Bonnie and Clyde (1967)

What a banner year 1967 was for film, “Cool Hand Luke,” “The Graduate,” and “In the Heat of the Night.” But “Bonnie and Clyde” tops them all. If you’re older than 13, you know the story: Clyde Barrow (Warren Beatty) and Bonnie Parker (Faye Dunaway) rob banks, shoot, kill, and die in a hail of bullets. In this Arthur Penn-directed tale, the couple stumbles into their life of crime, botching their first robberies at a shuttered bank and a grocery, with family (including a frantic sister-in-law played by Estelle Parsons) close by. The first murder is almost accidental, the others come easier. Penn dishes out the dark humor in droves, always with an edge of violence that still shocks with its exploded body parts and proximity. Beatty and Dunaway themselves explode as the original gangster couple with heaps of personal issues, faults and an unending hunger for stability during a financial depression that provides none. I could rave about Gene Hackman as an elder brother Barrow, but it’s Denver Pyle (yes, Uncle Jesse!) who burns brightly as a lawman with a raging psychotic lust for murder, barely masked by his quest for justice. A+