Bonnie and Clyde

Arthur Penn, working from a screenplay credited to Robert Towne, puts aside knee-jerk morality to consider the titular duo as modern entities who take advantage of contemporary technology to push their legend. Bonnie and Clyde takes place in the dust bowls and foreclosed homesteads of the Great Depression. Bonnie starts out as a bored, flirty waitress; Clyde her skeezy carjacker. Terminally savvy, the gang that this pair forms concentrate their crimes on the villainous banks that are seizing local property. As a result of this canniness, they all quickly become folk heroes. Faye Dunaway and Warren Beatty play the titular duo as youthful, sexually frustrated outlaws oblivious to the chaos they cause. Their robberies are just scaled up versions of tick (or tag if you're an American reader), with the couple causing some chaos then seeing if they can get to the state border before they're caught. 

These crimes are, to them, a game then. A rolling series of opportunities to push their stolen vehicles as far as they can while spraying Thompson machine guns out the window. Penn's film seems to be in full agreement with these outlaws, scoring their escapes with an energetic bluegrass. The chic couple pose for photographs and even mail in poems, always with a mind to how their story is being managed and processed by the masses. The push back they receive then is particularly aggressive. You see, in this telling, Bonnie and Clyde haven't just broken laws, they've transgressed against the natural order of things. They've taken money from banks and made fools out of policemen. Worst of all, they've given regular people ideas about their own standing inside the capitalist machine. Therefore, the so-called lawful society that has settled on top of the Americas doesn't just have an obligation to stop them and prevent further disobedience, it needs to shoot Bonnie and Clyde so full of holes that they no longer even resemble people.