Bonnie And Clyde

ENOUGH already about the couple your paper and Philly.com insist on calling "Bonnie and Clyde. " What is the fascination? Is it that they are white or young or educated or attractive or arrogant or stupid or self-centered? Is this stuff selling newspapers? They're crooks and should get no more ink than the thousands of others reported on every day, and then fade into oblivion. What they did was despicable - but enough, please! Joseph A. Farrell, Philadelphia Re Stu's column: Bonnie and Clyde ought to get 10 years in a state prison - not some federal country club.

WHEN YOU READ the following, consider the so-called "Bonnie and Clyde" couple: "Let's face it. Everyone cheats. You may think you don't, you may try to convince yourself that you're above reproach, but you're not. "It's part of the human condition to be a little bit sneaky, a wee bit opportunistic and just a tad shady. We all strive to be our best selves, but deep down in the darkest recesses of our souls, there's always a part of us that says, 'Try to get it done the easy way, and don't worry about stepping on that other guy!

The current society-wide awakening to the pernicious effects of what Tom Wolfe has termed "pornoviolence" on television and in the movies raises a number of questions, such as, "What took us so long?" And, "Where did we go wrong? I have a theory on the latter that may, in turn, possibly shed some light on the former. Specifically, I think we went wrong with the release of Bonnie and Clyde 26 years ago, in August of 1967. I don't have a lot of convincing research to back this up. Certainly I had no clear realization when it first came out that Bonnie and Clyde was the first in a wave of movies that came to the screen immediately after Hollywood's self-policing apparatus was dismantled in 1966, intent on exploring the outer reaches of the envelope in terms of depicting violence and sex. And I had no idea that 1967 would be the year cited by chroniclers of Hollywood as the year in which the movie industry lost its hold on the American mass audience.

The first film version of the Bonnie and Clyde story is Nicholas Ray's quiet study, They Live By Night (1949), starring Farley Granger and Cathy O'Donnell as the bank robbers. Ray during World War II helped develop psychodramatic techniques as a way for neuropsychiatric patients to exorcise their war traumas. In this, his directorial debut, he gets such realistic performances out of Granger and O'Donnell that there is the sense of getting inside the characters of these social outcasts.

The couple dubbed the "Bonnie and Clyde" of identity theft returned to their Center City condo today, creating unease among neighbors still trying to figure out whether they had been victimized by the pair, police said. Meanwhile, investigators said they had yet to determine whether there was a connection between the couple's illegal possession of keys to other condo units and mailboxes and the fact that Edward Anderton formerly worked for a company that developed the condo building.

They were small people. Bonnie was 4'10", Clyde was 5'6". They arose from a Southwest pounded by a decade of sandstorms and abandoned by a system that didn't care. For four years they led the law on a small-time crime spree. Hollywood rediscovered them in 1967, when Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway caused a sensation with a film that somehow turned two desperate, criminal lives into the stuff of haute couture. Their last two years, they lived mostly in their cars. Clyde Barrow preferred Ford V8s. They were faster than anything most police had. With them they carried up to 20 rifles, 10 or more pistols, and 10,000-15,000 rounds of ammunition, including metal-jacketed slugs that would rip out a man's heart at 200 feet.

JUDGING FROM her reaction, Jocelyn S. Kirsch may have received the best Christmas present of her life in 2003. Her father, Dr. Lee Kirsch, a plastic surgeon from Winston-Salem, North Carolina, shipped her a package containing a pair of silicone breast implants, she told her fellow Drexel University dorm residents. Kirsch, then a freshman, said it was her father's Christmas gift. Kirsch quickly showed off the implants on her dorm floor, according to classmates familiar with the story.

The duo dubbed the "Bonnie and Clyde" of ID fraud kept their profile low and public interest running high yesterday as they dodged camera jockeys and reporters to turn themselves in on burglary charges. Investigators say Jocelyn Kirsch, 22, and Edward Anderton, 25, raised cash for a globe-trotting lifestyle by stealing identities, some of them from neighbors in their Center City condo. They had been free on bail after being arrested Friday on charges including forgery, identity theft, and unlawful use of a computer.

If you want to hear helpless gushing (hey, even if you don't), listen to trickster-turned-movie star Penn Jillette on the subject of his director, Arthur Penn: "Finding Arthur may be, next to hooking up with Teller, the most fortunate thing that's ever happened to me in my career, and perhaps my life. . . . Arthur's making every scene look better on the set than it looked in my head. It's an absolute love affair from our side, and I know I speak for Teller. " And if you don't believe him, listen to the other half of the magician twosome Penn and Teller, waxing ecstatic over the way things have been rolling on the set of their darkly comic first feature.

GIMME FIVE Philadelphia native Arthur Penn died this week, leaving a body of work that moved fluidly between the monumental and the quirky. 1. "Bonnie and Clyde. " (1967) 2. "The Miracle Worker. " (1962) 3. "Alice's Restaurant. " (1969) 4. "Night Moves. " (1975) 5. "Little Big Man. " (1970)

Question: Any advice on how to keep bouncing back when life keeps sending bad news your way? I feel like that ambush scene in Bonnie and Clyde when the cops keep shooting way after Bonnie and Clyde have probably died. My father died of ALS in July, my mother has ovarian cancer and her chemo isn't working, our dog is 15 and on his last legs (no pun intended), and my freelance business is in the tank due to the recession. I'm talking with a therapist each week but still feel swallowed up by the never-ending crap tsunami.

