Where exactly does Bonnie and Clyde rank in the American pantheon? It's a bona-fide classic, to be sure. It placed on the American Film Institute's Top 100 in 1998 and again in 2007. It's also on the IMDB's Top 250 list. Upon closer inspection, however, it's far more than a perfect, polished gemstone. Rather, it's a bundle of contradictions. Everyone knows that it was a groundbreaking film of its day, the first to incorporate a new kind of violence and moral complexity into the mainstream. But screenwriters Robert Benton and David Newman borrowed these elements directly from French New Wave films like Jean-Luc Godard's Breathless (1959) and Francois Truffaut's Shoot the Piano Player (1960). In fact, Truffaut was the first director approached for the project. Despite this, Bonnie and Clyde somehow transcends time. More than just a moldy relic of the 1960s, it has aged much better and is far more watchable today than, say, Easy Rider (1969) or even The Graduate (1967).

Flimmaker Arthur Penn, who will receive an honorary Golden Bear at this year's Berlin Film Festival, talked about his career in a new interview with the Hollywood Reporter. Sounding crusty but cheerful, he calls his noir Night Moves (1975), starring Gene Hackman and a young Melanie Griffith, his best work. He acknowledges the influence of Bonnie and Clyde (1967) and says that Little Big Man (1970) was his most difficult film to make. He says he hated Hollywood in the 1950s and left for Broadway; his successful production of The Miracle Worker led him back to direct the movie version in 1962.

In his fifty-year career, Penn has completed about a dozen feature-length, theatrical films, including The Left-Handed Gun (1958), Mickey One (1965), The Chase (1966), Alice's Restaurant (1969) and The Missouri Breaks (1976), the latter a much-publicized teaming of top stars Jack Nicholson and Marlon Brando. But his most recent feature film was the underwhelming Penn and Teller Get Killed (1989), although his television movie Inside (1996) showed at the San Francisco International Film Festival concurrently with Penn winning that festival's lifetime achievement award.

But Penn still goes to the movies, praising "British films," like Venus and The Queen and directors like Jim Jarmusch, Wes Anderson and Stephen Frears. And he says he's still available for work. Just imagine: instead of hiring Brett Ratner or Edward Zwick or McG or Ron Howard, or some music video director or those guys who did Deck the Halls or The Hitcher, we could hire Arthur Penn, the guy who did Bonnie and Clyde. Wouldn't that make sense? I mean, c'mon!

Director Arthur Penn is probably always going to be remembered for Bonnie and Clyde in 1967, but Penn had a few films under his belt before his ultimate in "glamorized gangsters". The 84-year-old director was working in films up until the late 80's and has served as an executive producer for the TV series Law & Order.

The Hollywood Reporter announced that Penn has been selected to receive the prestigious Golden Bear at this year's Berlin Film Festival. The director will be in attendance at a gala on the 15th of February to receive the lifetime achievement award. The festival is showing 10 films in total during a retrospective program at the Deutsche Kinemathek -- Museum for Film and Television that will end with the gala. Director of The Berlin Festival, Dieter Kosslick said, "Arthur Penn's films of the 1960s and early 1970s reanimated the crises-ridden American cinema. He is a great director, who deeply influenced the American cinema d'auteur". The retrospective of the director's work includes the Penn's first film The Left-Handed Gun; the film re-tells the legend of Billy the Kid as a sexually confused and psychologically tortured youth. The part was originally intended for James Dean but went to Paul Newman after Dean had passed away.

You have to admire a director who dared to present one of America's greatest folk icons as a sexually ambiguous neurotic, and in 1958 no less. For that alone the man probably deserves an award.