Bonnie & Clyde

Details for new Special Edition, Blu-ray and HD releases, Updated with early reports on video/audio quality
Warner Home Video is releasing newly remastered transfers of Bonnie and Clyde, with new special features, in several editions. Amazon is taking orders at the following links:

Standard DVD 2-disc Special Edition
Standard DVD 2-disc Ultimate Collector's Edition
Blu-ray
HD

The first three were released on March 25th; the HD version is due out on April 15th. Warner Brothers has announced that it won't support HD after May 31, 2008, so there may be a limited window to get the HD version.

The new transfers have been made from the "original elements," meaning stuff like original negatives or original prints. (See below for an update on the video and audio...

Natural born killers
Trust Hollywood to turn two common criminals into two American folk heroes. Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker were two small-town young people drifting aimlessly during the Great Depression of the 1930's; she's bored out of her gourd, and he's a felon who had killed fourteen men by the time he met his end at the ripe old age of twenty-four. They meet, fall sort of in love, and embark on a petty crime spree. At first it's all good-humored fun; they steal a couple of cars, hold up a couple of stores, and in a moment of hilarious insanity, Clyde attempts to rob a bank that went bust a week before, much to the amusement of the banker and Bonnie, who's collapsing with laughter over the steering wheel. But then a storekeeper takes offense at Clyde attempting to hold him up, and is pistol-whipped by Clyde in his frantic efforts to escape. Once the battered storekeeper ID's Clyde's photo to the cops, things turn serious.

As Clyde's posse expands to include a lowlife neer-do-well...

The Stuff of Legend
This movie ignited critics and the public alike when it was first released in theatres. Much discussion centered around the movie's graphic violence (which was considered shocking by 1967 standards --- two years later "The Wild Bunch" would raise the ante even higher); there was also considerable hullaballoo over the film's glamorization of its lawless true-life anti-heroes (which was in fact an old Hollywood tradition best exemplified by a handful of late 1930's and early 1940's biographical Westerns including "Jesse James", "Belle Starr", "Billy the Kid", etc. in which beautiful actors portrayed the murderous title characters as Technicolored lads and ladies).

35 years later the fires of debate have burned out, and what remains notable about "Bonnie and Clyde" is neither its cutting-edge violence nor its historical inaccuracies, but instead the fine craftsmanship that went into its creation. The performances are...

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