If you do not know the picnickers are Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow, bank robbers and murderers, Penn’s picnics seem ordinary. Penn figured that picnics make good human interest episodes and would humanize Bonnie and Clyde’s selfishness and essential nastiness.
The Parker family picnic is a temporary lull for Bonnie and Clyde, who are graciously welcomed as local heroes. When the group settles to say grace, Bonnie sits with the family, but Clyde remains outside the circle. (He’s an outlaw, of course, pun intended.) Before they depart, Mother Parker admonishes Clyde, “You best keep runnin’.” It’s good advice, and soon they are again racing along country roads at breakneck speed in a Ford, Clyde’s preferred motorcar.
And they do run. Gathering speed and a cult-like reputation, Bonnie writes doggerel about their exploits, “The Ballad of Bonnie & Clyde.” When it’s published in a local newspaper, she reads it to Clyde: You’ve read the story of Jesse James/of how he lived and died./ If you’re still in need;/ of something to read,/here’s the story of Bonnie and Clyde.
Clyde is impressed by Bonnie’s doggerel poetry. He gushes, “You made me,” he says, “somebody to remember.” Until then, Clyde has been incapable of sexual intercourse, but the poem arouses him, and they make love. Poetry and picnics will do that!
*According to Clyde’s sister Blanche’s My Life with Bonnie and Clyde, Barrow and Bonnie picnicked at the end of a hard day robbing banks. The gang (that never paid for anything they could steal) drove to a farmhouse where a willing [?] family provided them with fried chicken. Then they drove off to a local store, bought [?] some bread, and had a regular picnic on the road somewhere near Shreveport, Louisiana.
The Cast: Faye Dunaway as Bonnie ; Warren Beatty as Clyde Barrow; Michael J. Pollard as C.W. Moss; Estelle Parsons as Blanch Barrow; Gene Hackman as Buck Barrow
Featured Image: The end of the picnic.
See Arthur Penn. Bonnie and Clyde (1967). Screenplay by David Newman and Robert Benton; Paul Schneider. Bonnie and Clyde: The thieves Behind the Legend. New York, Henry Holt, 2009; Blanche Caldwell Barrow. My Life with Bonnie and Clyde, Edited by John Neal Phillips. Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 2005.