Some of you won’t remember this, but back in the day, they had a “double feature” where you could go to the theater and watch two movies for the price of one. And they usually weren’t just willy-nilly pairings; the programmers put some thought into putting together movies that made sense together. I remember having an excellent time watching a James Bond double feature of You Only Live Twice and Dr. No at the Leroy Theater (my childhood home away from home). More than any single film, that experience made me a lifelong Bond movie fan.
And then, in 1967 (or 68), my dad took me to see a double feature of Bullitt and Bonnie & Clyde. I was 8 (or 9) years old. My dad never paid attention to ratings or anything like that. He wanted to see them, and I was his movie buddy.
If you haven’t seen Bullitt and Bonnie & Clyde … What’s wrong with you? Stop reading right now, and watch them. Make it a double feature at home. And keep in the back of your mind how an 8 (or 9) year old you would react to watching them in a darkened movie theater.
Because this is how I reacted.
Bonnie & Clyde played first, and I was having a good time. A lot of the sexy interplay between Faye Dunaway and Warren Beatty was way over my head. But there were a lot of car chases, and many people were getting shot. It was exciting, even though I remember the scene of a bank teller getting shot in the mouth as he tried to stop the getaway car made me hide my eyes.
Then Clyde’s sister-in-law, Blanche (Estelle Parsons), got shot in the eye. It was (is) gruesome. And then she puts her hand up to her face and brays, “WHAT HAPPENED TO MY EYE?” I turned ice cold. The room started spinning. I knew I would faint or puke, so I ran to the restroom. And hid. I didn’t faint or puke, but I wasn’t going back out there until Blanche was either dead or in a hospital, As long as she shut the heck up about her eye.
What seemed like hours later, I finally walked out of the men’s room at the back of the room just across from the last row of seats – just in time to watch Bonnie and Clyde get slaughtered by the cops. At least, that’s how I talk about it now; at the time, the sensory overload of their final demise was too intense for me to handle. Back into the bathroom, I went.
Before long, other people started entering the bathroom, and it was clear they weren’t there to hide. It was intermission, so I went back out to find my Dad. He was where I left him, but I could tell he was worried that I had been gone so long. I told him it was tummy trouble and asked for a Coke to settle my stomach. It helped. With the cold drink in hand, I settled in for the second movie to begin.
Bullitt is rightly remembered for the incredible car chase where Steve McQueen (Det. Lt. Frank Bullitt) tries to race away from two killers through the streets of San Francisco. According to the internet, Bullitt’s car is a 1968 Ford Mustang 390 GT 2+2 Fastback. The bad guys drive a 1968 Dodge Charger 440 Magnum. It remains one of cinema’s great car chase sequences.
And I was lucky to see it that night because long before Bullitt and the bad guys got behind their wheels, there was the matter of a witness in police protection getting blown in half by a sawed-off shotgun. Now, if you just finished watching Bullitt, you will scoff at the idea of the guy getting “blown in half;” I’ve watched Bullitt several times since that night, and I know that the guy gets shot and only slams against the back wall. And I know that the blood I imagined filling the screen is only a spatter on his shirt that looks to today’s audiences like red paint.
But, remember, I was only 8 (or 9) and had just seen Faye Dunaway and Warren Beatty shot with hundreds of bullets IN SLOW MOTION or watched enough of their murder to have me hiding in the Men’s room until it was over.
Which is where I went once I saw that guy shotgunned in Bullitt.
It was a shorter visit this second time. I walked around a bit to drive the images out of my imagination and, sensing the coast was clear (the actors I could hear through the Men’s room door were just talking now), went back to my Dad. We watched the most incredible car chase I had seen in all my years of seeing movies (which was about two at the time).
I’ve watched thousands of movies since that night and seen more graphic things than those shown in Bullitt and Bonnie & Clyde. I’ve become a massive fan of horror movies and think nothing of watching characters get killed in horrifying ways just to entertain me. The movies have made me hide in the bathroom only once since that night. But I will leave that for a future Movie Memory.
