Arthur Penn, who died yesterday of congestive heart failure at his Upper West Side apartment in New York, may have had the strangest career arc of any major Hollywood director. That's Penn, standing on the right, on the set of "Bonnie and Clyde," with Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway.
For the better part of a decade, from "Bonnie and Clyde" (1967) to "The Missouri Breaks" (1976), he was pretty much it among American directors until Francis Ford Coppola and Martin Scorsese came along. There was a special excitement attached to Penn's name. And why shouldn't there have been? "Bonnie and Clyde" was the most revolutionary movie made in this country since "Citizen Kane." No movie since has matched its impact. Its blend of humor and tragedy, its frank yet poeticized presentation of violence, the across-the-board excellence of its acting, even the hilarious yet pitch-perfect way it used Flatt and Scruggs' "Foggy Mountain Breakdown": All these elements and more combined to blow open the doors of Hollywood and usher in its Silver Age. There's lots of credit to go around (Beatty, who produced as well as starred; Robert Benton and David Newman's script; Robert Towne's script-doctoring; Dede Allen's gangbusters editing; the cast, too, of course). But it was Arthur Penn's movie.
