Arthur Penn, ‘Bonnie and Clyde’ director and pioneer of cinematic violence, dies at 88 in New York
Anonymous
Arthur Penn is shown during the filming of “Target.” Penn, a myth-maker and myth-breaker who in such classics as “Bonnie and Clyde,” died at 88.
Arthur Penn, the screen and theater director whose “Bonnie and Clyde” single-handedly blasted cinematic violence into a new realm in 1967, died Tuesday at his home in Manhattan. He was 88. The cause was heart failure.
Penn was 44 when he made the youth-centric classic about Depression-era gangsters Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker, but star/producer Warren Beatty – who’d previously acted in Penn”s “Mickey One” – selected the filmmaker after Francois Truffaut turned the project down.
“Bonnie and Clyde” polarized critics and was shortchanged by its studio, Warner Bros., until Beatty and Penn’s grassroots campaign got back into theaters in late 1967, where the movie’s much-discussed violence made it a hit. The movie’s resurrection is Hollywood legend, just as its hail-of-bullets ending is still imitated, studied and admired.