"This Here's Miss Bonnie Parker. I'm Clyde Barrow. We Rob Banks...."

When I was around 10 years old, I happened to be flipping through the channels on our family TV set, a 20-inch Magnavox color set. It was a hot South Florida summer Saturday afternoon, and with most of my friends either in summer school or on vacation, I had nothing better to do than to read a book or watch television.

In 1973, we didn't have cable or satellite television, and even Fox, UPN, and the WB hadn't even been dreamed of yet. We had the Big Three networks (ABC, CBS, and NBC), a Spanish language channel, and a couple of independent channels on the VHF and UHF bands; usually I watched WCIX because it ran movies quite frequently - the 8 o'clock movie on weekday nights, and two afternoon flicks on weekends.

I'm not sure whether it was the one or three o'clock movie that I happened to catch that day, but the image that I saw never quite left me - it was the climactic ambush that comes at the end of director Arthur Penn's 1967 Depression-era crime drama, Bonnie and Clyde.

Compared to, say, the first 20 minutes of Saving Private Ryan or some of the shootout scenes from the Die Hard movies, the sequence where Clyde Barrow (Warren Beatty) and Bonnie Parker (Faye Dunaway) are turned into bits of human Swiss cheese by a small army of state troopers and G-men in a Louisiana meadow is almost tame, but for a movie from the 1960s the level of violence was unprecedented.

To see the youthful and dashing features of Clyde and the vixenish Bonnie's face and body be disfigured and bloodied so vividly and in color still stirs feelings of both retribution and regret. Retribution because in both the film and real life Bonnie, Clyde, and their small gang of bank robbers had no compunction about robbing and killing people. Regret because Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker were a product of their era, when millions of Americans were unemployed and financially unsound.