Director Arthur Penn

Thanks for the thread - it got me to finally watch The Miracle Worker after it sat on my shelf for a decade.
The thing about Penn's films is that I find they get better with subsequent viewings.

This is especially true of Little Big Man and Night Moves.

Mar 21, 2017 20:40:01 GMT -4 movielover said:


Night Moves is an interesting private eye mystery. Some people don't like it, but I do.


I watched Night Moves two years back and was disappointed. Almost felt cheated by the ending.

Watching it two weeks ago it hit me. The film is playing around with tropes and I had fallen for the same sleight of hand as its hero, Harry Moseby (played by Gene Hackman). He thought he was the unstoppable hero of a private eye movie who would end up solving the case and getting the girl, and I thought I was watching such a movie. There is no excuse for either of us because he is actually mocked for thinking that early in the film.

The reality is somewhat different. In fact he is in a neo-noir and it is messier and deflating of his ego.

I liked it better second time around. 

The text that I placed in purple makes an excellent point, and Bonnie and Clyde is indeed a case in point. The film is quite stylized, sometimes surreal, and violently lyrical. In that kind of movie, no matter how compelling it may be on a certain level, human authenticity and emotional poignancy are often sacrificed—I would actually cite some of Stanley Kubrick's films, especially from the late sixties on, as examples of this cost. But Bonnie and Clyde is a deeply poignant, emotionally haunting film full of pathos—the lyricism and surrealism are not idle at all, and instead those wondrous qualities facilitate a surprising degree of gravitas and sensitivity. 

In this regard, I might analogize Penn to another director making influential (although not critically acclaimed in those days) movies around the time of Bonnie and Clyde: Sergio Leone out of Italy. Even more stylized than Penn, Leone was a deliriously operatic, hugely mythic director whose films nonetheless depicted humanity on an earthier, more grubbily realistic, and more viscerally intense level than the movies (writ large) had previously presented. On a more intimate level emotionally, director Mike Nichols was also using stylistic lyricism to display human warts, especially in The Graduate, released the same year as Bonnie and Clyde. And one could argue that director Nicholas Ray was doing something similar years earlier with such mid-fifties offerings as Johnny Guitar and Rebel Without a Cause, although he was more constrained by the edicts and stylistics of the day—even as he managed to shockingly shake off those constraints at times. 

Perhaps what also unites these directors is that while they were all more than capable of thematic cynicism, they were not cynical toward their protagonists—unlike many directors (Kubrick, perhaps), they did not conflate the two types of cynicism. Thus their films felt honest rather than exploitative, no matter how stylized they might have been. Of course, a failure to be cynical of one's protagonist can occasionally be a weakness, as in Penn's 1976 Western The Missouri Breaks, where the director seems to treat Marlon Brando's character with full seriousness even as that character descends into absurdity. But Penn delivered some of Hollywood's most important and iconic films in perhaps the industry's most culturally incisive era. At his best, he bridged traditionalism and revisionism—the old Hollywood and the new—in seamless fashion. 

That scene really is memorable—visually incisive with expert editing. I viewed Bonnie and Clyde in the theater in October 2013, and although the audience was not large enough to gauge any discernible reaction, I can certainly appreciate your comments. Incidentally, Bonnie and Clyde is receiving another theatrical re-release (of the two-day variety) later this year (in August) to commemorate the movie's fiftieth anniversary. 

I had seen Bonnie and Clyde about three times previously, on VHS or DVD, but part of what stood out to me when viewing the film in the theater three and a half years ago was the sense of a Vietnam War allegory. In effect, the film militarizes the police or turns it into a para-military force indulging in excess, rendering an analogy to Vietnam inescapable.