It might not seem as though violence and romance would go together, but a handful of movies have found an interesting intersection between love stories and action-packed crime stories that has resonated with audiences. From Bonnie and Clyde to Jean-Luc Godard’s French New Wave classics, the crime and romance genres can be a match made in heaven if the filmmaker can nail the balance.
One of the greatest examples of a violent love story is Tony Scott’s drawn from a screenplay by Quentin Tarantino, which sees a movie geek and an escort going on the run to sell some stolen cocaine.
True Romance
Christian Slater and Patricia Arquette’s unparalleled on-screen chemistry makes True Romance work beautifully. Clarence and Alabama’s story is ripped straight from a pulpy crime novel – they’re on the run from mobsters and they’ve got a brick of coke to move – but their love feels real.
Tony Scott’s sentimental approach to Tarantino’s initially pessimistic screenplay ended up doing wonders for the movie’s romantic element. In Scott’s hands, it became a love story for the ages.
Bonnie And Clyde
The most famous true-to-life romantic crime story is that of Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow, a pair of bank robbers who caught the attention of the American press during what was known as the “public enemy era.”
Arthur Penn turned the couple’s lawless antics into a movie starring Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway. This movie helped to usher in the New Hollywood movement with grittier, more violent stories.
Drive
Nicolas Winding Refn’s slick neo-noir removed a lot of their lines from the script to keep most of their communication nonverbal, and it works spectacularly.
The brutal skull-crushing scene in the elevator puts their relationship to the test, as Irene learns that the Driver will do anything to protect her, but also discovers his true dark nature.
Badlands
One of Tony Scott’s templates for True Romance was Badlands, another crime story about two lovers going on the lam. He even reused Carl Orff’s “Gassenhauer” from Badlands’ soundtrack.
Terrence Malick’s film stars Sissy Spacek and Martin Sheen as Holly and Kit, who go on the run after killing Holly’s father. The bounty hunters on their tail push them to commit a crime spree.
Punch-Drunk Love
Paul Thomas Anderson’s it’s also an immensely satisfying one. Adam Sandler and Emily Watson share incredible chemistry in the lead roles of Barry and Lena.
Barry suffers from serious emotional issues that leave him prone to violent outbursts. The movie posits that Lena’s love gives Barry physical strength. He beats up the blond brothers with a tire iron after they crash into his car and Lena is injured.
Wild At Heart
One of David Lynch’s zaniest movies – and that’s saying a lot – Wild at Heart is a road movie starring Nicolas Cage and Laura Dern as a pair of lovebirds who break parole to run away to California.
Dern’s own mother Diane Ladd plays her character’s overbearing mother, who wants to break up her daughter’s relationship so badly that she tries to have her boyfriend killed.
Heathers
Winona Ryder and True Romance’s Christian Slater star in Heathers, a pitch-black high school comedy in which two outcasts start picking off the popular kids and making their murders look like suicides, which makes suicide a cool new trend at school.
While it certainly takes on some challenging subjects, Heathers is just as charming and lovable as any of the saccharine John Hughes movies it sought to satirize.
The Terminator
James Cameron wrote The Terminator after seeing a metallic skeleton emerging from flames in a fever dream. That dream turned into one of the greatest sci-fi movies ever made. Linda Hamilton stars as an everywoman named Sarah Connor who, unbeknownst to her, will become the mother of the resistance fighter who saves humanity from a robot uprising in the future.
A killer cyborg is sent back in time from that future to kill her and prevent her son’s birth, while a human resistance fighter named Kyle Reese is sent back to protect her from it. Throughout the movie, amidst the high-octane action and neo-noir visuals, Sarah and Kyle fall in love.
Breathless
Often named one of the greatest movies of all time, Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless is certainly one of the most influential. It was one of the earliest entries in the French New Wave movement and upended a lot of cinema’s rigid conventions.
The movie’s experimental postmodern style is its most common point of discussion, but there’s a love story at its heart between Bogart-loving criminal Michel Poiccard and American student Patricia Franchini.
Natural Born Killers
Another Tarantino script that was brought to the screen by another filmmaker, Natural Born Killers is essentially an amped-up Bonnie and Clyde starring Woody Harrelson and Juliette Lewis as trigger-happy soulmates Mickey and Mallory Knox.
Whereas Tony Scott was faithful to Tarantino’s original script for True Romance (save for linearizing the narrative and letting Clarence live), Oliver Stone rewrote Natural Born Killers as an Oliver Stone movie. It’s a satirical indictment of the media’s role in glamorizing crime and bloodshed.
