While Arthur Penn had made four movies previously, Bonnie and Clyde stands out as his masterpiece. He got his start directing on Broadway and television, for which he had received many accolades. His unflinching treatment of the Bonnie and Clyde story is what put him on the map and cemented him as an American film master. Many cite his direction of Bonnie and Clyde as a defining moment in American film history, a work that reacquainted American audiences with a more visceral filmgoing experience due to its unapologetic and un-sentimentalized depiction of the failure of the American dream.
While she had her reservations about the film as a whole, critic Pauline Kael praised many elements of Bonnie and Clyde and Penn's direction. She wrote of the film, "the end of the picture, the rag-doll dance of death as the gun blasts keep the bodies of Bonnie and Clyde in motion, is brilliant. It is a horror that seems to go on for eternity, and yet it doesn’t last a second beyond what it should. The audience leaving the theatre is the quietest audience imaginable." Penn's treatment of the final bloodbath is disturbing but affecting, and the way that it crushes the dreams of the protagonists sends a clear message that Bonnie and Clyde's naive but criminal independence is not all fun and games.
Penn sought to blend the comic with the tragic in this film, and the effect is often disorienting and affecting. Taking his cues from the French New Wave, he worked to create an atmosphere in which a lighthearted moment could go from slapstick to brutal in the blink of an eye. Some critics praised this quality and perceived its message as a rallying cry for 1960s youth culture, while others thought it was derivative. In Variety, Owen Gleiberman wrote, "Bonnie and Clyde caught the revolution but was wise enough to know that living for the moment and doing whatever you want couldn’t work. That’s why the movie spoke so timelessly. It told the audience that life is precious, crazy, sexy, desperate, fleeting. It said hang on and enjoy the ride." Contrastingly, Pauline Kael wrote in The New Yorker, "Penn is a little clumsy and rather too fancy; he’s too much interested in being cinematically creative and artistic to know when to trust the script. Bonnie and Clyde could be better if it were simpler. Nevertheless, Penn is a remarkable director when he has something to work with."
