The Highwaymen
Directed by John Lee Hancock
Written by John Fusco
Kevin Costner- Frank Hamer
Woody Harrelson – Maney Gault
Kathy Bates – Governor Ma Ferguson
John Carroll Lynch – Lee Simmons, chief of prison system
So this is how it will be. After Roma, The Ballad of Buster Scruggsand several lesser efforts,we get The Highwaymenfrom Netflix, a full feature film for 2019. The current pattern; film festival, two weeks limited theatrical release to qualify for 2019 Awards, then straight to TV with Netflix. We have a large TV and great 5.1 system, but it’s still a shame that a film with such huge road vistas of Texas (though actually it’s Louisiana pretending to be Texas) should not be experienced on the full cinema screen.
Woody Harrelson as Maney Gault. Kevin Costner as Frank Hamer.
The concept was knocking around Hollywood for so long that the original pitch had Robert Redford and Paul Newman as the leads. By 2018 it was Kevin Costner and Woody Harrelson … note that Harrelson came into it from Three Billboards Outside Ebbing,Missouri for which he received deserved nominations for best supporting actor. I would say Costner was no longer at his Dances With Wolves, Robin Hood, JFK, The Bodyguard top of the A list peak, but nevertheless remains a major force.
It’s the story of Bonnie & Clyde, but it’s the mirror story, the inverted story, seen entirely from the point of view of the chasing Texas Rangers, played by Costner as Frank Hamer and Harrelson as Maney Gault. But here’s the twist, we have an opening shot of Bonnie Parker (Emily Brobst) with a machine gun, but after that we don’t really see Bonnie & Clyde at all until they’re dying. A pair of feet here, a figure going up some steps, a way distant shot of them standing on a road, a microsecond twisted face as she shoots a police officer in the head. The clothes and cars, seen at a distance, echo the 1967 Arthur Penn film. The Arthur Penn film opened with stills of the actual Bonnie & Clyde. This one ends with them. The pictures reminded me of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men by James Agee and Walker Evans, they’re the same era and region. The new film has so many images of shacks, shanties, overloaded Ford Model T flatbeds heading West, rural poverty, but also some recreated main streets, gas stations, and store interiors.
Back in 1967, Bonnie & Clyde was the most powerful film I’d ever seen. I fictionalized my first viewing in Music To Watch Girls By, but the effect was about as described there.Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway were just so cool. I had a huge poster of them on my wall at university. I bought a set of cinema display photos later. Bonnie & Clyde (LINKED) has a retrospective review in the Late 60s Films Revisited section on this blog too. There were other gang members in the story. Penn concentrated them into one fictional character, C.W. Moss played by Michael J. Pollard. I really missed him this time!
Take the central character of Frank Hamer. In Penn’s film he was captured and humiliated by Bonnie & Clyde thus feeding his need for personal vengeance. Denver Pyle played him. In reality, he never met them until he killed them. In 1971 his family sued the film producers for defamation and won a settlement. If you move to Wikipedia, Frank Hamer was a character worthy of half a dozen films. He was a Texas Ranger back in 1906, patrolling the border with Mexico long before some idiot proposed building The Great Wall of Texas, New Mexico, Arizona and California. He also led the fight against the Ku Klux Klan in Texas. He was involved in many shootings including his wife’s brother-in-law by her first husband. He had retired in 1932 with forty other Texas Rangers on the election of Ma Ferguson as Governor (Kathy Bates in the film). She then disbanded them. The movie fails to use Hamer’s non-PC original statement When they elected a woman governor, I quit.
Kathy Bates as Texas Governor, Ma Ferguson
After the Barrow gang broke three associates out from a prison farm, Ferguson was persuaded to commission Hamer to hunt them down. The breakout starts the film. From there it weaves classic movie themes. On one level, it’s the classic western, hunting down the baddies … Geromino, the Hole in the Wall Gang, Billy The Kid, Mexican bandits or whatever. OK, there are cars instead of horses but the long vistas across the landscape are much the same as is the ethos.