NEW YORK - Start spreading the news: The musical based on the film Newsies is striking a path to Broadway. Disney Theatrical Productions said Tuesday that the show would begin a limited run at the Nederlander Theatre in March. It had a critically acclaimed debut in September at the Paper Mill Playhouse in Millburn, N.J. "It just plays like a great, classic musical with this wonderful choreography," said Thomas Schumacher, president of Disney Theatrical Productions, the theatrical-production arm of the Walt Disney Co. "It's fun. " The new musical is based on the true story of child newspaper sellers in turn-of-the-century New York who go on strike.

GIMME FIVE Philadelphia native Arthur Penn died this week, leaving a body of work that moved fluidly between the monumental and the quirky. 1. "Bonnie and Clyde. " (1967) 2. "The Miracle Worker. " (1962) 3. "Alice's Restaurant. " (1969) 4. "Night Moves. " (1975) 5. "Little Big Man. " (1970)

Arthur Penn, the Philadelphia-born director whose rhapsodically violent portrait of Depression-era outlaws Bonnie Parker and Clyde Darrow - 1967's Bonnie and Clyde - stands as one of the pivotal American movies of the 20th century, died late Tuesday, of congestive heart failure, one day after his 88th birthday. Although he directed only 13 features - and stopped altogether in the mid-1990s - Mr. Penn, who came to filmmaking after pioneering stints in theater and live television, is responsible for some of the most iconic screen images of the 1960s and 1970s.

Stories By David Means Faber and Faber. 164 pp. $23 Reviewed by David L. Ulin If you're looking for a key to The Spot , David Means' fourth collection of short fiction, you need go no further than the title story. In it, Means gives us a looping narrative, or a series of overlapping story lines, at the center of which is a gaping emptiness. It's too matter-of-fact to be despair. Hope, when it exists at all, is an illusion, a bit of wish fulfillment or maybe just a trick of the light.

ATLANTIC CITY - They were staying at the Plaza, a posh, 14-story condominium complex with a pool and cabana abutting the Boardwalk at South Plaza Place. He lived on the sixth floor. She would come and go, sometimes staying for up to three days, said Carlos Battista, who works in the valet-parking garage there. "They were quiet," Battista said last week. "But there was something about them. . . . You knew there was trouble. " Big trouble, it appears. Battista, who works the night shift at the garage, unwittingly played a role in the apprehension of Craig Arno and Jessica Kisby, charged last week in the carjacking-killing of casino patron Martin Caballero on May 21. Arno, 44, and Kisby, 24, have been portrayed by some in law enforcement as a lowlife Bonnie and Clyde, based on a violent, weeklong rampage that authorities say included murder, kidnapping, carjacking, arson, robbery, and shoplifting.

Volcano a show stopper That pesky Eyjafjallaj?kull volcano - its eruption grounded, like, two-thirds of Europe's air traffic, and now it's also messing up the entertainment world. Last weekend, the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival in Indio, Calif., lost acts such as The Cribs, Bad Lieutenant and Frightened Rabbit to the ash clouds. The Tribeca Film Festival in Manhattan, which begins Wednesday, might suffer, too, with some stars and filmmakers stuck in Europe. Some say NYC could lose as much as $250 mil. Whitney Houston took matters into her own hands.

Honor student, star athlete, scholarship student at the University of Pennsylvania, Edward K. Anderton graduated in 2005 with a degree in economics, an immediate $65,000-a-year job, a new girlfriend and a bright future. That future was past yesterday as Anderton was sentenced to four years in prison for an identity-theft scam with ex-girlfriend Jocelyn Kirsch that betrayed friends, neighbors and coworkers to fund what the judge called "a lavish lifestyle. " For a year the pair - popularly dubbed "Bonnie and Clyde" - traveled internationally on about $116,000 from about 50 victims whose financial information they stole.

Maybe it was her fake boobs, or violet-colored contact lenses, or her bodacious, bikini-clad body. Whatever the allure, Edward Anderton seemed to have lost his head when he met Jocelyn Kirsch, his ex-lover. Yesterday, he lost his freedom, too. Anderton, 25, the brainy half of the identity-theft duo known as "Bonnie and Clyde," was sentenced to four years in federal prison without chance of parole. At the sentencing, Anderton stood before the judge and accepted responsibility and expressed remorse for a year-long crime spree in which he and Kirsch stole more than $119,000 to fund a lavish, jet-setting lifestyle.

Jocelyn S. Kirsch - half of Philadelphia's infamous pair of identity-theft scammers known as "Bonnie and Clyde" - was sentenced yesterday to five years in prison by a judge who said her crimes were born of "greed and a desire to fuel a lavish lifestyle. " Kirsch, 23, had benefited from "the best that America can offer - good schools, an opportunity to grow up in a safe environment," said U.S. District Judge Eduardo C. Robreno. And yet she "visited harm on at least 50 victims," many of them friends and colleagues.