The filmmaker who opened the doors to the new Hollywood

If Arthur Penn had not yielded to the insistence of Warren Beatty in 1967, the American cinema of the 1970s would not have been the same.

Arthur Penn who was welcomed to the generation that revolutionized American cinema in the '70s, Scorsese, Coppola, Spielberg, Lucas, Brian De Palma, Bob Rafelson and Hal Ashby. But it was Bonnie and Clyde which earned him a place in movie history

Penn, who died in New York late on Tuesday aged 88, was not the first choice to direct Bonnie and Clyde, the film-hinge of the "new Hollywood." But Francois Truffaut, the first name advanced by screenwriters David Newman and Robert Benton, whose screenplay was openly influenced by French New Wave, was committed to Fahrenheit 451 and suggested the name of Penn.

But Arthur Penn, scalded by previous experiences in Hollywood, began to decline the invitation. His first film, Killing Addiction (1958), revisionist Western with Paul Newman in the role of a Billy the Kid understood as juvenile offender, was literally ignored by the studio. Burt Lancaster had fired him from the filming of The Train, replacing him with John Frankenheimer, and producer Sam Spiegel departed-the assembly of the Chase (1966).

Moreover, the director, a veteran of World War II from the school of television dramas and intense that articulated the discomfort of post-war, saw no interest in a film about two small thieves, upstarts of the 1930s.

Warren Beatty, producer of the film and also the main actor, not dropped the bone and there convinced Penn, who also had considered abandoning the project during pre-production, feeling that the script still had problems. And the shooting was not a bed of roses: the actor-producer and cinematographer of candles walked backwards, and the director of photography Burnett Guffey, a veteran of "old Hollywood" gave up everything for a week, because Penn insisted only run with natural light.

Guffey eventually win one of two Oscars (ten nominations) Bonnie and Clyde received in 1968, after a turbulent career brilliantly that he saw the movie, the studio foundling slammed by critics and more veterans, become a sensation hailed by all a new generation of critics and audience that saw the slap without a hand that went on there to the conventions of American cinema.

The film which was reluctantly accepted Arthur Penn the hinge that opened the door to the "new Hollywood" of the 1970s, the generation of Scorsese, Coppola, Spielberg, Lucas, Brian De Palma, Hal Ashby and Bob Rafelson, the movement that came to reinvent how American cinema was designed, filmed and shown. Not Bonnie and Clyde, there would have been Easy Rider, The Graduate, The Wild Bunch and many others.

Arthur Penn, however, was the most unlikely of hosts to do so. It is true that Paul Schrader, the screenwriter of Taxi Driver and The Raging Bull, said that it "brought the sensibility of European films of the 1960s U.S. cinema, and paved the way for the new generation of filmmakers who have studied American cinema."

But, though did not come from "old Hollywood", Penn was far from being a "young Turkish. Came to the filming of Bonnie and Clyde 45 years and has extensive experience in live TV, which had led, for example, one debate between John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon in the presidential election of 1960 (that Kennedy would win).

It also had a career as a theater director and the curriculum, the public and critical success of his second film, The Miracle Worker Anne Sullivan (1962), adaptation of the play by William Gibson about the relationship between the blind deaf-mute Helen Keller and her tutor, Anne Sullivan. Penn had directed a television production of the first part and then the theatrical production that was two years on Broadway, before making the film version of which won Oscars for interpretation, Anne Bancroft and Patty Duke, and the first of three appointments (never implemented) for an Oscar for best director (the others were Bonnie and Clyde and Alice's Restaurant).

But his disenchantment with the failure of the Hollywood machine, he felt the skin from the experiences of The Train and The Chase, it would take to return to New York to the stage and education, including Beatty, who had worked with Penn on Mickey One (1965), the final push in 1967.

The return to the theater

The "second wind" that Bonnie and Clyde could give her career was fleeting but significant - although it turned more post-1967, Penn directed only 14 feature films in a career spanning 50 years. Sign that the filmmaker does not fit firmly in the generation of authors who began to assert itself, even if the "new Hollywood" has proven more receptive to their oblique narratives, which often were reviewing the parameters of the film through the prism of gender troubled society that surrounded him.

Addiction Killing Billy the Kid looked like a rebellious teenager of the year 1950 a la Rage to Live, deadly shootings of Bonnie and Clyde suggested a metaphor for Vietnam. They would follow the approach to American counterculture of the Flower Power (Alice's Restaurant, 1969, based on the success of folk singer Arlo Guthrie), like looking over the western capitalist society (Little Big Man, 1970), and the police black reflecting existentialist (Night Moves, 1975). Penn in 1976 a sign of the last throes of the "new Hollywood" Duel in Missouri, against unreasonable between Marlon Brando and Jack Nicholson to finish off the western.

With the second blockbuster Spielberg and Lucas - a kind of cinema that Penn felt great, but confessed that he is unable to do - to take the place of the more intimate and European film production in Hollywood after the success of Jaws and Star Wars, the director returned to the theater and teaching.

By the end of his career would sign only five more films, neither of which really was imposed on the public or criticism: Four Friends (1981), The Target (1985), Dead of Winter (1987), Penn & Teller Get Killed (1989) and TV movie Inside (1996). His last job was in 2001, an episode of the television series 100 Centre Street.

Arthur Penn has never really part of the generation that has opened the doors but never entered comfortably in a Hollywood that gave less space to the filmmakers more interested in people and their dilemmas than on mechanical formulas. But without his contribution, the current landscape of cinema would be very different.

Second son of Sonia and Harry Penn, a nurse and a watchmaker, the younger brother of photographer Irving Penn, who died last year, Arthur Penn was born in Philadelphia on September 27, 1922.

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