Realism

“The director, Arthur Penn, wanted his film to be as real and untheatrical as possible,” Guffey comments. “The producer, Warren Beatty — who was also the star of the film — shared his point of view. They were out to get stark realism on celluloid. Nothing was to be beautiful. Everything was to be, you might say, harsh — and that’s the way it was through the whole picture.”

In the interest of such realism the decision was made to film as much of the script as possible in the actual locales where the true-life outlaws of the title had held sway more than 35 years before.

Tone

Directed by Arthur Penn, Bonnie and Clyde has a tone that constantly switches between comedic and tragic, childish fun and grave consequences. The use of black in the scene where Bonnie meets her mother for the last time creates a funereal tone and foreshadows the death of the protagonists. Overall, the tone of Bony and Clyde is at times comic, slapstick, and light-hearted. At others, violent, dramatic, disturbing, and tragic.

Visual Style (French New Wave)

From the opening credits, depicting period photographs accompanied by the sound of camera clicks suggestive of gun shots, through to the film’s boldly original framing, employing windows, glass and mirrors as recurring visual motifs, Bonnie and Clyde constantly experiments with the tools of cinema, clearly echoing the techniques most familiarly connoted with the French New wave.