Summary
Moss goes into the store for a moment, then comes out with a wad of cash, smirking. Clyde invites him to jump in the backseat and they drive away.
We see the man from the grocery store who Clyde hit in the head with his gun. A detective sits at his bedside, holding up photographs of different criminals trying to get him to identify his assailant. When the detective holds up a photo of Clyde, the man squints, recognizing him.
The scene shifts to Bonnie lying in bed awake, while Moss snores nearby. Leaning over, Bonnie stares at Clyde, and his eyes open, kept awake by the snoring.
The next day, the group drives into a town, and Bonnie and Clyde go into the bank. They hold up the bank while Moss waits in the car. The banker stuffs the cash into a paper bag that Bonnie holds and they leave the bank, but when they go outside the couple cannot find the car, which Moss has moved to a corner. As the security bell goes off, Bonnie and Clyde run over to get in the car and scold Moss for parking the car while they were robbing the bank. They make a slow getaway, and as a man climbs on the side of the car, Clyde shoots him in the face.
Bonnie and Clyde go to a movie in which the song "We're in the Money" is featured. Moss looks upset as Clyde rocks in anxiety in the back row and scolds him for parking the car during the robbery. Bonnie shushes them and tells them to go in the lobby if they want to talk, watching the film on the screen intently.
The scene shifts and we see Bonnie singing "We're in the Money" and putting on a necklace in the mirror. Clyde beckons her over to the other room and tells her that because they killed a man that afternoon and were seen, the authorities will be after him for murder. While he cannot get out of the situation, he urges her that she still can, and tells her that she ought to go back to her mother's. She doesn't want to, however, and insists on staying with him.
"You could get a rich man if you tried," Clyde tells her, but she insists that she doesn't want one. "You ain't gonna have a minute's peace," he warns her, and she jokes, "You promise?" They embrace and kiss on the bed. She begins to lower herself to begin performing oral sex, but Clyde turns her over, and they sit in silence for a moment. He gets up and says, "I told you I wasn't no lover boy," and the two of them stare at each other for a moment.
The scene shifts and we see a couple (Clyde's brother and his wife) arriving at a house and meeting Clyde. Clyde and his brother, Buck, greet each other jubilantly, wrestling boyishly, as Buck's wife, Blanche, watches from the car. Buck introduces Blanche, who seems unimpressed with Clyde, and Clyde takes Buck to meet Bonnie. When she meets Moss, Blanche is exceedingly creeped out, and Buck wants to take her picture, but she doesn't like it.
Clyde takes out a machine gun and poses with it. When Buck wants Clyde to take his picture with Blanche, she resists. Bonnie then poses for a picture holding a pistol, and Clyde takes her picture. Going inside, Clyde asks Buck what he thinks of Bonnie and Buck asks Clyde if she is "as good as she looks." The two brothers laugh with each other for a moment, when suddenly Buck asks Clyde if he was put in a position in which he had to shoot the man in the bank robbery. "Don't say anything to Blanche about it," Buck tells him. After hooting and hollering about how they're going to have a good time, Buck asks Clyde about prison and Clyde tells him about his missing toes.
The group drives down the road, Buck and Clyde in one car, and Bonnie and Blanche in the other. Buck tells Clyde a humorous story about a friend's ailing mother as Clyde drives. Blanche and Bonnie drive down the road silently, Bonnie scowling and smoking while Blanche looks out the window.
The group arrives at a small cottage that Buck introduces to his new wife as their first home. Blanche is delighted by the house, as Bonnie sits in a rocking chair. Later, the group plays a raucous game, but Bonnie seems bored and goes in the next room. Blanche tells Buck that he needs a haircut, while Clyde goes to find Bonnie.
When he finds Bonnie in the next room, Bonnie does a mocking impression of Blanche. Clyde warns her not to mock his sister-in-law while she's in the next room. "Don't you ever wanna be alone with me?" she asks, and Clyde tells her that he always feels like they're alone, before going into the next room.
The next day a boy delivers groceries to the house and Bonnie pays him and takes them upstairs. The boy lingers for a moment, looking suspiciously up at the window.
Inside, Bonnie reads the group some of her own writing, a fictional story about a beautiful but tough woman named Sal, but Buck keeps interrupting. Suddenly, Clyde notices a cop car outside the window. As Blanche begins screaming, Bonnie and Clyde grab guns and begin shooting at the cops. Buck grabs a rifle and goes outside, followed by a screaming Blanche. He shoots one of the cops and the group gets in a car together, almost leaving Blanche behind. After circling back, they grab Blanche and pull her into the car, driving off.
Analysis
In this section of the movie, Bonnie and Clyde welcome an accomplice into their circle, the mischievous car mechanic, C.W. Moss. While the premise of their crime has been that they are a couple, providing for one another, they make the transition into welcoming a new companion into the mix. In the strange little family, Moss becomes a stand-in for Bonnie and Clyde's son, a young boy who just wants to please them and fit in.
Even though Clyde welcomed Moss into their criminal circle, the young man turns into more of a third wheel than an asset, as represented by the moment in which Bonnie and Clyde are lying in bed together, kept awake by Moss' snoring. Bonnie and Clyde's is a strange marriage of sorts, a kind of bizarre intimacy that only gets triangulated when Moss joins their ranks, helpful though he may be.
As the stakes get higher, Bonnie and Clyde's quaint acquaintance gets darker and more and more violence creeps into the narrative. The film starts from a violent place as soon as Clyde reveals that he has a pistol, but he doesn't use it until this section of the film, when they are making a slow getaway out of town. When a townsperson climbs onto the side of the car, Clyde shoots the man in the face in a shocking eruption of violence. In this moment, we discover that Clyde is capable of brutal violence, in spite of being a charming protagonist figure. The life of crime isn't all mischievous fun and smiles, as we learn in this moment.
When Clyde murders the man, the risk of their endeavor increases greatly, and threatens to destroy the happy union between the wayward antiheroes. When Clyde offers for Bonnie to leave the operation, however, telling her she could have a better life if she wanted it, she insists that she wants to stay with him. It turns out that the rising stakes of their criminal life only brings them closer together and makes them feel more connected (if not necessarily sexually compatible) as they get in deeper and deeper.
In this section of the film, we meet Buck, Clyde's brother, and Buck's wife, Blanche, who is rather more prudish than the uninhibited and criminal Bonnie. Buck and Blanche are foils of sorts for the glamorous bank-robbing protagonists, Blanche in particular. In the midst of the rowdiness and unrefined associates of her husband's, Blanche wears a disapproving frown, as though she is permanently allergic to the coarse ways of Clyde, Bonnie, and Moss. Estelle Parsons, who portrayed Blanche, won an Academy Award for her performance.
