Today in the Saturday spotlight, we revisit two of Texas’ most notorious criminals. Seventy-five years ago today, Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow were gunned down by a group of law enforcement officers from Louisiana and Texas. The pair had been wanted for years for a string of robberies and the killings that often accompanied them. Thirty-three years after their deaths, director Arthur Penn revisited the pair in Bonnie and Clyde, with Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway in the lead roles. The film was nominated for 10 Oscars and helped to usher in a new era of cinematic violence that continued in films like Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch and Francis Ford Copploa’s The Godfather. More recently, a pair of books about the couple has been released, one by Fort Worth author Jeff Guinn.
To mark today’s anniversary, the Texas Theatre will screen the 1967 film at 7 p.m. The location seems fitting, as the theater is where another famous Texas killer, Lee Harvey Oswalt, was finally apprehended.
