Bonnie and Clyde, inflated to tragic-heroic proportions by Faye Dunaway and Warren Beatty in Arthur Penn`s brilliant 1967 film, ”Bonnie and Clyde,” are turned into pretty puppets by Tracy Needham and Dana Ashbrook in ”Bonnie and Clyde: The True Story.”
A Fox original (7 p.m. Monday, WFLD-Ch. 32), this film is an attempt-based on accounts of relatives and other cronies-to set the record
straight, to include biographical material and historical tidbits not included in the 1967 film.
Since our gangsters and cowboys and even our athletes are generally more enjoyable in mythic rather than realistic form, one might have asked the producers, ”Why bother?”
Why would we care that Bonnie was some sort of child wiz?
The film begins with her winning a grammar school spelling bee and continues to try to impress us with her literary flair: She`s writing a poem only minutes before she and Clyde meet their bloody ends.
If the filmmakers are intent on floating the theory that Bonnie was a potential Mary McCarthy thwarted by a sex-peppered thrill ride of crime, they fail miserably.
The film strongly suggests that Bonnie was a sexually needy young woman. We are meant to see her as victim-of her own desires and of Clyde`s ability to satisfy them.
Clyde is, at first, rather impish, aspiring to little more than a life of petty crime inspired by his older brother, Buck (Michael Bowen).
But things get bloody when Clyde`s goofball sidekick, W.D. Jones (Billy Morrissette), kills a storekeeper. First horrified and then resigned, Clyde sets in motion the massive police manhunt across several states that puts Bonnie, Clyde and W.D. on the run.
The earlier film made heroic Depression-era Robin Hoods of the characters. But this film casts them as what they more likely were-nasty people without any socio-political agenda.
The acting doesn`t help color the characters. Ashbrook appears to be from that wide-eyes-mean-fear-hate-or-any-other-emotion school of acting and Needham is too soft and sexy around the edges to capture Bonnie`s menace, however reluctant it may have been.
Morrissette is passable but far from nutty enough and far from Michael J. Pollard`s crafty concoction in 1967.
The script leaps from place to place without much sense and, at every opportunity, fails to give its characters texture.
”The True Story” does tell us things that the earlier masterpiece didn`t. The famous photo of Bonnie with a cigar in her mouth and holding a gun, for instance, was faked by a newspaper editor.
Gee whiz and who cares?
– Some of the characters encountered in ”Never Say Die: The Pursuit of Eternal Youth” (an ”America Undercover” edition airing at 8:30 p.m. Monday on HBO) are, to put it mildly, weird.
Durk Pearson and Sandy Shaw, for instance, are advocates of living longer by means of mega-vitamin supplements. We see them-and they aren`t the healthiest 47-year-olds I`ve ever seen-pounding back vitamins and yammering about esoteric and, according to one doctor, potentially harmful vitamin combinations.
There`s a handsome woman explaining why she wants to have her face remade by plastic surgery, an experience that is graphically shown. Have you ever seen what`s really involved in a face lift?
Less weird than heartening is a visit to the vital old folks at Sun City, Ariz., living fully and controlling their own lives.
Less weird than sad is a nice older fellow who so desperately misses his dead wife that he has paid to have her head frozen-and his when he passes away-in hope that medical science will one day be able to bring them back to life.
Alcor Life Extension Foundation-in California-is the name of the company involved in this grisly business. It`s $35 per head or, for the well-heeled, $140,000 for the entire body.
Throughout most of its hour, the program appears to be filmmaker Anthony Thomas` attempt at a subtle freak show, without any real point of view.
But in the concluding pieces, which move from an examination of genetic research that might enable humans to live 200,000 years, to a visit with a large French family, Thomas makes his point powerfully.
”What good could there be seeing the same faces for hundreds of years?” says one of the Frenchmen.
”If immortality exists,” says another, ”it exists within life.”
Beautifully photographed and imaginatively structured, ”Never Say Die”
is a celebration of life`s course-unaltered by science, vitamins, face lifts or frozen heads.
