Arthur Penn, RIP

Penn had just turned 88.

Mr. Penn’s direction may have also changed American history. He advised Senator John F. Kennedy during his watershed television debates with Richard M. Nixon in 1960 (and directed the broadcast of the third debate). Mr. Penn’s instructions to Kennedy — to look directly into the camera and keep his responses brief and pithy — helped give Kennedy an aura of confidence and calm that created a vivid contrast to Nixon, his more experienced but less telegenic Republican rival.

But it was as a film director that Mr. Penn left his mark on American culture, most indelibly with “Bonnie and Clyde.”

“Arthur Penn brought the sensibility of ’60s European art films to American movies,” the writer-director Paul Schrader said. “He paved the way for the new generation of American directors who came out of film schools.”

Many of the now-classic films of what was branded the New American Cinema of the 1970s — among them Martin Scorsese’s “Taxi Driver” and Francis Ford Coppola’s “Godfather” — would have been unthinkable without “Bonnie and Clyde” to lead the way.

Loosely based on the story of two minor gangsters of the 1930s, Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow, “Bonnie and Clyde” was conceived by its two novice screenwriters, Robert Benton and David Newman, as an hommage to the rebellious sensibility and disruptive style of French New Wave films like François Truffaut’s “Shoot the Piano Player” and Jean-Luc Godard’s “Breathless.”

In Mr. Penn’s hands, it became something even more dangerous and innovative: a sympathetic portrait of two barely articulate criminals, played by Warren Beatty and a newcomer, Faye Dunaway, that disconcertingly mixed sex, violence and hayseed comedy, set to a bouncy bluegrass score by Lester Flatt and Earl Scruggs.

Not only was the film sexually explicit in ways unseen in Hollywood since the imposition of the Production Code in 1934 — when Bonnie stroked Clyde’s gun, the symbolism was unmistakable — it was violent in ways that had never been seen before. Audiences gasped when a comic bank robbery climaxed with Clyde’s shooting a bank teller in the face, and were stunned when this attractive outlaw couple died in a torrent of bullets, their bodies twitching in slow motion as their clothes turned red with blood.

Reporting on the film’s premiere on the opening night of the International Film Festival of Montreal in 1967, Bosley Crowther, the chief film critic for The New York Times, was appalled, describing “Bonnie and Clyde” as “callous and callow” and a “slap-happy color film charade.” Worse, the public seemed to love it.

“Just to show how delirious these festival audiences can be,” Mr. Crowther wrote, “it was wildly received with gales of laughter and given a terminal burst of applause.”

Similar reactions by other major critics followed when the film opened in the United States a few weeks later. The film, promoted by Warner Brothers with a memorable tag line — “They’re young. They’re in love. And they kill people.” — floundered at first but soon found an enthusiastic audience among younger filmgoers and won the support of a new generation of critics. “A milestone in the history of American movies,” wrote Roger Ebert in The Chicago Sun-Times. Pauline Kael, writing in The New Yorker, described it as an “excitingly American movie.”