Having only celebrated his 88th birthday on Monday, director Arthur Penn sadly passed away on Tuesday, his daughter Molly reported.
Penn will be best known for his ground-breaking work on Bonnie & Clyde, which at the time was a massive departure from the tone and style of Hollywood’s output, yet still earned him a thoroughly deserved Oscar nomintion for Best Director (he earned BAFTA, Golden Globe and DGA nominations that year as well).
The film, along with Easy Rider and The Graduate marked the dawn of New Hollywood, as independently-minded films, often with a strongly counter-cultural message began to find a voice and an audience. In one sense it is a shame that Bonnie & Clyde so overshadowed his career. It is an almost peerless film to be remembered for, drawing on many of the traits of the French New Wave and adopting a desaturated palate long before the cast of Saving Private Ryan braved the shores of Normandy, but it is far from being Penn’s sole noteworthy achievement.
He was Oscar-nominated five years earlier in 1963 for directing The Miracle Worker and Anne Bancroft earned an Oscar for that film for Best Actress in a Lead Role. After Bonnie & Clyde, Penn continued to put out sterling work in the Seventies (Little Big Man, Night Moves and The Missouri Breaks), working with Gene Hackman, Marlon Brando and Dustin Hoffman in the process. As the New Hollywood bubble burst in the wake of Heaven’s Gate and the rise and rise of blockbusters, Penn struggled to continue to find work. He worked occasionally in the 80’s and 90’s but never to the same acclaim as his work attracted in the 60’s and 70’s, however he was given an honorary award at the Berlin Film Festival in 2007.
Penn always defended the unprecedented on-screen violence of Bonnie & Clyde, including the blood-soaked finale as the two anti-heroes are gunned down by just about every law-enforcement official in the US. Penn rightly maintained (in an interview with Martin Scorsese) that the violence was realistic and no different from the shocking footage making its way onto US TV screens from the Vietnam war. You can catch a review of Bonnie & Clyde here as part of our “IMDb 250” project.
Penn was a great director, who will be fondly remembered and sorely missed.
