Robert Benton, who collaborated on the screenplay for “Bonnie and Clyde,” one of the most explosive movies of the 1960s, and wrote and directed “Kramer vs. Kramer,” one of the most acclaimed movies of the 1970s, died on Sunday at his home in Manhattan. He was 92.
His death was confirmed on Tuesday by Marisa Forzano, his longtime assistant and manager.
Mr. Benton’s credits also included such noteworthy films as “Places in the Heart,” which he wrote and directed and for which his script won an Academy Award. But he was a Hollywood neophyte when he and David Newman, a colleague at Esquire magazine, wrote a screenplay based on the exploits of the Depression-era bank robbers Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow.
Directed by Arthur Penn and starring Faye Dunaway and Warren Beatty, “Bonnie and Clyde” was a sensation almost from the moment it was released in 1967. Though set in the 1930s, it vividly captured the turbulent, unsettled mood of America in the 1960s.
The movie’s unconventional approach, in particular its rapid shifts in tone from comic to serious and back, owed much to the postwar revolution in French cinema known as the New Wave. (The screenwriters’ first choice as director had been the New Wave pioneer François Truffaut.) Its graphic violence upset some reviewers, but it mostly drew rapturous praise; Pauline Kael of The New Yorker said it was the most important and influential film of the 1960s, bringing “into the almost frighteningly public world of movies things that people have been feeling and saying and writing about.”
A box-office hit that was nominated for 10 Academy Awards — including one for Mr. Benton and Mr. Newman’s screenplay (to which Robert Towne and Mr. Beatty had made uncredited contributions), and won two, for supporting actress (Estelle Parsons) and cinematography (Burnett Guffey) — “Bonnie and Clyde” helped usher in a new era of adventurousness in American cinema.
Mr. Benton’s “Kramer vs. Kramer,” released 12 years later, was less of a breakthrough than “Bonnie and Clyde” but even more successful — and, in its depiction of a marriage gone bad when the wife leaves her husband and child, also groundbreaking. It was the highest-grossing film of 1979 and won rave reviews and five Academy Awards, including writing and directing Oscars for Mr. Benton, who adapted it from a novel by Avery Corman, as well as acting honors for its stars, Dustin Hoffman and Meryl Streep.
“Kramer vs. Kramer” was the third film Mr. Benton directed, but it became his project only when Truffaut, who was once again the first choice, declined the offer from the film’s producer, Stanley R. Jaffe, saying he was too busy.
Working with Néstor Almendros, one of Truffaut’s favorite cinematographers, and rarely moving the camera except to follow the actors, Mr. Benton made a film that was, as Frank Rich wrote in Time magazine, “composed almost entirely of actors’ faces, of intense passions and of winter light,” and that in its intimate approach clearly showed Truffaut’s influence.
When Truffaut died in 1984, Vincent Canby of The New York Times called Mr. Benton his only true heir among American directors.
Reflecting his own New Wave sensibility, Mr. Benton liked to say that movies are “written” by the camera. He saw his films as an extension of painting, an artistic endeavor he had pursued as a young man.
Nowhere was this truer than in “Places in the Heart” (1984), also shot by Mr. Almendros, for which Mr. Benton returned to Waxahachie, Texas, where he had grown up, to tell the story of a widow’s struggle to survive the Depression.
Reviewers praised the look of the film, particularly what Richard Schickel of Time called the “play of light” orchestrated by Mr. Benton and Mr. Almendros. The cinematography, Variety’s review noted, “is not pretty, but high on feeling and atmosphere.”
Mr. Benton said that “Places in the Heart” — which earned him an Oscar for his screenplay and an Oscar nomination for his direction — was inspired by the sense of loss he felt when his mother died. He turned 50 not long after the death and realized, he said, that after selling the family home in Waxahachie he had no reason to go back. “So,” he said, “I created one.”
Mr. Benton directed only 11 feature films in 35 years. But they covered a wide range of subjects and moods, from an irreverent look at the Civil War (“Bad Company,” 1972) to a penetrating glimpse of small-town life (“Nobody’s Fool,” 1994, based on an acclaimed novel by Richard Russo) to idiosyncratic takes on the detective genre (“The Late Show,” 1977, and “Twilight,” 1998). His last movie was the romantic drama “Feast of Love” in 2007.
For all the accolades he received, Mr. Benton was often described as self-effacing. In a 2007 interview with The Los Angeles Times, he compared himself to Dracula: “I don’t leave a trace in the mirror.”
He was nonetheless known for his doggedness in rewriting scripts and reshooting scenes, and for his deft touch in handling actors. Top stars clamored for parts in his movies, sometimes for less than their standard pay. Many of them, including Sally Field, attended a celebration of his 90th birthday in 2022.
