The man who directed 'Bonnie and Clyde'
Arthur Penn comes to the Harvard Film Archive for a retrospective
NEW YORK - American film has its titled aristocracy. Just as certain eminent Britons have their name preceded by "Sir" or "Dame," four movies have the word "after" attached to them in Hollywood history. That is, after their release filmmaking was never quite the same. Such was the impact of "The Birth of Nation," "The Jazz Singer," "Citizen Kane," and, the baby in the bunch - a mere 41 years old - "Bonnie and Clyde."
"Yes, I did know there was something special going on," Arthur Penn says about what he felt while directing "Bonnie and Clyde" on location in east Texas. "Of course, I had no idea about what the response would be."
The response to the film's then-unique blend of violence and comedy, sex and iconoclasm would be what we now know as the New Hollywood.
Penn will be at the Harvard Film Archive this Friday, kicking off a four-day retrospective of his work. Sitting in the art-filled Upper West Side duplex he shares with his wife, he recently talked about his life and work. Despite a recent hospitalization for pneumonia, Penn was an animated and articulate conversationalist.
"What happens is, you reach 85, and everybody says, 'Get him before he dies!,' " Penn laughs. "You like being celebrated, but you also know the clock is ticking."
A trim, energetic man of medium height with a hang-dog face and striking light-blue eyes, Penn's casually dressed: sweater, chinos, a pair of Nikes. He has a voice like the character actor Philip Baker Hall's: a little weaker, not so raspy, but with a fine residue of feistiness.
"He's my favorite director," Dede Allen says in a telephone interview from Los Angeles. This is high praise from the editor of Robert Rossen's "The Hustler," Sidney Lumet's "Dog Day Afternoon," and Warren Beatty's "Reds."
"Bonnie and Clyde" was the first of six Penn films Allen edited. "I would cut the phone book for Arthur," she says.
Penn excites that sort of loyalty from colleagues. Gene Hackman acted for him three times, Marlon Brando and Beatty twice each. Beatty, who produced "Bonnie and Clyde," trusted Penn enough to hire him as well as work for him.
"Bonnie and Clyde" is the high point in a career filled with them. Penn was a lion of television's golden age. One of the many live television plays he directed, "The Tears of My Sister," a 1953 Horton Foote drama, will be shown Friday at the HFA. Penn went on to become a Tony Award-winning director on Broadway in the late '50s and early '60s. Among productions he directed were "Two for the Seesaw," "The Miracle Worker," "Toys in the Attic," "An Evening with Nichols and May," and "Wait Until Dark."
Penn directed his first film, the revisionist western "The Left Handed Gun," in 1958. The film version of "The Miracle Worker" (1962) established his reputation in Hollywood, then came such ground-breaking titles as "Bonnie and Clyde," "Alice's Restaurant" (1969), and "Little Big Man" (1970).
HFA director Haden Guest, in an e-mail, lauds Penn's films for "breaking boundaries with their bold depiction of the violence inherent in American culture and history and cutting to the bone of the contemporary zeitgeist with their profound, restless questioning about American history, myths, and national identity."
Almost as striking as Penn's achievements has been his career trajectory. For a decade, he was a dominant figure in American film. Even his failures, like "The Chase" (1966) and "The Missouri Breaks" (1976), drew enormous interest. Then something happened - or failed to. There have been just four feature films over the last 30 years.
"I was out of fashion," Penn says matter-of-factly. "My time was over, unless I was willing to live out in Hollywood and keep trying to generate projects and keep trying to stay in the public eye. None of which I was willing to do."
Born in Philadelphia, Penn is the younger brother of the photographer Irving Penn. His face lights up when he learns a visitor has just come from his brother's retrospective at the Morgan Library, which he's eager to see. There's also a copy of one of Irving Penn's books on a coffee table. "I learned a lot from him," Penn says, "and I'd like to think he's learned some from me."
Being a director "just emerged," Penn says. "I was drawn to the theater as kind of a lonely kid . . . I went there, really, for company." He stage-managed Army shows as an enlisted man during World War II. The GI Bill brought him to Black Mountain College, followed by studies in Italy.
Back in the States, Penn got a job holding cue cards for Milton Berle on live TV. It was a new medium, open to new talent, and Penn quickly rose from Uncle Miltie stagehand to director on such prestige vehicles as "Playhouse 90."
"TV was exhilarating," Penn recalls. "Going on the air with three cameras, 12 lenses, a bunch of actors: If you could survive it, you'd survive pretty much anything."
Long affiliated with the Actors Studio, Penn soon got a reputation as a classic actor's director. Most of the interview Penn sits calmly on a couch. "With actors, I'm always just amazed and very grateful for what they do," Penn says. "And I'm able then, consequently, to have an atmosphere that's nonthreatening and tends to invite a certain degree of almost recklessness, which is what I look for."
Penn's most important contribution to film history may be his providing the connection between Elia Kazan, the director who brought Method intensity and naturalism to film during the '50s, and the New Hollywood of the late '60s and early '70s.
"Absolutely," Penn says when asked about this. "I was aware of it happening. When I came back from Italy here was Kazan, so well established, in film and theater, and I thought, 'That's what I want to do, actually.' "
Allen cites as one of Penn's great strengths that "he never does the same thing twice." There is, however, one constant in his films: outsiderdom. It's not just the outlaws (Bonnie and Clyde, Paul Newman's homoerotic Billy the Kid, in "Left Handed Gun"). It's also people supposedly on the right side of the law (Hackman's detective in 1975's "Night Moves," Brando's sheriff in "The Chase" and his "regulator" in "Missouri Breaks"), and such social outcasts as Arlo Guthrie in "Alice's Restaurant" and Anne Bancroft's Annie Sullivan and Patty Duke's Helen Keller in "The Miracle Worker."
"I almost don't have a choice," Penn says of his penchant for such figures. "The outsider appeals to me because I believe there are so many odd characteristics of human behavior that don't get into films. I mean an environment where those things occur. I've always just been drawn to it." An "Arthur Penn film," he says, means "a rubbing of plates, tectonic plates, of the personality and the society."
Penn stays abreast of what's going on in film. "I thought the Coen brothers ['No Country for Old Men'] film was very good." He praises Daniel Day-Lewis ("a great actor") and expresses a wish to work with Johnny Depp ("He has a lot of what Brando had: audacity"). He's also taken notice of the recent comeback by Sidney Lumet, his old live-TV contemporary and a mere pup at 82.
With the success of "Before the Devil Knows You're Dead," might Penn want to get back on to a set, too? "I do, I do," he says. "I was having dinner with my wife last night and we were talking about an idea."
Mark Feeney can be reached at mfeeney@globe.com 