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Dunaway mows down new Bonnie and Clyde

WHEN Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway learnt that a Hollywood studio was planning a 21st-century remake of Bonnie and Clyde, the legendary 1967 film that earned both of them global acclaim, they each responded with the same question: “Why?”

The answer, according to the author of yet another new book on America’s most notorious outlaw couple, is that romance and crime never go out of fashion, and that a new age of economic depression may be just the time to revive national interest in a 1930s gangster and his moll who robbed banks the old-fash-ioned way - not with dodgy investment schemes, but with double-barrelled shotguns and getaway cars.

“Their story is very relevant right now,” insists Jeff Guinn, whose new book, Go Down Together: The True, Untold Story of Bonnie and Clyde, is published this week.

Another new book, Bonnie and Clyde: The Lives Behind the Legend, by Paul Schneider, will be published on March 31. The film and the books coincide with the 75th anniversary this year of the blood-spat-tered ambush near Gibsland, Louisiana, where Bonnie and Clyde died in 1934 in a hail of machinegun bullets.

Yet fans of the original film, not to mention Beatty and Dunaway, who became the most acclaimed movie gangsters in history, have not been impressed with proposals for an updated version of a film that many consider a milestone in American cinema for its art house portrayal of the previously trashy gangster genre...

Read entire article at Times (UK)