The Highwaymen

Dir: John Lee Hancock

2019

****

When one thinks about Bonnie and Clyde in popular culture, you can’t help but think about Arthur Penn’s 1967 film staring Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway as the titular characters, and of course Serge Gainsbourg and Brigitte Bardot’s hypnotic ballad that used lines from Bonnie Parker’s poem The Trail's End, written weeks before her demise. I love Arthur Penn’s film and although I like Gainsbourg’s song it does have an annoying habit of getting stuck in my head and overstaying its welcome. I’m quite fond of William Witney’s 1958 The Bonnie Parker Story starring Dorothy Provine, one of my all-time favourite actors, and I have a soft spot for the ridiculous Bonnie and Clyde vs Dracula but generally I think between Penn’s film and the many comprehensive documentaries made over the years, the story of the young lovers, who between them killed nine people, has been covered. I didn’t think we needed another Bonnie and Clyde film, like we don’t need another film about Charles Manson or Winston Churchill. However, John Lee Hancock and John Fusco’s 2019 The Highwaymen is a Bonnie and Clyde film with a difference, in that it doesn’t feature Bonnie and Clyde. Instead, The Highwaymen focuses on Frank Hamer and Maney Gault (played here by Kevin Costner and Woody Harrelson), the two Texas Rangers who were hired to track down the young couple and ‘bring them to justice’, which meant ‘kill on sight’ basically. Hamer acquired legendary status in the Southwest as the archetypal Texas Ranger. He was a Ranger off and on throughout his adult life. He first joined Captain John H. Rogers's Company C in Alpine, Texas patrolling the border with Mexico. In 1908 he resigned from the Rangers to become the City Marshal of Navasota, Texas. Navasota was a lawless boom town, wracked by violence where shootouts on the main street were so frequent that in two years at least a hundred men died. Hamer moved in and created law and order at the tender age of 24. Hamer rejoined the Rangers in 1915 and again was assigned to patrol the South Texas border around Brownsville. Because of the constant unrest in Mexico during that country's revolution, the Rangers dealt most seriously with arms smugglers. They also tried to control the bootleggers during the Prohibition era and bandits who plagued the border. His life is mentioned in the film by way of whispers from other characters, but mainly his partner Maney Gault. Between them they killed a lot of men. Hamer was famous before he got involved with Bonnie and Clyde, referred to then as the Barrow Gang. Truth be told, a film about his life would have been a little more interesting than just the chapter involving the young killers. The incident at the Sweetwater Gas station in October 1917 been such an event that would look great on film. Hamer had married Gladys Sims, the widow of Ed Sims. Gladys and her brother Johnson were charged in 1916 with having murdered her husband Sims that year. In the fall of 1917, the trial of her brother was moved to Baird, Texas. On October 1, 1917, Hamer and Gladys, his brother Gus Hamer, her brother Johnson and his wife, were all on their way to Baird and stopped at a garage in Sweetwater to get gas. By chance they encountered Gus McMeans of Odessa, a brother-in-law of the late Ed Sims, at the garage. The Hamers and McMeans got in a pistol battle. McMeans was a former Texas Ranger and sheriff of Ector County. Hamer and McMeans were clinched, and the latter died of a shot to the heart. Hamer was wounded. Ten shots were fired in the gunfight. Police collected a total of seven revolvers, two automatic pistols, and three repeating rifles from the members of the two parties. Hamer accepted a position as a federal agent soon after. Stationed primarily in El Paso, the scene of countless gunfights during the Prohibition era, Hamer participated in numerous raids and shootouts. This is where he met Maney Gault and where they would ambush and kill 100 men in just one evening, many as they slept. I think it is important to point out that Hamer was a hired man and not a far-right ultra-conservative, and as a Texas Rangers he led the fight in Texas against the Ku Klux Klan, which was still growing in Texas. During his long career, he saved fifteen African Americans from lynch mobs although in 1930 in Sherman, Texas, Hamer and a handful of Rangers protected a black rape suspect from a mob of 6,000. Hamer personally shot and wounded two of the mob's leaders, and forced the lynchers to flee the courthouse but the mob still managed to set fire to the courthouse and the prisoner died in the inferno. Hamer was the first and only Texas Ranger to lose a prisoner to a lynch mob but you get the picture, he was principled. Hamer was retired in the early 