Why might it matter to some if long dead Clyde Barrow was impotent or not?
Warren Beatty had become a major star at the age of 23 with the release of his feature début, the poignant Splendor in the Grass, in 1960. Veteran Method director Elia Kazan coaxed a brilliant performance from both Beatty and co-star Natalie Wood, the former child actress whose close affinity to the character of Deanie (revealed in Suzanne Finstad’s painstaking 2001 biography of Hollywood’ last true studio star) made the film a painful experience for her. The screenplay was written for the screen by gay playwright William Inge, who had similarly crafted a stage role for Beatty in A Loss of Roses, which enjoyed a short-lived theatre run in late 1959. It would take Beatty a few more years to hone his screen craft and he discovered a soul-mate in Arthur Penn, who directed him in the self-conscious Nouvelle Vague-styled Mickey One (1965), a resounding box-office flop which allegedly had its origins in Penn’s recollection of his work on television’s Colgate Comedy Hour with Jerry Lewis in t
When I was around 10 years old, I happened to be flipping through the channels on our family TV set, a 20-inch Magnavox color set. It was a hot South Florida summer Saturday afternoon, and with most of my friends either in summer school or on vacation, I had nothing better to do than to read a book or watch television. In 1973, we didn’t have cable or satellite television, and even Fox, UPN, and the WB hadn’t even been dreamed of yet. We had the Big Three networks (ABC, CBS, and NBC), a Spanish language channel, and a couple of independent channels on the VHF and UHF bands; usually I watched WCIX because it ran movies quite frequently — the 8 o’clock movie on weekday nights, and two afternoon flicks on weekends. I’m not sure whether it was the one or three o’clock movie that I happened to catch that day, but the image that I saw never quite left me — it was the climactic ambush that comes at the end of director Arthur Penn’s 1967 Depression-era crime drama, Bonnie and Clyde. Compared
We know lots of things about gangter Clyde Barrow. Bonnie and Clyde were well known during the era when crooks and robbers seemed to take on an almost fantasy hero aura. Stories of bad guys robbing the poor like Robin Hood helped make them heroes to many who viewed banks as tools of the government. Bonnie and Clyde also became the heroes of a movie with much more attractive than real life stars playing them. Some attack Barrow’s sexuality, saying he was impotent as a means of bringing him down a few notches or even mocking him, or even perhaps, in an odd way, explaining that Bonnie stayed with him because she felt sorry for him. It might even be given as an excuse for his crime sprees. Bringing the famous Clyde Barrow down a few notches, of course, can also serve to raise the esteem of those who’d cast doubt on his potency, even if it is irrelevant today.
