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While we’re on the subject...Warren Beatty is a little too suave for a pimple faced country bumpkin, but the distortion helps more than it hurts Clyde Barrow was a child, quickly overwhelmed by his own homicidal hype. On the other side of it, to this day Faye Dunaway looks like she just stepped out of a perfume ad. It’s tempting to dismiss this but if you’ve ever seen a good picture of Parker, it makes perfect sense. Bonnie was truly a fish out of water - a pretty girl, and a hell of a lot smarter than the schmucks she ran with. In a perfect world, she might have been the only member of the gang to actually make something of herself. But despite her relative intelligence, history tells us Bonnie felt there was no practical use for it in the real world. She turned to the pen to record her thoughts, and in doing so scrawled her own epitaph.

She was certainly an average writer, but her words are less naive than her actions, and they paradoxically underscore the wistful way she viewed the chaos around her. And the film those words inspired is no less erratic.

Bonnie and Clyde is one of the first films in which gun play is elevated into an art. So the shootouts depicted here are a bit like watching an old football game - oddly familiar yet somehow rudimentary. There’s a clumsy, manufactured humor to them that highlights the ineptitude of the characters and blunts their brutality in a darkly disconcerting way. Video games did not exist in 1967, but you wouldn’t be far off in calling this Grand Theft Auto: Great Depression. There’s nothing funny about murder, but in this case it’s hard not to understand how silly it is that these kids ever thought they could be professional criminals. Like the imagination of an under educated teen, the movie is all sporadic bursts of violence and sexual innuendo, sandwiched between lulls of introspection and levity. It’s a chaotic tone that some might find frustrating, but it’s hard to deny there’s a certain sense of realism to it.

The rest of the cast helps. Gene Wilder makes his screen debut as a hapless civilian, briefly caught up in the action. The fact that he is a human puppy is what makes it so funny to see him surrounded by such mayhem. Gene Hackman (who I believe is in every movie made between 1971 and 2001) appears as Clyde’s dopey brother Buck. His roguish intensity amps up the bedlam and makes for one of his earliest standout roles. No doubt there’s an artificial sheen on the cast that makes it seem as though the characters were fully aware they’d be famous one day. It adds an edgy sarcasm to the story that makes Bonnie and Clyde seem more like a sarcastic joke than a serious narrative. And in the end (we all know how it ends, don’t we?) the first thing you feel is the shock emptiness and futility - just as you should.

No attempt is made to justify or explain why the Barrow Gang does what they do. Somewhere along the line a bunch of kids took a wrong turn and never found their way back, and that’s just the way it is. Just as in life, the endgame seems inevitable. Just as in life, it’s equal parts funny, tragic and pointless. Bonnie and Clyde plays off like a brutally seductive, meandering road trip where you get to dig your own grave at the end. That’s exactly what it is, but the payoff is in the execution and the experience and not in the end result, because the end is never in doubt.

Maybe that’s the lesson. Sometimes life imitates art, and sometimes art imitates life. For better or worse, Bonnie and Clyde became a pop culture sensation and without meaning to, changed the course of movies forever. Their story will never be forgotten, and sex and violence on screen will never again be the same.

Maybe those two idiots really DID accomplish something, after all.

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