At first it looks like a comedy. The handsome young man nods to the pretty girl at his side. "This here's Miss Bonnie Parker. My name's Clyde Barrow." He considers for an instant, then he smiles disarmingly. "We rob banks."

And so they do. Adrift in the Depression-era Southwest, Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow innocently embark on a life of crime. They don't really mean any harm. They love adventure...and each other. Before long, we begin to love them too. But nothing in film history has prepared us for the astonishing violence to come. Bonnie and Clyde turns suddenly, savagely explicit. In brutal gun battles, our heroes become vulnerable. We know they can be hurt - and dread they can be killed.

Bonnie and Clyde superbly balances itself on a knife-edge of laughter and terror, thanks largely to intelligent, vivid title-role performances by Warren Beatty and Faye Dunnaway, and superb characterizations by Michael J. Pollard, Gene Hackman and Estelle Parsons, who won the Best Supporting Actress Academy Award. Director Arthur Penn (The Miracle Worker, Little Big Man) keeps the film's sensibilities tough but never cruel. It's technique continually dazzles, particularly in the work of cinematographer Burnett Guffey, who captured the film's second Oscar, and editor Dede Allen.

Like many true-life legends and modern movie masterpieces, Bonnie and Clyde may seem to be conventional at first glance. But as audiences and critics of a generation have discovered, it's no ordinary gangster movie.