Was a warning issued?
Which of the six fired first?
Did a Texas Ranger captain fire bursts into the car’s occupants?
Did the same Captain Hamer fire a Colt Monitor or a Remington Model 8?
Was the Judas Goat, Ivy Methvin, present?
Why did Prentiss Oakley pull his trigger?
What is beyond dispute is that all six officers opened fire with a variety of high-powered weapons, including two—or was it three?— of the powerful Browning Automatic Rifles. One of them, Dallas Deputy Ted Hinton, fired his 20-round BAR clip, grabbed a semi-auto 12-gauge shotgun and emptied it, then snatched his .45 automatic from a shoulder holster and emptied that magazine. Twelve seconds later—or was it 16?—the lawmen had fired over 150 bullets and shells—or was it 168?—into the vehicle and, inevitably, its occupants.
The car was transformed into a macabre American icon, a stern message to all road desperados of what lay ahead as both John Dillinger and Babyface Nelson would learn in the next few weeks. So spectacular was the carnage of pierced metal, spider-webbed window, and blood stained upholstery, that the vehicle itself went on national tour of carnie grounds and state fairs and even today is displayed in tacky splendor not in a museum, but in a Nevada casino.
It was death for Clyde and Bonnie.
Their bodies were so mutilated by high velocity bullets that a coroner in nearby Arcadia didn’t even bother to count the holes. The autopsy pictures are easily accessible on the Internet: two scrawny bodies—”That little pipsqueak was Clyde Barrow?” a viewer asked— literally torn to shreds, frosted with blood, faces pathetically slack, eyes resolved into coin slots.
And so Clyde and Bonnie entered history.
Or did they?
The squalid ambush that ended their careers in 1934 was really memory-holed in the years that follow. I can testify that America in the ’50s and ’60s was largely Clyde-less, as the two diminished into a narrow regional celebrity, if that. I was the little boy who wanted to be a G-man and work for Mr. Hoover, and I knew of all the great law enforcement triumphs of the ’30s over the Dillingers and the Nelsons and the Capones. I had never heard of Bonnie and Clyde.
That all changed in 1967 when Arthur Penn’s film version came out with Warren Beatty and Faye Dunnaway, and that’s the Bonnie and Clyde that most people remember: vibrant, beautiful movie stars with witty ripostes on their lips and grace in their limbs and superbly tailored haberdashery on their shoulders, while bluegrass legends Flatt & Scruggs plucked away brilliantly behind them. Quickly, they commanded the allegiance of a baby boom generation—mine among them—hungry for anti-establishment heroes who were killed—virtually crucified— by ruthless officers out of mean-spirited vengeance. It was an easy generational transference for the nascent boomers to see themselves as so beautiful, so in love, so radical, so entitled to self-expression, so embittered by a failing economic system, so martyred by a crusty older generation that despised them for those attributes exactly.
“Bonnie and Clyde” pandered to and fed on the vanities of a generation hell bent on avoiding an inconvenient war and exploring its awesome power in the marketplace. In fact, even now, it’s difficult to know whether to regard the two outlaws as figures of the far-off dust bowl ’30s, or symbols of the more insane 60s. If they’re famous today, it’s certainly because of the Penn film, not because of anything that happened in 1934.
Yet, examined today, in light of a kind of pop-culture Clyde and Bonnie boomlet that is part of a larger arc that celebrates that outlaw year—Michael Mann’s huge budget, star-driven retelling of the Dillinger story will arrive in July—one has to wonder about the Penn movie, particularly in the light of two books recently published, Jeff Guinn’s Bonnie and Clyde and Paul Schneider’s Bonnie and Clyde: The True Story. It’s a shame the books aren’t better—they nowhere approach the majesty of the best of the 30s outlaw bios, Michael Wallis’s Pretty Boy Floyd. Guinn’s is poorly written, overly detailed, and lacks any dimension of poetry or tragedy, much less melancholy. Worst of all, he has no gift for action and recreation of the pair’s major gunfights or the whirlwind of full metal jackets that took them out. Schneider’s suffers from a supreme case of artistic misjudgment. In a poorly conceived attempt to turn his book more novelistic, he employs a second-person point of view when he addresses Clyde, calling the young scrapper throughout “you”.
But taken together, they make a point. That point is that the legendary Penn movie, which invented the New Bonnie and Clyde, was such a lefty crock that it deserves placement in that list of other lefty crocks mistaken by gullible critics and film lovers as somehow great: I think of Beatty’s “Reds,” the appalling “JFK” and the toxic oeuvre of Michael Moore and his tribe of screwball clones in the documentary field, as well as the recent spate of angry, misguided Iraq war films.
