Tough Acts.(Movie review)

"Bonnie and Clyde" (Warner Bros.) opens with Faye Dunaway sashaying naked in an upstairs bedroom as she catches a glimpse of Warren Beatty in the street below. Within minutes, the two are engaging in lascivious banter, but he wants her as his partner in crime and nothing more. The movie's strength is its psychosexual subtexts as much as its metafictional hints: the screenwriters, Robert Benton and David Newman, reveal the legend of the Barrow gang to have been the product of Bonnie and Clyde's own self-mythologizing, and they present the gangsters' rise from obscurity to fame as a perverted, Depression-age version of a Horatio Alger story. The 1967 film was produced by Beatty, who hired the director, Arthur Penn, who in turn served up a Method feast of showy, shambling performances. His gangsters are, above all, megawatt personalities, like the stars who play them. Cynical about law, bitter about social inequities, and self-aware regarding the game of celebrity, the writers and the director gave the American audience of the mid-sixties all the modernism it could bear--and no more.

The credit sequence of James Gray's "We Own the Night" (Sony), from 2007, starts like that of "Bonnie ...