Together with The Graduate (1967) and Easy Rider (1969), Bonnie and Clyde (1967) is a crucial film for the emergence of the so-called "New American Cinema" characterised by the influence of European auteurs and a more candid representation of sex and violence which eventually led to the creation of a new systems of ratings. This collection of essays edited by Lester Friedman aims to assess both the relevance of Penn’s movie in the context of the cultural and political changes of the late Sixties and its contemporary cinematic legacy.

The essays in the volume present a variety of ideological as well as methodological approaches to the film. They range from the personal recollections of director Arthur Penn and screenwriter David Newman to the conflicting representations of the "real", historical couple of criminals, from the ways in which the movie, although set in the 1930s, resonated in the context of 1960s US to a close analysis of its visual strategies used to convey "the paradoxical qualities of its characters and its subject". Unsurprisingly, one of the essays focuses on the meaning of violence in the film and argues, rather unconvincingly, on the negative impact that the celebrated final scene has had on American cinema and its use of violence. The final essay in the collection is a provocative queer reading of Bonnie and Clyde which brings to light its suppressed and hidden homosexual tensions. The volume ends with two extremely divergent reviews of the film written in the year of its release and indicative of the debates that Bonnie and Clyde engendered.

As in all collections the level of the contributions is not always even and sometimes, the ambitious scope of the volume notwithstanding, there are tiresome repetitions (e.g. the point that even though the movie is set in the Depression, it is really self-consciously about the Sixties). The essay by Matthew Bernstein on the movie’s visual style is particularly useful in the context of secondary education as it offers the teacher plenty of close-readings that can be replayed in the classroom with the assistance of the related clips from the movie. This would be an effective introduction to the inter-relationships between cinematic form and content. The queer reading by Liora Moriel is also perceptive, although her point about race and the representation of African-Americans is not fully integrated into the essay. Using Moriel’s essay in the context of the secondary-school classroom may prove a challenge, yet such an endeavour would be truly in the progressive spirit of Arthur Penn’s movie. As Bonnie and Clyde led to the eventual defeat of heavy censorship codes, teaching the movie according to Moriel’s reading would help to defeat the censorship of queer subjects still present in education nowadays.