Joe Morgenstern has vivid memories of the first time he saw "Bonnie and Clyde." It was the week before the movie's August 1967 opening in New York. Then in his second year as a film critic at Newsweek, he'd gone to the Warner Bros. Fifth Avenue offices to see the film.
He still remembers who sat next to him during the screening: Warren Beatty.
"I don't know if it made me nervous or not," recalls Morgenstern, now the film critic at the Wall Street Journal. "But it certainly was unusual, especially since Warren spent the whole time trying to read my notes."
As the film's star and producer, Beatty had reason to be nervous. He knew that Warner Bros. Pictures was giving the film a lukewarm send-off. Instead of giving the film a prestigious summer booking, the studio opted to release it in the dog days of late August. Nor did the film debut in top-of-the-line theaters: Its Los Angeles booking was at the Vogue, a now-defunct action house at the east end of Hollywood Boulevard.
"Through the years, many producers and directors have claimed that their films were mishandled, but in this case, they're right," says Dick Lederer, who in 1967 was Warners' head of advertising and publicity. " 'Bonnie and Clyde' was a watershed film, but no one knew it. In fact, I think it unnerved the Warners executives so much because they realized a new era was coming that they didn't understand."
The film premiered in early August at the Montreal Film Expo, where the audience loved it. Unfortunately, the only American press coverage of the festival was from Bosley Crowther, the venerable New York Times film critic who wrote three dismissals of the film in less than a month, each a denunciation of its jarring juxtaposition of comedy and violence.
In his opening day review, Crowther wrote that Beatty and Faye Dunaway acted "as though they were striving mightily to be the Beverly Hillbillies." Time magazine dismissed the film as a "strange and purposeless mingling of fact and claptrap." In his Newsweek review, Morgenstern called it a "squalid shoot-em-up for the moron trade."
As if to add insult to injury, Esquire magazine--which still had the film's screenwriters, Robert Benton and David Newman, on its masthead--ran a sprawling profile of Beatty by Rex Reed, whose tone was best caught in his assessment of the press-shy actor: "Interviewing Warren is like asking a hemophiliac for a pint of blood." Sly and bitchy, the piece cast Beatty as a pseudo-intellectual fop who boasted of his photographic memory for dinner party menus, New York phone numbers and "anything of a sexual nature."
