WHAT IT'S ABOUT: In the early 1930s, Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow captured the public imagination like few other outlaws of the "public enemy" era. Young lovers with fashionable outfits and heavy artillery, they pulled off a multistate crime spree of robberies and holdups, smartly outrunning the law and becoming the Robin Hoods of the Great Depression _ even when their gang left dead policemen in their wake.
Eventually, a couple of former Texas Rangers were brought in to stop Bonnie and Clyde the old-fashioned way: Hunt them down and kill them. "The Highwaymen," a Netflix original film, tells how Frank Hamer (Kevin Costner) and Maney Gault (Woody Harrelson) spent months tracking their prey until finally cornering them on a rural Louisiana road in May of 1934.
MY SAY: Bonnie and Clyde owe much of their fame to "Bonnie and Clyde," Arthur Penn's highly glamorized biopic from 1967. In the title roles, Faye Dunaway and Warren Beatty served as sexy stand-ins for the hippie generation, flouting the law and conventional morality, while the authorities looked like cowards and murderers. Penn's film divided audiences into harrumphing oldsters and with-it youngsters, perhaps much the way the real outlaws did some 85 years ago.
