(Arthur Penn, US 1967, 111 min.)

True Crime. Francois Truffaut may have been the original director of choice, but in the hands of Arthur Penn, David Newman and Robert Benton’s script about a pair of real-life Depression-era bank robbers-turned-folk heroes (played by Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway) became a transitional film in American cinema and a harbinger of the New Hollywood. Some contemporary critics got it and loved it — Pauline Kael chief among them — but many others were outraged by the film’s unprecedented violence and audacious glamour. Either way, American films would never be the same.

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