Been watching a good film lately, several times in fact. To
see it, you will need Netflix. I’m talking about the Netflix film The
Highwaymen. It tells the story of two
aged Texas Rangers, Frank Hamer (Kevin Costner) and Maney Gault (Woody
Harrelson) who set out to stop the murderous rampage of Clyde Barrow and Bonnie
Parker. It is superbly done, worth watching, if for no other reason, than to
see actress Kim Dickens playing Hamer’s wife. Ahh.
We might view the film as a correction of the 1967 (highly romanticized
and inaccurate) version that pictured Frank Hamer, known as the most famous Texas
Ranger of all, as a bumbling meanie played by Denver Pyle. This new film doesn’t
always follow history, but the inaccuracies derive from maintaining a storyline
and screenwriter’s license. It plays heavily on the popular adoration of the outlaws.
Actually, as Jeff Guinn tells us in his meticulously researched biography Go Down Together, the public allure of
the pair disappeared after the April 1, 1934 cold-blooded murder of Texas
Highway Patrolman H.D. Murphy near Grapevine, Texas.
Guinn says that one of the other gang members did the
murder, not Bonnie or Clyde. But Patrolman Murphy was engaged to be married,
and after his finance wore her wedding dress to his funeral, public sentiment
for the country’s most famous criminal pair evaporated like a Texas wind
funnel.
The interplay between the old rangers is a marvelous bit of
cinema, played by two great talents who aren’t afraid of growing old on screen.
I can’t imagine how the producers managed to capture the look and feel of Depression-era
America, but they did. Wonderful, wonderful, film.
I became fascinated with Bonnie and Clyde as a pre-teenager
because I thought they looked a bit like my mother and daddy. You can imagine
the fantasies that produced. The fascination continued into adulthood and
culminated some months ago in a road trip with pal Sonny Rhodes. We trekked to the
actual site, near Gibsland, Louisiana, where the duo was gunned down, sans
Mirandizing, by a group of law officials that included, yes, Frank Hamer and Maney
Gault.
Oh, and I leave you with a tidbit from Arkansas. One brief
scene in the film shows Frank Hamer reviewing crime scene photographs of some victims
of Bonnie and Clyde. One quick snippet is, I am told by Alma, Arkansas officials,
the actual photo of Marshall Henry Humphrey.
As the city marshal of Alma, he was making his rounds on the
night of June 22, 1933, when he was surprised by Bonnie and Clyde's gang. They
forced him into the town bank, tied him to a pillar with baling wire, and stole
the bank's small safe. They even stole Humphrey's gun.
The next afternoon he again unexpectedly ran into the gang,
this time on a road north of town. A shootout ensued, Humphrey was mortally
wounded, and the gang then stole his replacement gun. The city recently erected
a monument to Marshall Humphrey.
Bonnie and Clyde were holed-up in a motel in Oklahoma at the
time, having sent the gang members to Fayetteville to rob a grocery. The film (somewhat)
accurately pictures Bonnie with a limp from being burned with battery acid when
Clyde ran their car off a bridge. Guinn says that, by the time of her death, Clyde
actually had to carry her.
The duo appears only briefly in the film. They mostly serve
as off-screen presences. The film is about Hamer and Gault, two old lawmen sharing
one more adventure with grouches and insights sharing equal billing..
Watch the film. It’s real sleeper. If you don’t have
Netflix, subscribe. Else ways, burst in on someone who does. Not me though,
some other feller.
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| Where the crime spree ended. |
