Mickey One (1965)

It almost single-handedly dragged Hollywood into the aggressive stylistic modernism that Europe had been enjoying for most of the 1960s; there had been scattered earlier efforts to incorporate the attitude of the French New Wave into an American movie (among them, in fact, was 1965's Mickey One , which shared Bonnie and Clyde's director, Arthur Penn, and lead actor, Warren Beatty), but none that had clicked in a big way with audiences and critics.

Bonnie and Clyde developed the aesthetic that marked Penn's high-visibility period: slyly accented, harmonica-hootin', harvest-gold-patchwork Americana; ever-poised violence; and an open invitation to apply the story as a flexible allegory for the issues of the day.