Bonnie and Clyde is quintessentially the product of a country where guns are props in the national playhouse, from the time a kid is old enough to play cops-and-robbers. At the same time, the movie is shrewd enough to wonder what kind of impact that has on our notions of reality and fiction, law and order, right and wrong. As such, Bonnie and Clyde may not be the greatest American movie--let's not even play that parlor game--but you could certainly make a case for it as the great American movie, the one that best represents our character and our cinema, warts and all. Even after 31 years, after countless imitations and the numbing escalation of movie violence, its basic contradictions remain more pertinent than ever. How can we demonize crime as citizens and romanticize criminals as moviegoers?

First and foremost, Bonnie and Clyde is a great gangster movie about two people who imagine themselves as the stars of a gangster movie. Everything in it calls to mind the outlaw classics of the 1930s, only fonder and dreamier. No Little Caesar or Scarface ever looked as flawlessly handsome as Warren Beatty's Clyde Barrow; no moll ever gave off anything like the heat of Faye Dunaway's Bonnie Parker. The gleaming roadsters, the vintage fashions (which sparked a short-lived craze)--Burnett Guffey's camera polishes them all to a stylized gloss that evokes the world through a celluloid curtain. Car chases cut from real cars to obviously fake process shots; the fleeing robbers see themselves riding to glory against a back-projection screen. A scene in a movie theater captures the disparity between the movie world and their life of crime. Onscreen, dancing chorines sing "We're in the Money" in a Busby Berkeley production number. In the audience, Clyde fatmouths about killing a bank guard--the first of many killings to come.

What isn't stylized is the violence. It isn't poetic, as in The Wild Bunch; it's blunt and ugly. The director, Arthur Penn, undercuts the rollicking tone of the early scenes with ominous hints: credits that fade to blood-red, a splash of ketchup on Bonnie's blouse. A clerk with a cleaver bolts into the frame behind Clyde as he holds up a grocery, deliberately violating the lighthearted mood, and from then on the violence is sudden, disruptive, and as harsh as the rest of Bonnie and Clyde's world is idealized. The outlaws pose for photos with guns and write their own ballad, but the grubby reality constantly undermines the glamour--matinee-idol Clyde is an impotent coward, beautiful Bonnie is a vicious crook, and the people they kill look like us. We start out admiring the outlaws, and they respond by shoving their shiny guns back in our faces. In the notorious ending, a masterpiece of montage in editor Dede Allen's hands, a firing squad brutally punctures their delusions with a hail of machine-gun fire.

Ironically enough, it was the seriousness of the violence that infuriated reviewers when Bonnie and Clyde was released in 1967. (Many of them turned about-face when the movie became a blockbuster and a critical cause cl¸bre.) The blood was nothing new, and neither was the brutality. Herschell Gordon Lewis' far grislier cheapies had been playing drive-ins for years, and one of the biggest hits the same year was Robert Aldrich's The Dirty Dozen, which tossed in a near-rape and several beatings along with a substantially higher body count.

But those movies didn't explode their cartoonish use of bloodshed as entertainment the way Bonnie and Clyde did. Bonnie and Clyde jumbled humor and horror in ways that recalled the groundbreaking thriller pastiches of the French New Wave--whose leading lights, Jean-Luc Godard and Fran¨ois Truffaut, were initially offered the David Newman-Robert Benton script by producer Beatty. (A lyrical slow-motion shot of a child tumbling down a hill, an homage to Truffaut's Shoot the Piano Player, gives a glimpse of the film that might've been.) The movie's moral ambiguity isn't about killing; it's about bank-robbing. The movie immerses us so deeply in the delusions of its bank-robber heroes that it makes banks deserving targets, stick-ups fun, and lawmen bloodthirsty bullies. It takes bullets to snap us out of it.