When the Banjo Stops (by Elizabeth Samet)

That's when the trouble starts in Bonnie and Clyde. My students noted this when we watched the film a few weeks ago. When the banjo stops, bad things happen: “I killed a man back there,” Clyde seethes in the back of a movie theater after the getaway from their first fatal job. Like moviegoers everywhere, my students are deluged by onscreen violence. However, because they are preparing to become military officers, their response to it has a clear-eyed sense of the stakes. It is the antithesis of Clyde’s childlike, dangerous naiveté. The film’s final scene, in which Bonnie and Clyde are riddled with bullets, had an especially powerful impact on us. It doesn’t look like the violence typical of most action movies today. Its horror unfolds in slow motion, and it tells us something about ourselves that the supercharged gore of contemporary cinema does not. It isn’t only the slow motion, of course, but also the preceding series of quick cuts between Bonnie and Clyde, who, having realized what is in store for them by the side of that country road, search out each other’s eyes. Watching it this time, what I found most powerful was Clyde's broken sunglasses (one lens has popped out) and untucked shirttail—the hapless disarray of his life crystallized in an instant.