'Bonnie And Clyde' Director Arthur Penn, 1922-2010

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Enlarge this image toggle caption Warner Bros. Pictures/Courtesy American Film Institute Warner Bros. Pictures/Courtesy American Film Institute

Enlarge this image toggle caption Warner Bros. Pictures/Courtesy American Film Institute Warner Bros. Pictures/Courtesy American Film Institute

Director Arthur Penn, whose film Bonnie and Clyde shocked critics, inspired filmmakers and changed the course of American film, died Sept. 28, just a day after his 88th birthday.

In the 1950s and '60s, Penn leapfrogged from Broadway to Hollywood to the then-new medium of television. But no matter what medium he was working in, Arthur Penn always seemed to be something of a miracle worker -- so it makes sense that The Miracle Worker was his ticket to fame.

He first directed the story on live television in 1957, returned to it two years later on Broadway, and returned again three years after that on the big screen, turning the tale of a wild young Helen Keller -- blind, deaf and wordlessly battling her teacher Annie Sullivan every step of the way -- into an out-and-out slugfest.

The Miracle Worker won Oscars for leads Patty Duke and Anne Bancroft, and it established Penn as a successful film director, though his career initially moved in fits and starts.

He was dismissed from one project, had another butchered by his producer, and by the time Warren Beatty called him to ask if he'd take over direction of a flick about a pair of bank robbers, he was bitter about the way Hollywood had treated him.

Beatty gambled and offered him final cut -- a rare thing at the time, but in this case a smart bet. The result was a gangster film unlike anything Hollywood had ever seen: an initially funny crime spree that turns mythic, becoming a mix of sex, charisma, and violence.

Many establishment critics loathed Bonnie and Clyde, saying it was morally lacking and in terrible taste. But a few young critics embraced it, and they brought young audiences with them. It was the first picture Pauline Kael reviewed for the New Yorker, and she raved, calling it an "excitingly American movie."

Enlarge this image toggle caption Warner Bros. Pictures/Courtesy American Film Institute Warner Bros. Pictures/Courtesy American Film Institute

As to the criticism that there was excessive violence in the film, Penn rejected that.

"There's gratuitous, mindless violence and then there is the depiction of how it really is," Penn told Fresh Air host Terry Gross in a 1998 conversation. "I think we depicted that by not doing it in an ordinary reportorial style. God knows we’ve been imitated thousands and thousands of times now. Every time you see somebody attempting violence, they go into that basic slow motion. Well, in American films at least, we did it first."

Arthur Penn was born in 1922 to a Russian Jewish couple, a watchmaker and a nurse, who divorced when he was 3. He and his brother Irving Penn, who would later become a famed photographer, moved around a lot, and in a sense, that's the way he lived his career as well, using lulls between television projects to direct films like Alice's Restaurant and Little Big Man, and using lulls on film to direct on Broadway, where he staged Wait Until Dark, Two for the Seesaw, Toys in the Attic and the civil rights-era musical Golden Boy.

Though he slowed down at the end, Arthur Penn continued directing well into his 80s, both on TV and on stage, always attracted to stories of social outsiders -- and the chance to give one more little big man a voice.