This really is not news. When “Bonnie and Clyde” was released and soared, after an initial few weeks of failure, the Chicago Daily News columnist, Mike Royko, launched a mini-crusade to restore Clyde and Bonnie to their actual dimensions. He had the audacity to point out: They were young. They were in love. They killed people. A lot of people. I thought he was an idiot. The Times’s critic, Bosley Crowther, then the oldest, whitest guy in New York, also dared abjure the film, and felt the lash of social ostracism and contempt. I thought he was an idiot also. Then it was a losing cause. Maybe not so much now.
Clyde and Bonnie, to begin with, were far more interesting than the moviemakers portrayed them to be. They were far from sleek beauties embodied by the 30-year old Beatty and the-28 year-old Dunnaway (who in truth delivers a stunning performance that absolutely sustains the movie). They were essentially homeless: they lived in their car, wandering from town to town in a kind of lose circuit that always placed them close to state lines in the days when police agencies were unable to cross such borders. They robbed banks—once in a while. More frequently, they robbed gas stations, broke into warehouses, held up mom n’ pop groceries and the suchlike, each time securing as swag what was basically soda pop money to keep them going a few more days.
They were kids. (A more accurate contemporaneous movie would have starred Judy Garland and Alfalfa; in the late ’60s, Tommy Sands and Sandra Dee.) They were tiny kids. They were brave kids, after a screwy fashion. And they appeared to be genuinely in love. And of course, they were extremely nasty. To stand against them in their infantile greed was to face Clyde’s superb marksmanship with the same type of Browning Automatic Rifle—his preferred weapon— that ultimately tore his body to shreds at the age of 25.
They were both West Dallas slum rats. She was a dim romantic and self-styled poet who dreamed of appearing on Broadway but had to settle for waitressing, after an early broken marriage (to another career criminal) and non-existent prospects. Guinn ungenerously speculates that she might have been a part-time prostitute but exactly as much evidence exists to suggest that Eleanor Roosevelt was a part-time prostitute. She was less than five feet tall and weighed about 90 pounds. Everyone agrees she had a kind of charisma(she was the live wire, the jazz baby, Betty Boop), even, as it turns out, one of the men who killed her. That was Dallas deputy Ted Hinton, who knew her as a waitress. He was on the No. 2 B.A.R. May 23 and contributed an account of those last moments in his book Ambush, far superior to anything Guinn or Schneider can come up with.
She may never have killed a soul, though one of their gang members claimed she was the best re-loader of them all. Both Guinn and Schneider point out that she was hardly even ambulatory: a car crash had burned one of her legs, and she could only hop about or be carried by Clyde. She loved her mother and her sisters, but she did indeed love Clyde and not only did her family, but he himself urged her to leave him before it was too late.
That wasn’t the only thing Clyde was right about. He was right about most things, in fact, and possessed a native ferocity and aggression so intense it would have made him a natural leader and hero in the Second World War, another Texas Aud
ie Murphy. If ever a man was born to lead an infantry squad against the German resistance points across Europe, it was this little guy. He stood about 5-4, weighed about 140. He had jug ears and a pleasant, unremarkable face. He liked to dress up in suits and kept his tie tight and his shirt clean, no matter how many thousand-mile V-8 odysseys he took over dusty roads. Feral and cunning, he was committed to crime early and stayed true to the calling. His life traced and exaggerated another American pattern, of the rural proletariat. He arrived in West Dallas with his huge, poor, largely illiterate family when the Dust Bowl made living off the land impossible. While Ma struggled to hold the kids together, Pa scraped a few bucks a week from a scrap wagon and later a hand-built gas station. He had no gift for schooling and was soon running with the young wolves that such a cesspool of dead-end kids and zilch prospects inevitably creates.
What set the pair apart, more than anything, was no genius or vision of their own, or the audacity of their usually petty crimes, but the fact that after narrowly surviving a police raid in Joplin, Mo.—Clyde’s shooting and driving skills got them out of that one, as it did so many others—they left behind a Brownie camera full of cute shots of the sorts most young couples take, except that Bonnie and Clyde’s depicted them at play with weapons almost bigger than they were. The images of these frail children with their adult arsenal in the gleeful poses mimicking true kick-ass banditry were widely reprinted, especially a shocker with Bonnie playing the gun-moll part to the hilt, with a big Colt .45 in her hand and a cheroot dangling provocatively from her dainty lips. She looked like a Cupie Doll from hell and died wishing people didn’t think she really smoked cigars.
It is of course ridiculous at this late date to run a comparison of the movie and the just-published books and get hung up at the manifold elisions and mendacities of the later. Did you know, for example, that Buck and Blanche were far more attractive than Bonnie and Clyde? Did you know the movie left out Clyde’s hatred for the Texas penal system, where he served two years on the harshest prison farm and, according to some sources, was regularly raped by a trusty whom he later killed, his only cold-blooded murder? Did you know that Clyde masterminded an escape from that farm, hiding weapons for and transporting five prisoners outwards, one of whom later betrayed him on the road between Mt. Lebanon and Sailes? You wouldn’t if you’d only seen the movie. Did you know that the majority of the men Clyde and his gang killed were police officers? Did you know that their last two killings were Texas highway patrolmen who bumbled upon them and were gunned down for their troubles, an act uncharacteristic of the gang and usually attributed to new member Henry Methvin, who later betrayed them? Did you know that on that last day, Clyde never left the car, he and Bonnie never exchanged an achingly poignant if resigned last lover’s look. His temple was bisected by a .35 Remington softpoint on the first shot; the next 166 were largely irrelevant. Does it matter? Probably not.
