Reviews

I'm amazed this movie gets four checks when it appears on television. I suppose it's for the cinematography, especially the ambush scene, which was innovative for 1967. I was in seventh grade when the movie came out, so I was overtaken with the Bonnie and Clyde mystique. The movie is highly fictionalized. The character C. W. Moss, played by Michael J. Pollard, seems to be a composite of W. D. Jones and Henry Methvin. I read the book, "The True Story of Bonnie and Clyde," based on the testimony of Clyde's sister and Bonnie's mother, which came out the same time as the movie. According to them, some of the killings attributed to Bonnie and Clyde were done by others, among them the Easter Sunday, 1934, killing of a policeman near Grapevine, Texas. Bonnie said to Clyde, "Let's take 'em," their code for kidnapping policeman and taking them for a ride, later dropping them off unharmed. Methvin shot them in cold blood. Maybe this is a lie, but Methvin did cop a deal to escape murder charges. When Bonnie and Clyde were ambushed, they had stopped to help him fix a flat tire. We'll never know the truth.

This is a great movie. Cinematography and scripting are excellent. The fact that it wasn't a summer blockbuster in the vein of "Independence Day" and "Mission: Impossible" speaks well for it. Stanley Tucci's performance is riveting. He portrays the complexity of character of a highly controversial figure, hated by some and loved by others, and both for good reason. He was a crony of J. Edgar Hoover, but also had a social conscience. One minute we see Winchell shamelessly using blackmail in order to be the first to scoop a story; the next we see him being beaten to within an inch of his life by Hitler sympathizer thugs because he refused to be silent on the threat of the rise of Naziism.

The monster had a striking resemblance to the Creature from the Black Lagoon, which was a much better picture with great cinematography. To make a correction: the substance used to kill them was sodium, not sodium chloride. Sodium burns on contact with water. It's a soft metal, not a powder, so it would take a lot to kill them. But why not just use flame throwers or some other flame source? The music by the Del Aires was really corny. I did a search and found nothing relating to them. Did they ever put out a record? You wonder where they plugged in their amplifiers on the beach. And how were the canisters of toxic material so easily broken open? I wonder what became of the actors. I don't recognize a single name from the cast.