Adrift in the Depression-era southwest, Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker embark on a life of crime. They mean no harm. They crave adventure - and each other. Soon we start to love them too. But nothing in film history has prepared us for the cascading violence to follow. 'Bonnie and Clyde' turns brutal. We learn they can be hurt - and dread they can be killed.

'Bonnie and Clyde' balances itself on a knife-edge of laughter and terror, thanks to vivid title-role performances by Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway and superb support from Michael J. Pollard, Gene Hackman and Estelle Parsons, who won 1967's Best Supporting Actress Academy Award®. Director Arthur Penn keeps the film's sensibilities tough but never cruel. It continually dazzles, especially in the work of cinematographer Burnett Guffey (winner of the film's second Oscar®) and editor Dede Allen. And as film lovers since have discovered, it's no ordinary gangster movie.

Amazon.com essential video: One of the landmark films of the 1960s, Bonnie and Clyde changed the course of American cinema. Setting a milestone for screen violence that paved the way for Sam Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch, this exercise in mythologized biography should not be labeled as a bloodbath; as critic Pauline Kael wrote in her rave review, "it's the absence of sadism that throws the audience off balance." The film is more of a poetic ode to the Great Depression, starring the dream team of Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway as the titular antiheroes, who barrel across the South and Midwest robbing banks with Clyde's brother Buck (Gene Hackman), Buck's frantic wife Blanche (Estelle Parsons), and their faithful accomplice C.W. Moss (the inimitable Michael J. Pollard). Bonnie and Clyde is an unforgettable classic that has lost none of its power since the 1967 release. --Jeff Shannon