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Movies|Robert Benton, Influential Director and Screenwriter, Dies at 92
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/13/movies/robert-benton-dead.html
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Robert Benton, who collaborated on the screenplay for “Bonnie and Clyde,” one of the most explosive movies of the 1960s, and wrote and directed “Kramer vs. Kramer,” one of the most acclaimed movies of the 1970s, died on Sunday at his home in Manhattan. He was 92.
His death was confirmed on Tuesday by Marisa Forzano, his longtime assistant and manager.
Mr. Benton’s credits also included such noteworthy films as “Places in the Heart,” which he wrote and directed and for which his script won an Academy Award. But he was a Hollywood neophyte when he and David Newman, a colleague at Esquire magazine, wrote a screenplay based on the exploits of the Depression-era bank robbers Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow.
Directed by Arthur Penn and starring Faye Dunaway and Warren Beatty, “Bonnie and Clyde” was a sensation almost from the moment it was released in 1967. Though set in the 1930s, it vividly captured the turbulent, unsettled mood of America in the 1960s.
The movie’s unconventional approach, in particular its rapid shifts in tone from comic to serious and back, owed much to the postwar revolution in French cinema known as the New Wave. (The screenwriters’ first choice as director had been the New Wave pioneer François Truffaut.) Its graphic violence upset some reviewers, but it mostly drew rapturous praise; Pauline Kael of The New Yorker said it was the most important and influential film of the 1960s, bringing “into the almost frighteningly public world of movies things that people have been feeling and saying and writing about.”
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A box-office hit that was nominated for 10 Academy Awards — including one for Mr. Benton and Mr. Newman’s screenplay (to which Robert Towne and Mr. Beatty had made uncredited contributions), and won two, for supporting actress (Estelle Parsons) and cinematography (Burnett Guffey) — “Bonnie and Clyde” helped usher in a new era of adventurousness in American cinema.
