Bonnie and Clyde (1967 Arthur Penn)

The film that jumped American film into modernity is claimed to be the first that really embraced the nouvelle vague - evident especially from Dede Allen's dancing editing - and indeed Truffaut initially was approached to direct - writers Robert Benton and David Newman loved A Bout de Souffle and Truffaut; Robert Towne then worked on it.

Truffaut finally rejected it after learning Beatty had bought the script and was producer.

"Actually", he wrote to Elinor Jones, "I have no admiration for Warren Beatty and, moreover, he seems to me an extremely unpleasant person. As far as I'm concerned, he and Marlon Brando, and several others, are on a little list I have classified in my head as 'Better not to make films at all than to make films with these people'."

'Truffaut', de Baeque & Toubiana (1999).

Faye Dunaway is just great, for example in scene where she's scoffing a burger and Beatty tells her to change her hair. Also the vision of the blonde, stocking-wearing moll brandishing a tommy gun is memorable indeed.

I realised after that Michael J Pollard's character is the couple's adopted son. With Gene Hackman, Estelle Parsons (AA), Gene Wilder. Burnett Guffey's photography is superb, memorably in shot which catches the sun going behind a cloud over a field, but also in the pastel scenes where Bonnie visits her family (amusingly he's reported to have hated the way he was made to shoot it).

The way they are executed at the end disgusts even the cops. It's still quite an ending.

Jack Warner hated it. The critics hated it, except a young Roger Ebert, who had just started working as a reviewer. And according to Newton, Pauline Kael attempted to rescue it in her fierce defence in the New York Times.

Fabulous, and still fresh.