But it is worth noting that the movie, entirely gratuitously, gave flesh to a supposition that underlies much of the narcissistic culture that came after and skewed the culture in unhelpful ways. It made a tacit connection between Clyde’s impotence and his nothingness, assuming therefore, that he had an inborn right to somethingness. When Bonnie tells his story—the film plays clever tricks with the real Bonnie’s naive folk-poetry—and newspapers publish “The Story of Bonnie and Clyde”, his sudden arrival at somethingness charges him sexually, completes his life. It reminds me of those screwball buttons the Ayn Randers used to send out, protesting the New York Times’ refusal to acknowledge them; they read “Aesthetic Realism’s Right to Be Known.” I suppose that underlies the 60s and the Baby boomers who ran it: that feeling of an innate right to be known. And of course it’s all utter fantasy, or at least, as both Guinn and Schneider point out, there’s not a single shred of evidence to sustain it. But we loved it in ’67 where we had just discovered the cocoon of our own darned specialness.
By far, however, the movie’s gravest insult to posterity is its treatment of the Ranger captain, Frank Hamer, who may (or may not) have been instrumental in bringing them down, even if he was one of the boys on the firing line. As seen in the movie, Hamer (played by Denver Pyle in an uncharacteristically dour performance) is a kind of harsh Puritan ideologue, so righteous that when Bonnie (whom Dunaway has made us love) flirtatiously poses for a funny snapshot with him, he spits savagely in her face. He considers her so morally tainted that he is sickened by her. Then later, like a serpent in a garden, he coos and caresses the blind Blanche (Estelle Parsons in another great performance), gulling her into giving up a vital clue that leads to his ambush murder by Thompson submachine gun.
In fact, Hamer was almost a prototype of the kind of man the boomer generation would be taught to distrust, both in life and fiction. Almost insanely brave and almost unbelievably tough, he was Texas’s most famous man hunter. Of course, he wouldn’t sell his life story to the movies—too dignified, too suspicious of the alien (even then) west coast culture and of “dramatic license.” But if he had, the Duke would have played him, with all 50 of his shoot-outs accounted for, as well as his numerous wounds. The Duke would have been portrayed standing up against lynch mobs murderously incensed by African-Americans (Schneider recreates this scene), uncovering murderous bounty hunter schemes. And the Duke would have yelled out fair warning to the pair, as both he and another posse member, the self-same Ted Hinton, claimed occurred in their written accounts of the incident. And the Duke would have replicated Hamer’s odd body posture so evident in the photographs, his rolly-polly, almost contemptuous slouch, off center always and listing one way or the other as he refuses to look at the lens and sucked on the always present tailor-made, in the way that Wayne’s Tom Doniphon did in “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance.” I see Glen Campbell as Hinton, hat worn a-tilt, and maybe John Russell as tall, taciturn, Dallas deputy in funny hat, Bob Alcorn.
That movie, however, certainly could not have been made in 1967, and it certainly can’t be made in 2009: Hamer is too straight, too commanding, too uncompromising for such a treatment. He stands for your father’s authority, annoyance at fools, the idea that women are uninteresting, and the willingness to kill in the belief that he was saving the weak by eliminating their predator. We can see variants of him in George S. Patton, Carlos Hathcock, the SEAL snipers: he was a righteous killer, a dinosaur whose time has passed. He’s what Barrack Obama swore he’d change about America.
The irony is that Hamer is forgotten while Clyde and Bonnie live on. And Hamer stood for something: the idea of right and the guts to make it stick. Clyde and Bonnie stood for nothing, except perhaps infantile nihilism; unformed, incoherent, vicious. If they were ambushed without warning, it’s because each had weapons at hand. If they were ambushed without warning, it’s so they wouldn’t widow and orphan other police families. If they were shot to pieces, it’s because the old time law enforcement guys knew you shot ’em, then you shot ’em some more and to hell with the autopsy pix.
A semi-popular website has it all wrong, but it expresses exactly the sentiment that was sold to the baby boom gen all those years ago and probably clots the minds of too many to this day: “Bonnie and Clyde died for your sins.”
No, they didn’t. Clyde and Bonnie died for their own sins.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Stephen Hunter
Stephen Hunter retired last year as Film Critic of The Washington Post. His new novel, I, Sniper, will be published in October.
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