WARNING: SPOILERS

Is there a better 1950s B-movie beginning than busty blonde Bonnie Parker (Dorothy Provine) disrobing down to her slip to a jangling rock ‘n’ roll beat? The opening credits are on the left, and we see her through a window on the right—with a swinging light above her, lockers behind her, and a bored expression on her face. Where is she? Turns out getting ready to work at a diner in Oklahoma City in 1932. Basically we’re peeping toms. B movies sell sex and boom here it already is.

I remember being surprised—about 25 years ago—when I found out there’d been another “Bonnie & Clyde” released about 10 years before the famous Beatty-Dunaway version, but the real surprise, now that I think about it, is that there was just the one. The Bonnie and Clyde story is made for exploitation. It’s got built-in sex, violence and rebellion, and the majority of it can be filmed in the hinterlands, where it’s cheap to film. Shouldn’t they have made more of them?

He's my all
The focus with this one, as the title implies, is on Bonnie. Clyde isn’t even Clyde. He’s Guy Barrow, with Jack Hogan doing a kind of Elvis Presley thing: anachronistic sideburns, Tupelo twang. If you think of him as Elvis and Provine as Jayne Mansfield, it’s an ultimate 1950s oomph matchup.

Parker is played as a bit of a sneering harridan. All the men make a play for her, and she belittles them all, calling them small-timers. She’s the force behind everything, the will, and does a lot of the killing. She’s a very, very bad person. Then, oddly, near the end, she gets religion in a way that nice guys everywhere will shake their heads over.

A nice guy named Paul (William Stevens), you see, asks to borrow her phone but doesn’t give her the once-over or get too close or sloppy. The opposite. He’s simply phoning a sick friend to let him know the reading assignments. Bonnie assumes he’ a teacher but he’s a night-school student looking to become an architect, and he explains what that is without patronizing her. He’s not just nice but down-to-earth, and the movie implies he’s the chance she blew. Later, when Guy tells her she’s lost her nerve, she responds, “I didn't lose my nerve, I know right where I left it,” and you get the feeling it’s here, talking with Paul, particularly when her dying words are “Paul … Paul…”—which the cops mishear as “Guy… Guy…” He was her potential redemption, the movie implies. Of course, by then, she’d killed nearly a dozen people, some in cold blood, but what the hey. Give a girl a chance.

The filmmakers muck with the history of course. I didn’t know, or I’d forgotten, that the real Bonnie Parker was married before—to Roy Thornton, a burglar—but here he’s named Duke Jefferson (Richard Bakalyan) and doing 175 years in federal prison for murder. The real Bonnie never saw hubby again after 1929 but this Bonnie helps Duke break out of prison—not for anything romantic, mind you, but to help them rob banks. Is it awkward, this threesome? Naw. By this point, Bonnie is cold to Guy, too. Early on, the two go at it hot and heavy but that ends abruptly. Not sure why. Other than him being small-time.

Wasn’t his brother a bigger deal in real life? Here, he’s named Chuck rather than Buck—and played by Joe Turkel, everyone’s favorite bartender in “The Shining”—but he’s barely in it. He and wifey show up at Bonnie and Guy’s ranch house, unknowingly bringing the cops along. After they shake them, the four camp out in the woods, but the cops find them there, too, and, blam, there goes Chuck. He doesn’t pull even one job with his brother.

Frank Hamer? He’s Tom Steel (Douglas Kennedy), forthright, sharp, and right on their heels from the beginning. But they slip through his clutches twice, and then he’s MIA, and then he shows up in the final reel for the big blowout. So odd. He’s supposed to be the hero but the movie makes him look rather incompetent.

Cuckoo’s nest
Other odd choices. It has them dying on June 6, 1934, rather than May 23, 1934. Didn’t writer Stanley Shpetner and director William Witney have an encyclopedia? A local library? Or were they trying to avoid a copyright lawsuit?

Even so, for what it is, a drive-in movie from American International, it’s not bad. We get a few surprising, sharp moments and some not-bad dialogue. I like the kid sticking them up. There’s a fun bit with hiking boy scouts coming across their path whose comical, portly scoutmaster seemed familiar to me. Turns out it's Sydney Lassick, good ol' Charlie Cheswick from “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” making his screen debut. Nice to see you, Cheswick.

Production-wise, they don’t do a poor job of it, either. One wonders how they afforded all those 1930s cars and then you do the math: It’s just 24 years prior. It would be like us doing a movie set in 2000. That seems shocking to me. From 1934 to 1958, we extracted ourselves from the Great Depression, went through World War II, entered the atomic age and the Cold War era, and went faster than the speed of sound. We went into outer space. What’s happened since 2000? Yes, 9/11 and COVID, but both led to backbiting and/or problematic policies. Mostly our phones got smarter and we got dumber.