Stained Glass

One evening in Autumn of 1967 some friends and I, sophomores at North Texas State University, adjourned to the Campus Theater on the courthouse square in Denton, Texas, to view the then-new Hollywood movie 'Bonnie and Clyde'. That minor but very popular opus had its world premier there a few days before, having been filmed in little towns all around Denton and Dallas Counties where many of the buildings housing the banks robbed by the original Bonnie and Clyde are still standing. The movie itself was a rather thin period fashion show, and neither Warren Beatty nor Faye Dunaway were especially convincing as the 1930s-era desperadoes Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker. The film's glamorizing and romanticizing of the outlaw ways of Barrow and Parker sort of complimented the rebellious 'hippie' counter-culture notions fashionable among a lot of late '60s American bourgeois college kids.