On Aug. 13, 1967, Bonnie and Clyde changed film. The bloody biopic, starring Warren Beatty and an ascendant Faye Dunaway, hit theaters and—to the surprise of Warner Bros.—was a smash with audiences, who rushed to see the gangster picture. It had an unprecedented amount of violence for a studio film of that era, and soon became a darling within the industry; the movie was nominated for several key Academy Awards, including acting nods for its core and supporting cast, best writing, best director, and best picture. It lost that year (to the Sidney Poitier vehicle In the Heat of the Night) but still ushered in a new wave of inspired films in the 1970s.

It would be natural to think, then, that critics at the time were also keen on this groundbreaking film. But that‘s not quite what happened. Some did champion the movie, including leading voices like Roger Ebert and Pauline Kael. But many others savaged it, criticizing Bonnie and Clyde as a bloody, empty project that degraded modern cinema. Here are a few of those reviews:

Variety: Critic Dave Kaufman began by thrashing the script, saying the titular bank robbers had been depicted as “inept, bumbling, moronic types.” He moved on to slam Arthur Penn’s directing style, calling it inconsistent, before praising Dunaway—and tearing into Beatty, as well as Michael J. Pollard and Gene Hackman, who “are more clowns than baddies as gang members.”

New York Times: Critic Bosley Crowther’s second paragraph makes clear his opinion: “It is a cheap piece of bald-faced slapstick comedy that treats the hideous depredations of that sleazy, moronic pair as though they were as full of fun and frolic as the jazz-age cutups in Thoroughly Modern Millie.” Like many others at the time, Crowther was put off by the film’s violence and Penn’s “aggressive” directing style in that regard. The film could have been “a candidly commercial movie comedy,” if it wasn’t for those “blotches of violence of the most grisly sort. . . . This blending of farce with brutal killings is as pointless as it is lacking in taste.”

Time: The headline for this review just about gives it all away: “Low-down Hoedown.” It doesn’t get better from there; the film was criticized for being “a strange and purposeless mingling of fact and claptrap that teeters uneasily on the brink of burlesque.” The script also didn’t get away unscathed, shredded for creating characters with “no discernible shape.” The plot “rides off in all directions and ends up full of holes.”

This was par for the course for Bonnie and Clyde. That said, the film did have a few extraordinary champions, including: