Clyde Barrow never had time to get out of his Ford V8 on May 23, 1934. The troop of police waiting for him and Bonnie Parker opened fire on the couple’s stopped car, before the two fugitives cannot make a move.
In terms of historical accuracy, The Highwaymen therefore wins over Bonnie and Clyde, Arthur Penn’s film which opened the era of New Hollywood in 1967. According to this previous version of the robber couple’s walk, Clyde (Warren Beatty) was shot a few meters from Bonnie (Faye Dunaway). Photos taken after their death show them on top of each other, in front of the car, and it was this image that guided John Lee Hancock in his endeavor to rewrite an American myth.
Based on a screenplay by John Fusco, the filmmaker has made Bonnie and Clyde two silhouettes away from which he carefully holds his camera. He prefers that she stubbornly follow the efforts of two former Texas Rangers, Frank Hamer (Kevin Costner) and Maney Gault (Woody Harrelson), to root out the cult-like couple. Since we are at the cinema, we could invoke the need for the reverse shot. But we are also in Hollywood, at the heart of the star system. The status of performers automatically makes them heroes.
imperfect men
After Barrow organizes a bloody escape from the Texas penal colony of Eastham, the director of the penitentiary administration obtains from the governor of the state that we entrust the hunt for Bonnie, Clyde and their accomplices to men charged to kill fugitives rather than apprehend them. For any legal viaticum, they are assigned to the traffic police (hence the title of the film). This is how Gault and Hamer are brought out of retirement, and this is where the fiction begins.
The Highwaymen contrasts the inflexibility of the former with the humanity of the latter. Which corresponds to the respective registers of Costner and Harrelson. It’s also a way to rehash a narrative nearly as old as American cinema: These men are flawed, they carry around terrible memories, but they’re the rest of society’s only bulwark against the mortal dangers posed by killers like Bonnie. and Clyde. If they sin, it is for our salvation. And, besides, we don’t deserve it: two sequences show the mob at its most despicable side, celebrating the outlaws during a foray into town, and stripping their corpses after they were slaughtered.
This authoritarian and pessimistic vision of the world, staged with a gravity that often borders on heaviness, gives the film a funereal tone, further accentuated by the unique expression – between gravity and disgust – that Kevin Costner affects throughout the movie. It is the exact negative of Arthur Penn’s ambiguous Dionysian film. It’s about burying Bonnie and Clyde once and for all, and making sure no one comes to fill their graves.
