Arthur Penn, 88, Philadelphia-born director of 'Bonnie & Clyde'

Arthur Penn, the Philadelphia-born director whose rhapsodically violent portrait of Depression-era outlaws Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow - 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. In his work with Paul Newman (as Billy the Kid in The Left-Handed Gun), Ann Bancroft (in The Miracle Worker), Dustin Hoffman (Little Big Man), Gene Hackman (Night Moves), and, of course, Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway in Bonnie and Clyde, Mr. Penn showed an affinity for his stars that yielded inspired, intense results.

He was an actor's director, overseeing eight Oscar-nominated performances, but also a director's director - borrowing from independent cinema and the French New Wave to create a new brand of film, breaking from the studio formula and inspiring the likes of Francis Ford Coppola, George Lucas and Steven Spielberg. Mr. Penn was thrice nominated for Academy Awards, though he never won.

(He was also a politician's director: Mr. Penn coached John F. Kennedy during his televised debates with Richard M. Nixon in the 1960 presidential campaign, instructing the Democratic candidate to look directly into the camera and keep his answers brief and to the point.)

Mr. Penn was born in Philadelphia on Sept. 27, 1922, the son of Sonia (née Greenberg), who later became a nurse, and Harry Penn, a watchmaker. The director's older brother, who died last October, was renowned photographer Irving Penn.

In the mid-1920s, the parents divorced, and Arthur and Irving spent peripatetic childhoods in New Jersey, New Hampshire and several boroughs of New York, with their mother, or with other relations.

The future filmmaker returned to Philadelphia when he was 14 to live with his father, and to (reluctantly) apprentice in his Jewelers Row shop. Mr. Penn attended Olney High School, where he discovered his passion for theater. In 1943, he enlisted in the Army and reported for training at Fort Jackson, S.C., where he soon started a theater troupe. Later, stationed in Paris, he performed with the Soldiers Show Company.

After World War II, Mr. Penn studied theater at Black Mountain College in Asheville, N.C., and then trained at the fabled Actors' Studio. But acting wasn't paying the bills, and at 26, he joined NBC as a floor manager, working on variety shows and news broadcasts before moving on to writing and directing, collaborating on projects with Paddy Chayefsky and Horton Foote.

In 1957, Mr. Penn's adaptation of The Miracle Worker aired on TV's Playhouse 90. He took the play to Broadway soon after, and with Anne Bancroft and Patty Duke as Annie Sullivan and her blind and deaf student Helen Keller, brought the William Gibson play to the screen in 1962.

Mr. Penn was not the first choice to direct Bonnie and Clyde (the writer-producers considered Francois Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard), but the film became a masterwork in his hands. He coaxed fiery, spontaneous work from his two leads, Beatty and Dunaway, and elicited brilliant turns from Estelle Parsons (an Oscar winner), Michael J. Pollard and Hackman. The final, fatal shoot-out - a slow-motion reverie of blood and bullets - was a jolting flourish that changed the way audiences viewed violence on screen. In many of his films, in fact, America's fascination with violence, and its impact on our culture, has been a central theme.

In 1969, Mr. Penn followed Bonnie and Clyde with Alice's Restaurant, a plucky counter-culture artifact adapted from Arlo Guthrie's 18-minute talkin' blues about a draft-dodging litterbug.

In 1970's Little Big Man, Mr. Penn examined the nation's tumultuous history through the eyes of a wrinkled centenarian (Hoffman). His neo-noir Night Moves is a bleak but beautiful film, with another great performance from Hackman. And 1976's The Missouri Breaks, with the heavy-duty duo of Marlon Brando and Jack Nicholson, is a big, improv-y oater that's both revered and reviled by cineastes.

Mr. Penn's final feature was Penn and Teller Get Killed, a larky vehicle for the upstart illusionists Penn Gillette and Teller. On the Atlantic City set of the 1988 comedy mystery, the director said in an Inquirer interview that he chooses the films "that seem appropriate to me at that given time. And since time is perforce elapsing, I make a different kind of film every time. But there are thematic aspects of the films that are the same."

Mr. Penn is survived by his wife of 54 years, the actress Peggy Mauer, and by his son, Matthew Penn, a daughter, Molly Penn, and four grandsons.