You will prepare and submit a term paper on Films from Different Decades. Your paper should be a minimum of 1750 words in length. Although these two films arrived in different decades, with stars that had very different persona’s along with the characters they portrayed, they do share some very important similarities that put their characters at odds with mainstream culture and the mainstream ideology of the Sixties and Seventies, that have catapulted these films into noted classics, with immense popularity after their respective releases, that have endured the test of time today.

As the writer, Lawrence L. Murray notes in his essay “Hollywood, Nihilism and Youth Culture of the Sixties: Bonnie and Clyde” in the book, American History/American Film: Interpreting The Hollywood Image, when the movie Bonnie and Clyde first opened at the Montreal Expo in August 1967, it was mostly panned by the mainstream press, with The New York Times Film Critic, Bosley Crowther, leading the way with an especially derogatory review in which he took the filmmakers to task for their irresponsibility over the “uneven” and “inaccurate” depictions of violence, among other things, in a classic stand that he would be taken to task for by the many readers who wrote in to decry the film’s brilliance and one that signaled the end of his career as a film critic. It soon became clear that Arthur Penn’s shocking new film was the breath of fresh air that the mainstream American film movement had been waiting for since the French New Wave took hold in the late Fifties and early Sixties, with young, adult, literate audiences and New Wave generation film critics alike pouring out in droves to view, review and discuss the film, once the buzz that there was something revolutionary in the air caught on. Bonnie and Clyde went on to gain the respect of the Hollywood establishment with 10 Oscar nominations and two wins, for Supporting Actress and Best Cinematography. More importantly, Bonnie and Clyde changed the way mainstream Hollywood studios viewed the movie-going public, recognizing that the target demographic had shifted from the tastes of older, working to middle-class parents, breadwinners, to those of the youth, the immense&nbsp.Baby Boomer generation.&nbsp. And their values were completely different, something only younger, more liberal filmmakers and producers could comprehend.