1930’s when Miriam "Ma" Ferguson took over office as the first female governor of Texas. Ferguson's husband had previously been governor of Texas, but was impeached and convicted on embezzlement charges. Ma ran as a puppet candidate, making it clear her husband would be calling the shots, and she was every bit as corrupt as her husband had been. Bonnie and Clyde's crime spree had generated vast media coverage that embarrassed law enforcement and government officials across half a dozen states. Perhaps the last straw, at least for Texas officials, came on January 16, 1934, when Barrow, Parker and associate Jimmy Mullens raided Eastham prison farm, freeing Raymond Hamilton, Henry Methvin, Hilton Bybee and Joe Palmer. Henry Methvin was not part of the original group but fled with them during the general confusion. Barrow had particularly wanted to free two other men but he considered the raid to be successful retaliation against the prison system all the same. During the breakout two guards were shot the escapees. On the go-ahead from Governor Ferguson, Hamer was persuaded to come out of retirement and accept an assignment to hunt down the Barrow Gang. He was directly told to "Put 'em on the spot, know you're right - and shoot everybody in sight.” Hamer set to the task. A smart and meticulous investigator, he examined the pattern of Barrow's movements, discovering he essentially made a wide circle through the lower Midwest, skirting state borders wherever he could, to take advantage of "state line" dictums (i.e., that officers from one state could not pursue suspects across state lines). He learned how barrow thought and how he acted in different situations. When he began to understand Clyde Barrow's mind, he began to make progress. In 1967’s Bonnie and Clyde Hamer was characterized by Denver Pyle as an incompetent fool, prompting his widow Gladys to sue Warner Brothers for defamation of his character. So basically I was wrong when I said we didn’t need another Bonnie and Clyde film, we did, only one that told more truths and looked at the story from a different angle. The Burrows Gang were not the modern day Robin Hoods that many of the locals thought they were. The authorities were corrupt and people saw them as an attack on the system but the truth was that they killed blue collar workers, people who supported families etc. Plus, the money they were stealing from banks was everyone’s. The following they had and still have is puzzling and very distasteful. I remember being angered when, during the funerals of the Kray twins in London, crowds of people turned up and many gravestones were broken in the cemetery that they were buried in. The Kreys were gangsters and murderers but actually they looked after the people in their area. Better to have two criminals in your town then several, I still don’t get it but I understand it more than I do with Bonnie and Clyde. I worried that the film would be a bit right-wing, a bit John Wayne, but it wasn’t. It was clear that Clyde would only go down in a blaze of glory and quite frankly they had to be stopped. No joy was had by Hamer and Gault, it was something that had to be done and they were the best people available to do it. The idea, written by John Fusco – who wanted the real story of Frank Hamer to be told properly for once, was in development since the early 2000’s. It’s a little sad to know that it was originally going to star Paul Newman and Robert Redford in the main roles (both pulled out when Newman’s health deteriorated) but Kevin Costner and Woody Harrelson do a fine job. It’s the sort of role that suits Costner and one that he has come accustomed to playing and I liked how Harrelson played the lawman in contrast to his very Clyde-like character, Mickey Knox, from Natural Born Killers. The film quite successfully takes a step back from Hamer and Gault’s investigation and quietly examines the popularity of the young killers without trying to make any sense of the prevailing mania. I thought the exploration of questionable worship to be quite timely, although it is a subject that is always relevant. So many subjects are muddied these days that it has become time that a few truths are broken down to the basics. I think The Highwaymen does this beautifully and knocks down the weird infatuation people have with the pair. A factual re-telling of a historical event shouldn’t be a refreshing change, it should be the norm, but there is something about how Fusco’s script/John Lee Hancock’s film approaches its subject that makes it quite special. Everything is intentional and the facts, rather than the legend, will help people form a proper opinion on the whole saga. It might even help people when forming opinions on current affairs, that they should learn the facts before coming to a conclusion.