Movies are often remade, and the same stories are told over and over again in different manners; throughout the different perspectives, cinematic effects, and cultural shifts, it is possible to understand how easily it may be for a story to be changed.
“Bonnie and Clyde” was produced in 1967; starring Warren Beatty, and Faye Dunaway, and featuring Gene Hackman, there were perhaps no better actors at the time to have been cast for these roles. Offering up a romanticized version of the career of these two violent criminals, it was truly a landmark film in the history of American movies. Merging the truth with a stylistic creative license, it was cruel, sympathy filled, funny, heartbreaking, and, perhaps most of all, it was beautiful.
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"“Bonnie and Clyde” and the “Law Abiding Citizen”: A Comparison and Contrast".
“Law Abiding Citizen” came out in 2009; starring Jamie Fox and Gerard Butler, it tells the tale of a man frustrated with the legal system, opting to take justice into his own hands as one of his family’s killers is set free in a plea bargain. He opts to take out not only his family’s killer, but also those who were involved in the deal that set the killer back out on the streets.
Both movies follow the theme of a “bad guy” who gets away with certain things, and tells of those who are determined to stop them, one told from the point of view of the bank robbers, and the other from the point of view of one who was wronged. While “Bonnie and Clyde” told the story with a degree of class no longer seen in movies in this day and age, “Law Abiding Citizen” went full on board with the crudity of language, the guts, the death, and the gore. Does this mean that what Bonnie and Clyde did in real life was less heinous than that which was depicted in “Law Abiding Citizen?” No, rather it serves as a means of looking at things differently.
Cultural taboos dictated what could and could not be shown on television or in film, and the FCC reigned on high. Bonnie was always a lady, even when she was blowing away upstanding citizens, and it was always clear that the violence was staged. Clyde Shelton, the character played by Gerard Butler, was crude, coarse, and thirsting for blood. This shift in personification is a direct result of the cultural shifts present within American society, going from the desire to tell a story to the desire to satisfy one’s baser instincts through visual depiction on a cinematographic medium.
Both movies depict good triumphing over evil, though they do so in remarkably different manners. Disregarding the differences in equipment, the slightly grainy film over the crisp and clear cut picture of today, the true differences are not simply in verbiage, or amount of gore, but rather are in the stylistic manner in which the tales are told. While “Law Abiding Citizen” is dark and grim, “Bonnie and Clyde” is depicted in full force in the light of day. The creative liberties taken by the screenwriters for “Bonnie and Clyde” in order to build up the mystery and romance that surrounded the couple clearly come through within the film itself, while in “Law Abiding Citizen” the coarseness of dialogue and the lack of attention to the minute details shows an example of a much coarser time, a time when it has become so that the story itself does not matter, nor the beauty in which the tale is told, but the amount of explosions, blood, death, chaos, destruction, and of course cursing, that may be thrown into a movie.
While “Bonnie and Clyde” and “Law Abiding Citizen” do both portray a tale of good triumphing over evil, the manners in which they choose to represent this tale, and the tricks of the cinema trade that they use to do so are remarkably different, and the change is not necessarily for the better.
