Coming to PBS’s American Experience tomorrow, Tuesday, January 19: BONNIE & CLYDE
John Maggio’s tale of the notorious outlaw couple makes its debut on the long-running public television strand.
During a crime spree that ran between 1931-1934, Bonnie Parker, Clyde Barrow, and their Barrow Gang captured the attention of the country with wild true crime stories of armed robberies making headline after headline. As recounted in Maggio’s biographical film, the pair emerged in the midst of the Great Depression, a time of desperation that saw the public embrace them as romantic anti-heroes and revel in their ability to defy the law, despite being behind the murders of several police officers and robbery victims. The gangsters’ inadvertent role in propagating this outsider image, however, ultimately proved their undoing, as the film reveals. They might have successfully continued to carry on their illicit activities were it not for the emergence of a series of photos the gang took in 1933 – playfully staged shots of themselves showing off their guns and acting out imagery familiar from true crime pulp magazines – that were discovered in their abandoned hideout. Once released to the press, these proto-selfies became a pre-digital viral sensation, made them instantly recognizable, and started the countdown to their inevitable, bloody showdown with the authorities made famous for more modern audiences through Arthur Penn’s Faye Dunaway/Warren Beatty classic. Maggio, sticking close to the American Experience formula, blends talking heads representing distant family members and historians with some intriguing archival footage to tell a conventional, but still compelling, story of the enduring appeal and fascination with the criminal couple.
what (not) to doc 