Friedman's excellent monograph puts Bonnie and Clyde in the broader historical, social, and cultural context of the breakdown of the studio system in the post World War II era and in the traditionalist versus counterculture culture war of the 1960s and early 1970s arguing that Bonnie and Clyde's outlaws against "traditional" authority resonated with many of America's young. Many of America's young, Friedman argues, found in Bonnie and Clyde, as fighting against America's restrictive moral code and its repressive social institutions if in a different era, the Great Depression of the late 1920s and 1930s.
Friedman also does an excellent job of exploring the production contexts of Bonnie and Clyde, thanks, in part, to interviews with the films director Arthur Penn, who began his directorial life in theatre and the new medium of American television, and with David Newman, one of the writers of the film along with Robert Towne, neither of whom had screenwriting experience or credits when they first wrote the script to Bonnie and Clyde. Friedman notes something that virtually everyone speaks of when they write about the film these days, that two heroes of the French nouvelle vague were asked to direct the film, Jean-Luc Godard and François Truffaut, and that Truffaut helped give the film a narrative structure.
I was impressed with Friedman's exploration of the contexts, production history, and analysis of Bonnie and Clyde, particularly its attention to the historical context of the film. I recommend the monograph to anyone interested in film, interested in American film, interested in the brief revolution in American film in the 1960s and 1970s.
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