Rated R

When I read Arthur Penn's obit in yesterday's New York Times, I recalled that his 1967 film Bonnie & Clyde was the first R-rated movie I saw, at the tender age of 9, at the now closed Fine Arts theater in Westport.  I remember feeling privvy to an adult world . . . of crime, violence and sex.  While I didn't understand it at the time, years later I came to scorn Hollywood's ability to manipulate audiences' sympathy for the most undeserving characters.

In The New York Times' April 14, 1967 movie review, by Bowsley Crowther, the era's less prurient mores led to this screed:

"A raw and unmitigated campaign of sheer press-agentry has been trying to put across the notion that Warner Brothers' Bonnie and Clyde is a faithful representation of the desperado careers of Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker, a notorious team of bank robbers and killers who roamed Texas and Oklahoma in the post-Depression years.

"It is nothing of the sort. It is a cheap piece of bald-faced slapstick comedy that treats the hideous depredations of that sleazy, moronic pair as though they were as full of fun and frolic as the jazz-age cutups in Thoroughly Modern Millie. And it puts forth Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway in the leading roles, and Michael J. Pollard as their sidekick, a simpering, nose-picking rube, as though they were striving mightily to be the Beverly Hillbillies of next year."

On further reflection, and after a little digging on Wikpedia which confirmed that the Motion Picture Association of America's ratings system wasn't introduced until a year later in 1968, I remembered that my first R movie was actually MASH in 1970, which I saw in NYC with a classmate who's father was divorced and lived in Manhattan.  After the movie his father saw us off at Grand Central, stopping first at a newsstand to get us a magazine to read on the train home, that month's Playboy.  A lot had changed in three years.