Never one to forget those he considered to be great, Arthur Penn paid homage to many great directors and actors in his own works. These tributes are very apparent in Bonnie and Clyde. When Clyde wears the glasses with the one lens missing, Penn is paying homage to the French actor Jean-Paul Belmondo in the movie A Bout De Souffle. Memorable scenes in the movie also pay recognition to John Ford's outstanding drama, The Grapes of Wrath.

With Bonnie and Clyde, Arthur Penn rewrote the idea of how crime movies could be made. He used the French New Wave style to show Bonnie and Clyde in an existentialist manner, revealing who they were as people, as opposed to them merely being outlaws. Penn also used discontinuous editing and colored filters to remind the audiences that they were indeed watching a movie. To give the...