dead, in the bullet barrage that won the film instant notoriety and lasting éclat. It consumes 30 seconds and 27 shots, in an artful montage by editor Dede Allen. From then on, no action film was complete without a mammoth display or artillery and the slow-motion deaths of gangsters or Western varmints, perforated with blood squibs.

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After Bonnie and Clyde became a hit, Penn again disdained the sure thing of Hollywood prestige projects for the new and the weird. Working with Venable Herndon (another first-time scripter) on adapting Guthrie’s narrative ballad into a movie, Penn cast nonactor Arlo in the lead role. Penn was noted for pulling great performances out of novice actors; he proved that when he coached John F. Kennedy in his first 1960 TV debate against Richard Nixon. (Viewers awarded JFK the win; voters gave him the Presidency.) But the charming Guthrie looked stranded as Penn put him in strange places and through some strange paces. The movie has scenes of Arlo in hospital visits with his father, the folk poet Woody Guthrie, who’s been virtually paralyzed with Huntingdon’s Chorea — played by actor Joseph Boley, as Arlo’s real dad had died the year before filming.

Ranging from dope scenes to underage sex kittens to Vietnam draft-board politics (it could be Hair with different songs), and often wandering off into the portrait of a marriage in crisis, the Alice’s Restaurant film misses the loose-limbed but finely crafted larkishness of Arlo’s song. But it shows that, with the freedom to make the film he wanted, Penn would try anything. Somebody else could fret over whether the audience got it.

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Little Big Man was closer to the kind of film Hollywood expected Penn to make: a Western epic from a lauded novel (by Thomas Berger) with a newly anointed star (The Graduate‘s Dustin Hoffman). A picaresque epic told by 121-year-old Jack Crabb, the last survivor of the Battle of Little Big Horn, this fitfully enthralling movie tilts, like Bonnie and Clyde, between winking comedy and a tragic body count. Penn’s signal achievement here was in his choice for the role of Jack’s Indian mentor, Old Lodge Skins. Unable to sign Laurence Olivier or Paul Scofield, and after Richard Boone left the movie, Penn cast the 70-year-old Chief Dan George, leader of the Tsleil-Waututh nation of British Columbia. Imagine: a Native American playing an Indian. Or, as George calls his people, human beings. At the end of the film, Old Lodge Skins prepares to die with a prayer to the spirits to take him away. But nothing happens. As he explains to Jack, “Sometimes the magic works, sometimes it doesn’t.”

For Penn, the magic would stop working. He’d go four, five years between movies, and the ones he made weren’t quite worth the wait. Night Moves reunited him with Hackman for a Ross Macdonald-style detective story that purred with Penn’s specialty, sexual tension, but otherwise couldn’t escape the ordinary. The 1981 Four Friends came alive in a spasm of violence at a dinner table (shades of The Miracle Worker) and the elegant tangle of lovers on a summer beach, with a third figure watching anxiously; but the acting of Penn’s young cast let him down. Dead of Winter, a 1988 thriller, showed that the director of Broadway’s Wait Until Dark still knew how to craft unease into dread. It was a smooth suspense ride that went nowhere new.

So Penn had one great film decade — which is one decade more than most directors. Not a writer, he relied on other people’s originality, to which he would bring his own artistry. His films display an ethnographer’s fascination with outsiders: people whose skin is the wrong color, whose sight is too weak or hair too long, who fight to achieve celebrity or just to keep on living — or who surrender to the siren call of mortality. Over a 50-year career, Penn always invested his projects with a passionate intelligence. And when American movies needed a little revolutionizing, he was there to make it happen. What Beatty’s Clyde Barrow said of himself might apply to Arthur Penn in the ’60s: “I ain’t good. I’m the best!”

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