Despite their lowly deaths at the hands of Texas Rangers in 1934, Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow have enjoyed second lives within America's popular imagination. Gunned down by Texas authorities after a murderous bank-robbing spree, Parker and Barrow occupied a dusty backroom of the national memory until 1967, when a Warner Brothers feature film brought their tale of love, crime, and violence back to the nation's attention. Written by David Newman and Robert Benton and directed by Arthur Penn, Bonnie and Clyde tells a historically based yet heavily stylized story of romance and escalating violence that announced the arrival of a "New American Cinema" obsessed with picaresque crime stories and realistic violence. A major box-office hit, the film and its sympathetic depiction of its outlaw protagonists struck a nerve on both sides of the "generation gap" of the late 1960s, moving some with its portrayal of...