Bonnie & Clyde – SOUNDTRACK**

Foggy Mountain Breakdown/Bonnie Meets Clyde/I Ain’t Much Of A Lover Boy/I Ain’t No Rich Man/Buck & Blanche Meet Up With Bonnie & Clyde/The Law’s Outside/Captain Hamer Spits At Bonnie/Bonnie & Clyde/ Family Reunion/Buck Falls/Bonnie Wounded-The Okies/Bonnie’s Poem/The Ambush & End Title

The immensely popular movie Bonnie & Clyde starred Warren Beatty & Faye Dunaway as the two notorious thirties gangsters. The soundtrack was scored by Charles Strouse. (US:12)

"This purports to be a soundtrack of Charles Strouse's period score, but it is actually full of sound-clips from the film. We get constant snippets of dialogue that have no value without the visual. The only uninterrupted music is the main title - Foggy Mountain Breakdown by Flatt & Scruggs. This is superb, in a country/bluegrass vein. All the other tracks are sound effects and dialogue that segue into the composer's background score. The music sections are very short, but I would gladly have a very short album than a truncated thing like this. Strouse has written some very winning music that has a hint of Americana in Copland mode, with occasional flavourings of banjos and trumpets. If I was Charles Strouse, I would sue the album producers. What in heaven were they thinking?"

"As was common with film soundtrack albums of the 1960s, Bonnie & Clyde consists of audio dubs directly from the movie, dialogue that only sometimes includes music. There's barely enough Charles Strouse and Flatt & Scruggs here to justify the 'original score' claim on the LP's front cover. Thus, we have a lot of Warren and Faye, such as his embarrassed 'lover boy' speech and her recitation of a number of verses of doggerel that Bonnie Parker herself entitled The Trail's End, a lengthy poem that, after the bank robber's demise, became known as The Story of Bonnie & Clyde. Fans of Arthur Penn's movie may find this assemblage interesting; those seeking only the music are almost certain to be disappointed."

"The instrumental banjo piece Foggy Mountain Breakdown by Flatt & Scruggs was introduced to a worldwide audience as a result of its frequent use in the movie. Its use is strictly anachronistic as the bluegrass style of music dates from the mid-1940s rather than the 1930s, but the functionally similar 'old time music' genre was long established and widely recorded at the period in which the film was set."