San Diego Reader

Arthur Penn's Dust Bowl fairy tale, in crackling crisp color, about two romantic runaways, a would-be Robert Taylor and a would-be Jean Arthur, who build a legend around themselves with crime headlines, publicity photos, and sophomoric poems, who achieve sexual success in a wheat field after some earlier worries about impotence ("You were just fine"), and who die the deaths of martyrs under a frightening shower of police bullets. A trend-mad movie: Depression-period clothes, Southern dialects, and bluegrass banjos flaunted as cultural exoticisms; guns treated as explicit phallic symbols; violence portrayed in a voluptuous style heavy on special effects and slow-motion. Warren Beatty, Faye Dunaway, Gene Hackman, Estelle Parsons, Michael J. Pollard, and Gene Wilder. 1967.

— Duncan Shepherd

• Rated R

Related links

• "National Crime Museum names their five favorite gangster films" • January 8, 2013

This movie is not currently in theaters.