Ms. Field, who won a best actress Oscar for “Places in the Heart,” said in an interview with The Times in 1994 that Mr. Benton “connects to the most minute things, the slight movement of hands.” Paul Newman, who worked with Mr. Benton on “Nobody’s Fool” and “Twilight,” said of his direction: “He allows things to develop. He just eavesdrops.”
Robert Douglass Benton was born in Dallas on Sept. 29, 1932, to Ellery and Dorothy (Spalding) Benton. His father worked for the telephone company. The family later moved to Waxahachie, a small cotton town near Dallas, where his mother had roots.
Robert had dyslexia, he told Texas Monthly in 1998, and graduated from high school only because his teachers liked his mother, who played bridge with them. His father beguiled him with stories — including his memories of attending Clyde Barrow’s funeral — and took him to the movies three times a week.
“I became a storyteller just watching the stories onscreen,” he said in 2007.
He became the first in his family to attend college when he entered the University of Texas at Austin, to study art. He aspired to a career as a painter, and his paintings of an older, vanishing Texas drew praise.
After graduating in 1953 with a bachelor of fine arts degree, he moved to New York to study art history at Columbia University. He ran out of money after one semester and was drafted into the Army. He emerged a corporal.
Returning to New York, he found a succession of jobs as an art assistant before being hired in 1957 as assistant art director at Esquire. He was the magazine’s art editor from 1958 to 1964 and a contributing editor from 1964 to 1972. He and David Newman created the magazine’s Dubious Achievement Awards, a long-running feature that took a humorous look at the events of the previous year.
Mr. Benton gradually shifted his focus to writing. In 1959 he and Harvey Schmidt, who would go on to write the music for the long-running Off Broadway show “The Fantasticks,” collaborated on “The In and Out Book,” a guide to big-city chic. He and Mr. Newman wrote the satirical “Extremism: A Non Book” in 1964 and the book for “It’s a Bird … It’s a Plane … It’s Superman,” a short-lived Broadway musical based on the comic book with a score by Charles Strouse and Lee Adams, in 1966. From 1964 to 1974 they wrote a column called “Man Talk” for Mademoiselle.
Mr. Benton and Mr. Newman shared a fascination with the works of postwar filmmakers like Ingmar Bergman, Federico Fellini and Akira Kurosawa, as well as American directors like Howard Hawks and John Ford. Their love of cinema led them to try writing a movie of their own.
With their interest in Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow piqued by a brief reference in a biography of John Dillinger, they visited Texas to interview people who claimed to have known the two bandits. They then set about turning their research into a screenplay.
The two collaborated frequently over the next decade. They wrote the westerns “There Was a Crooked Man …” (1970), starring Kirk Douglas and Henry Fonda and directed by Joseph L. Mankiewicz, and “Bad Company,” Mr. Benton’s first film as a director. (The story of a gang of young men, it starred Jeff Bridges as a character based on Mr. Newman and Barry Brown as a character based on Mr. Benton.)
They teamed with Buck Henry to write Peter Bogdanovich’s madcap 1972 comedy, “What’s Up, Doc?,” with Barbra Streisand and Ryan O’Neal. They were also among the many writers who contributed to the erotic revue “Oh! Calcutta!,” which ran on Broadway from 1969 to 1972 and was revived in 1976.
In 1978, Mr. Benton and Mr. Newman returned to the subject of their 1966 musical, joining with Mr. Newman’s wife, Leslie, and Mario Puzo to write the hugely successful first Christopher Reeve “Superman” movie. The Newmans worked on the scripts for the next two installments in the “Superman” franchise as well, but Mr. Benton did not.
Mr. Benton and Mr. Newman gradually stopped collaborating, although they remained friends. Their last joint project was Mr. Benton’s thriller “Still of the Night” in 1982. Mr. Newman died in 2003.
Mr. Benton’s wife of 60 years, Sallie Benton, an artist, died in 2023. He is survived by a son, John Benton.
Not all of Mr. Benton’s films were successful. Among those that were not was “Billy Bathgate” (1991), based on an E.L. Doctorow novel and starring Dustin Hoffman as the gangster Dutch Schultz. The movie, with a script by the playwright Tom Stoppard, displeased Mr. Doctorow. It also received mixed reviews and lost money. In a 1998 interview with Venice magazine, Mr. Benton called it “a deeply unsuccessful picture” and suggested why.
“I’m a director of small things,” he said. “It needed someone who was used to a bigger canvas.”
In any case, Mr. Benton was philosophical about the ebbs and flows of success. He knew, he told The Times in 1984, that if a movie works, it is “just a matter of time before something else doesn’t.”
“The only thing that matters,” he added, “is just to keep on working.”
At his death, he was at work on a memoir.
Janet Maslin and Ash Wu contributed reporting.
The post Robert Benton, Influential Director and Screenwriter, Dies at 92 appeared first on New York Times.
