Bonnie and Clyde and Frank

Movies re-write history and that was certainly true of Bonnie and Clyde, the 1967 hit that Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway stars, and catapaulted the couple to iconic status.

In real life, they were small, ugly and conscienceless killers, mostly of policemen.

Perhaps the greatest disservice the movie did was to the memory of Frank Hamer, the Texas lawman who pursued the couple during their grubby and lethal crime spree. Played by Denver Pyle, Hamer is portrayed as puritan and a bullier of women.

In fact, Hamer was almost a prototype of the kind of man the Boomer generation would be taught to distrust, both in life and in fiction. Almost insanely brave and almost unbelievably tough, he was Texas’s most famous man hunter. He wouldn’t sell his life story to the movies; he was too dignified, too suspicious of the alien (even then) West Coast culture and of “dramatic license.” But if he had, John Wayne would have played him, with all 50 of his shoot-outs accounted for, as well as his numerous wounds.

Stephen Hunter wrote about "Clyde and Bonnie" last year. It's worth reading the whole thing.

But if you won't, here's how it ends:

That movie (one about Hamer), 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. The irony is that Hamer is forgotten while Clyde and Bonnie live on. 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, and 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 them, and then you shot them some more.

Hamer stands for your grandfather’s authority, annoyance at fools, and the willingness to kill in the belief that he was saving the weak by eliminating their predator. He was a righteous killer, a dinosaur whose time has passed. He’s what Barack Obama swears he’ll change about America.

Nevermind. After all, we'll always have Dirty Harry.