The Highwaymen

The script John Lee Hancock shot had waited a long time. John Fusco’s idea went into development with producer Casey Silver around 2005, and at one stage Paul Newman and Robert Redford were set as the Rangers. Fusco wanted Frank Hamer shown in the proper light of history; he researched in Texas for years and befriended Hamer’s son. In the 1967 Bonnie and Clyde, Denver Pyle plays Hamer as an incompetent who gets taunted; after the release his widow and son sued Warner Bros.-Seven Arts for defamation of character and took an undisclosed out-of-court settlement in 1971. The project sat at Universal by 2013 and moved to Netflix in 2017. The ambush was staged in Louisiana on Highway 154, near where the real one happened; to turn a modern two-lane blacktop back into 1934 the crew planted trees along the verge and laid dirt over it. Bonnie and Clyde are played by Emily Brobst and Edward Bossert, listed at the bottom of the cast. By Netflix’s own count 40 million households watched it in the first month. A good fit if you want the pursuers ageing across the road, their methods falling behind the era, more than you want the ambush. Not for viewers expecting the famous couple to be the attraction; the weight stays with the men following.