10 Movies That Changed The Genre They Were Made In
6. Bonnie And Clyde
Director Arthur Penn is one of the filmmakers that Breathless liberated from the classic Hollywood style. With Bonnie and Clyde, Penn took the gangster archetypes audiences all knew and loved and gave them the Godard treatment. Gone were the wisecracking, invincible tough guys and damsels in distress of prior Hollywood crime films and in were characters who behaved like real people.
Bonnie and Clyde is a tragic movie that, along with Easy Rider, helped give birth to the American New Wave of cinema. Directors like Penn, Scorsese, Lucas and Spielberg now had an outlet to push their movies in directions that they just couldn't have gone before. This is exemplified in the violent nature of Bonnie and Clyde, which Scarface also had a hand in influencing.
Audiences at the time had never seen antiheroes so vividly portrayed on American screens before. Bonnie and Clyde is about much more than just watching criminals commit violent acts, though.
Over the course of the narrative you are given the world through the eyes of these ruthless characters so when they receive their inevitable gruesome deaths it doesn't really feel like the kind of pre-American New Wave justice audiences were used to. This moral divide between Old and New Hollywood styles is where the movie truly shows its innovative nature.