Film

The sole feature from writer-director-actor Barbara Loden is a bolt-from-the-blue milestone of American independent cinema, a bracingly raw, unvarnished portrait of a woman caught between freedom and the crushing weight of societal constraints. In a fearlessly personal performance, Loden plays Wanda Goronski, a working-class wife and mother who, after leaving her family, finds herself adrift in a dead-end world of desperate choices and callous men—and tumbling further into outsiderhood when she becomes involved with a bank robber on the run from the law.

Arthur Penn’s taboo-shattering gangster saga stars Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway as the infamous bank robber lovers whose notorious crime spree takes them on the run through Depression-era America. With its furious, unflinching violence, Bonnie and Clyde heralded the end of studio-era repressiveness—and the inception of the dark, uncompromising, auteur-driven sensibility of the New Hollywood wave.