One of These Things Is Not Like the Other

Let’s examine two sides of the same coin. In 1967, Warren Beatty produced and starred in Bonnie and Clyde. In 2019, Netflix produced The Highwaymen with Kevin Costner as the lead.

Here’s a trailer for Bonnie and Clyde:

Bonnie and Clyde is famous for a lot of things, mostly the wrong things. The American Film Institute ranks it 42nd on their list of the 100 Greatest Films of All Time, which it decidedly and manifestly is not. It wasn’t much like other movies when it got made, which was its appeal I guess. The actors wore packets of Karo syrup, tinted with red pigment, which are detonated to appear like bullets striking people with a spray of blood. That was a novelty, of a sort. Sam Peckinpah and lots of other bad directors took notes, I gather. Even Monty Python noticed the cheap new frisson of gore gone wild on the screen:

People like to point to the birth of splatter as the reason why Beatty got to be a sort of demigod in Hollywood, but that’s not it. No one would produce Bonnie and Clyde. The studios thought the idea reeked of George Raft and James Cagney and was twenty years too late. It was originally pitched as a kind of comic spoof, almost slapstick. With no interest, Beatty could buy the rights to the movie and became the producer. They made a mess of a movie on a a $2.5 million dollar budget. It made $70 million dollars for reasons that really can’t be explained by watching it. Beatty’s cut was 60 percent. That, and only that, is how you get to be a big deal in Hollywood. Moolah.

American filmmakers were warming up fast to the idea of the anti-hero at the time, and Beatty was out in front by a nose.

I’m not denigrating the entire idea of antiheroes. Outsiders who act as the hero if you squint hard enough have an important literary and societal purpose. You don’t have to squint all that hard at Clint Eastwood, for instance, he’ll do all the squinting for you. Let’s also remind ourselves that everyone from Don Quixote to Huckleberry Finn could be called an antihero.

Well, the real Clyde Barrow was certainly unheroic, mercenary, cowardly, and criminal. He was also a pervert, which wasn’t often included in a dramatic antihero’s curriculum vitae. Bonnie wasn’t any better. But they’re not really qualified to be antiheroes. Not to put too fine a point on it, but Bonnie and Clyde were just plain assholes. They were unadulterated by any redeeming qualities whatsoever. They were made into heroes in the first place by newspapers, investing them with anti-establishment credibility out of whole cloth. The papers have always been covens of arseholes as far as I can tell. Then Warren and Faye made them into antiheroes all over again with Bonnie and Clyde.

In a weird way, Kevin Costner kind of reminds me of Warren Beatty. They’re both sleeping on mattresses stuffed with $100 bills, so I expect they’ll be immune to any criticism from me. But they were both himbos who went their own way in Hollywood, and picked up dumptrucks of money, random gold statues, and girls along the way. Neither one can act, as far as I can tell. In the opening of The Highwaymen, I turned to my wife and opined, “Kevin Costner can’t even act like he’s doing nothing.” In every movie I’ve ever seen him in, he sounds like he’s reading a phone book. Warren was great in Shampoo, but that’s because he’s just playing himself, a ridiculous lothario bouncing around Los Angeles. He got Robert Towne to put some interesting words in his mouth in between boinking sessions, and he allowed Jack Warden to steal the show. He made another bazillion producing that one.

I’ll lay the success or failure of The Highwaymen at Costner’s door, if you don’t mind, because the project is his, no matter who the director or writer was. Woody Harrelson plays his sidekick, but at our house, he’s had a dry spell since tending bar in Boston. He’s playing an annoying, slightly humorous fellow in the picture, so I guess he fits the part.

Like Bonnie and Clyde, no one wanted to make The Highwaymen. The script idea from John Fusco had been kicking around Hollywood so long that the original leads were supposed to be Paul Newman and Robert Redford. Fusco objected to the way Frank Hamer, a real, commendable person, had been defamed in Bonnie and Clyde, and wanted to portray him properly. The Highwaymen does.

In the same way Clint Eastwood was born to play William Munny, and everything before was warming up, and everything after a coda, Costner was born to play Hamer. Hamer was as rigidly upright and subdued as Calvin Coolidge on Seconal, and Costner’s range extends to mumbling and grunting. He’s also got the perfect Texas sunblasted skin for the job.

Right at the getgo, a pack of hyenas newspaper reporters accost Texas governor Ma Ferguson and try to fill their paper with their desired slant. She ain’t havin’ it:

“Some folks are saying that Parker and Barrow are heroes, calling them Robin Hoods. Are they Robin Hoods, Ma?”

“Did Robin Hood ever shoot a gas station attendant point-blank in the head for four dollars and a tank of gas?”

Ah yes, the old somepeoplesay gambit. It never gets tired, does it?

So John Fusco, the screenwriter, and John Lee Hancock the director, and Kathy Bates, and Kevin Costner, and oh hell, Woody too, succeed in turning the tables around and making Frank Hamer the hero, or more accurately, the antihero of the story, if there is one, and push Bonnie and Clyde back into the rancid petri dish Warren Beatty pulled them out of. Hard thing to do. Needs doing more often.

Manos arribas.