Big Screen Little Screen

The director crafted a film that would pull audiences in with humor and flirtation, then slap them back with violence. “That,” [Arthur] Penn said, “is how the real world has always operated. It was vital to me that the film be a new American gothic. . . . The movie was released into a world where kids were burning draft cards and feeling beset by their own government. We rang a big bell with this film. A very big social bell. We had no idea how it would reverberate around the world.”

Arthur Bell and Warren Beatty remember Bonnie and Clyde. A special edition DVD package, with a new making-of documentary and 36-page hardcover photo book, was just released this week.