Manley Gault’s home at the beginning
Then it’s the classic cop buddy movie, with Hamer and his partner (pardner?) Maney Gault. They’re the basic pair. Costner strong, dour, tight-lipped, the boss. Harrelson the garrulous ageing drunk sidekick. Costner’s Frank Hamer has a rich wife, a nice house and has borrowed her new Ford V8 for the mission. Harrelson’s Maney Gault is on the skids, his shack about to be foreclosed, unshaven. OK, he’s Gabby Hayes to Costner’s Roy Rogers. They’re old timers, easily winded in a pursuit. Maney has to find somewhere to pee frequently.
At the migrant camp, Maney shows Bonnie & Clyde’s picture to a kid, while pretending to get water from a pump.
Harrelson as ever is a superb actor, and Maney Gault’s speciality is fibbing their way out of tight corners. Just before the end, Maney Gault is with the Louisiana sheriff and the young deputy from Dallas who knew Parker and Barrow from the neighbourhood. He’s there to make positive identification before they shoot them down. They’re playing cards. Frank Hamer sits silently outside the window. Maney tells a long story describing how he and Hamer once killed fifty-four men. It’s a high point of the film. Another great point, inevitably in a cop chase movie is a car chase across a dusty field when they get very close to the gang. The veteran cars are stars, and a running joke throughout the film is that Hamer refuses to allow Gault to drive. It leads to a nice last few frames of the film.
Maney & Frank
On Gault, the film departs from reality. The historic Maney Gault was a Texas Ranger who had worked with Hamer, but only joined him just before the final shootout. The demands of a buddy movie have to overrule that and have him on board from the outset. In fact, Hamer had spent 102 days as a Lone Wolf tracking Bonnie & Clyde.
Then it’s different because Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow were different, regarded as Robin Hood or Jesse James by the people. As Hamer says early on, Robin Hood never gunned down a gas station attendant for a tank of gas. This is the law men’s problem:
The guerrilla must move amongst the people as a fish swims in the sea. Mao Zedong
That describes the relation between the Barrow Gang and the populace. Some of the most significant scenes involve the law men confronting supportive crowds. The popularity of Bonnie and Clyde is more explicit and far wider than in the 1967 movie. Our lawmen drive into a camp of Okies … fleeing the Oklahoma dustbowl as in The Grapes of Wrath. These guys aren’t giving anything away. As we’re reminded at the end, 20,000 people attended Bonnie Parker’s funeral, 15,000 attended Clyde Barrow. The film finishes with the machine gunned car being towed into town and crowds trying to touch the bodies.
The crowd mob the shot-up car with Bonnie and Clyde’s dead bodies in it. Filmed in Arcadia, Louisiana.
One issue the film has is that because the story and the 1967 movie (and several more TV depictions) are so well known, there’s not a lot of tension in the ending. It reproduces Penn’s shooting pretty well- though in The Highwaymen they used the actual Louisiana road where it took place, covering the tarmac surface with dirt.
Kevin Costner as Frank Hamer on the actual road where Bonnie & Clyde were killed
I listen intently to the script, and the construction and the dialogue is first class. I only noticed one sore thumb (really unusual for me, an avid dialogue critic). Gault’s long story involves the problem of needing to say “Hands up” before shooting criminals who decline. In his example, the bandits were Mexican so they had shouted Manos arriba. That final warning was one Hamer and Gault had skipped in the past. Here Hamer decides he must stand in front of the car and issue the command. I think “Stick ’em up” was the wrong line. One jarring line is a tiny thing though at a crucial point. I’d’ve gone for the Spanish to link it.
From Wiki … I learned that the gun squad were paid little for their role in ending the Barrow Gang’s reign. However, Frank Hamer’s deal was that he could have anything they found on the gang at the end. There was no money, so the real Hamer had their extensive arsenal of weapons.