the three-time Oscar-nominated director best known for “Bonnie and
Clyde,” the landmark 1967 film that stirred critical passions over its
graphic violence and became a harbinger of a new era of American
filmmaking, died Tuesday, a day after he turned 88.
Penn died of congestive heart failure at his
home, said his daughter, Molly. A veteran of directing live television
dramas in the 1950s, Penn made his film directorial debut with “The
Left Handed Gun,”a 1958 revisionist Western starring
Penn, who was often attracted to characters who were
outsiders, directed only a dozen other feature films over the next
three decades, including “The Miracle Worker,” “The Chase,” “Mickey
One,” “Alice’s Restaurant,” “Little Big Man,” “Night Moves,” “The
Missouri Breaks” and “Four Friends.”
But during his heyday in the late 1960s and early
’70s, Penn was in the vanguard of American filmmakers and is considered
a pivotal figure in American cinema thanks to “Bonnie and Clyde,” the
standout film starring
“Had he only directed ‘Bonnie and Clyde,’ he’d be a
director of note,” film critic Leonard Maltin told the Los Angeles
Times in 2009. “But that was simply the most successful of these highly
individual, often idiosyncratic, films that he made in his heyday.”
Because of his relatively small number of films,
most of which were made before the 1980s, Penn “has a somewhat
neglected reputation at this point,” said film critic
“I think you should judge directors by their best
work,” Rainer told the Times in 2009, “and I think ‘Bonnie and Clyde’
is one of the very best American movies and is really sort of the
opening salvo for a whole generation of American directors who were
breaking boundaries and finding their own way.”
Rainer said that actors loved working with the stage-trained Penn.
“I think he’s up there with
best out of a performer,” he said. “And I think he, as opposed to a lot
of directors who have theatrical origins, had a real cinematic sense.
There’s nothing stagy about ‘Bonnie and Clyde’ or ‘Little Big Man.'”
In the late ’50s and early ’60s, Penn was best known for his work on
Among his later
Penn’s relationship with playwright
The
Penn’s 1962 film version of “The Miracle Worker”
earned him his first Oscar nomination as a director, and Bancroft and
Duke won Oscars for their performances.
“Bonnie and Clyde” earned Penn his second Oscar nomination.
The film’s famous ending, in which Bonnie and Clyde
are ambushed by lawmen and die in a seemingly endless hail of
submachine-gun fire, is considered one of the great moments in movie
history. The graphically violent ending, shot with four cameras running
at different speeds, was Penn’s primary reason for directing the film.
“I was reluctant to say ‘yes’ to doing ‘Bonnie and
Clyde’ because I wanted an ending that was simply not just violent,”
Penn said in an interview for Turner Classic Movies. “I wanted one that
would, in a certain sense, transport — lift it — into legend.
“And it wasn’t until I woke up one morning and I
could see that scene with multiple camera speeds and the shape of the
almost ballet of dying, and then I knew that that was a film I wanted
to make — desperately.” The release of “Bonnie and Clyde” ignited a
critical firestorm.
Outraged by the film’s “blending of farce with brutal killings,” veteran
hideous depredations of that sleazy, moronic pair as though they were
as full of fun and frolic as the jazz-age cutups in ‘Thoroughly Modern
Millie.'”
But New Yorker film critic
American movie since ‘The Manchurian Candidate.’ The audience is alive
to it.” Newsweek critic
But then he watched the film again and famously
reversed his position in a second review the next week, saying that he
considered the first review “grossly unfair and regrettably inaccurate.”
The Chicago Sun-Times’ young film critic,
had no such second thoughts, declaring in his review: “‘Bonnie and
Clyde’ is a milestone in the history of American movies, a work of
truth and brilliance. …Years from now it is quite possible that
‘Bonnie and Clyde’ will be seen as the definitive film of the 1960s.”
The movie’s core audience, Penn told the San
Francisco Chronicle in 1996, were the same people who were questioning
the Vietnam War and viewed the film’s notorious bank robbers as an
extension of their own rebellion.
“They were acting that movie out months before we
had made it,” he said. “They were in a kind of collective revolt and
the self-recognition that leaped off the screen is really what swept it
along. … It resonated in a way that I never expected.”
As for the violence in the film, he told the Dallas Morning News in 1999 that he “considered ‘Bonnie and Clyde’ to be about
“I was attacked for the violence in the film,” he
said, “but I wanted to show shootings as they really are — bloody and
horrifying — so the
Nominated for 10 Academy Awards, including best picture, “Bonnie and Clyde” won Oscars for
Beatty, who also starred in Penn’s 1965 film “Mickey One,” praised Penn in a 2000 interview with
“His intelligence,” Beatty said, “is the factor that
resonates most strongly, his intelligence and a lack of interest in
pandering.”
Film editor
“I would cut the phone book for Arthur,” she said.
Penn was born in
Penn’s parents — his father was a watchmaker, his mother was a nurse — divorced when he was 3, and he and his brother moved to
Penn later said he moved so often while growing up
that he attended at least a dozen schools over an eight-year period. At
14, he and his brother moved back to
While in high school in
acted in school plays and worked for a local radio station, voicing the
words of world leaders in dramatizations of events in the news. He was,
he later said, “a terrible actor.”
Penn received his first chance to direct at a local
amateur playhouse. The idea of becoming a director, he told the Boston
Globe in 2008, “just emerged. I was drawn to the theater as kind of a
lonely kid. … I went there, really, for company.”
After joining the Army during World War II, he used his weekend passes while training at Ft. Jackson in
Penn served in the infantry in
He began as the stage manager for a production of the play “Golden
Boy.” But after being demobilized, Penn succeeded Logan as head of the
company whose casts consisted of professionals and amateurs.
A year later, Penn returned home from
at the University of Perugia and the University of Florence. Penn
launched his career in television in 1951 as a floor manager for
But when his old friend Coe called him in 1953 with an offer to direct, Penn returned to
Directing assignments on other live dramatic anthology series, such as “
Penn, a former president of the
The couple later divided their time between homes in
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