I watched the movie Bonnie and Clyde again today. The one with
Warren Beatty as Clyde and Faye Dunaway as Bonnie.

I wondered if there is any factual basis for the part about them capturing Frank Hamer?

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In Omnia Paratus

Not in a million years.

No. The capture sequence was just a movie plot device. It was used to give the movie Hamer the motivation for relentlessly tracking the outlaws...to give him "motive" for setting up the ambush that killed Bonnie and Clyde.

A lot of the film was based on real events, though...just not the capture of Hamer.

I believe Hamer's surviving relatives sued over the portrayal.

Frank Hamer - True West Magazine

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Rule of law, not a man.

No. You should read this book:

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9D98685A-610F-4736-B98A-B92E945646A8.jpeg (67.0 KB, 50 views)

If you want to read the facts, get a copy of the latest Frank Hamer book, TEXAS RANGER by John Boessenecker. For years, I've read every account I could find. This is the best on Bonnie and Clyde, Hamer, etc.

Thanks for all those swift responses. In my foggy memory I seem to
recall something about the family suing for defamation or something like
that. And thanks for the book suggestions also. I know the movies make up
stuff to further their agenda, but I never thought a seasoned lawman
like Hamer would be caught in that kind of a situation.

__________________
In Omnia Paratus

I third the suggestion: read the Frank Hamer Book. Great read.

Well, artistic license was taken for the portrayal of
Frank Hamer.

But Faye Dunaway and the real Bonnie Parker were
nearly mirror images of each other. And had Clyde
Barrow and Warren Beatty lived at the same time,
people would have sworn they were identical twins.

I kid you not.

Phil—Many still despise them in the area where I grew up. They murdered a beloved town Marshal whose descendants still live in the area. He still has a nice memorial in the town.

It’s always surprising to me how frequently murdering scum like this can be glorified in our society. I guess Oscar Wilde was right about many taking their hero’s from the criminal classes.

Bonnie and Clyde - Encyclopedia of Arkansas

James R. Knight

Also a wanted poster from the gang’s crimes in the area:

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No school like the old school.

They may look alike, but Bonnie Parker was 4' 11" Faye Dunaway was 5' 7".

Other than race, can see no similarity in the four.

Except for the part where Beatty was about a foot too tall.

That wanted poster in 6518John’s post is interesting.

The men are really small by today’s standards. 5’7”, 125 lbs and 5’5”, 110 lbs. I recall reading, many years ago, that the average GI in WWII was 145lbs and by Vietnam 160.... I think it said WWI the average doughboy was maybe 120 or so...? Or so my fading memory says.

Also, I have never come across the fingerprint ID classification used in the poster before.

Finally, it is clear that Sheriff Maxey really wants ‘em. Bad. (To paraphrase, “Arrest ‘em anywhere in the US and I will come to you and pay $250 each. No need for a conviction. Just hold ‘em for me.” He says that twice.)

frank hamer's estate sued and received a judgement against the production company.

The movie was so awful that I walked out of the theater about twenty minutes into it. It bore not the slightest resemblance to the real Bonnie and Clyde. Barrow was a weaselly, vicious little psychopath and Parker was an airhead besotted with him. Parker bore little resemblance to Dunaway, but Barrow looked absolutely nothing like Beatty.

The reason I walked out of the theater was that the flick glamorized and prettied-up a couple of cheap, pathetic losers responsible for the deaths of several lawmen, among others.

A pretty good and very readable account of their spree, based on huge numbers of recently released FBI field notes and interviews, is in Bryan Burrough's Public Enemies.

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Oh well, what the hell.

And after, "Zulu!" portrayed Pvt. Henry Hook, VC as a miscreant, his family sued and won a bunch of money.

I realize that movie makers like to add elements for drama, but they shouldn't besmirch the memory of real people by making them seem bad or otherwise less than they were.

Phil,

Na, the Barrow gang wasn't nothing but killers on the run.
Not a thing like the movie, either one.

In Hamer's book, 'I'm Frank Hamer' he compared Clyde Barrow and
his bunch, aliken to wild horses out on the open range.
Making large circles that always came back around.
Hamer studied the pair (Clyde & Bonnie), Hamer claimed to know what
kind of whisky they like and the brand of cigarettes they smoked.

Anyway, it is said that Hamer, while lying on his death bed with his son and brother by his side.

When his son, Frank Jr. asked, 'Dad, did it ever bother you that you used your gun(s) so much?'

Hamer said, "Boys, I've killed fifty-two men and one woman, I killed them all right [legally] and
I go to sleep every night knowing I did right.'

A short time later, one of the most revered Texas Ranger Captains came unto his reward.


.

__________________
"IN GOD WE TRUST"

Sorry to disagree with you, but I have seen photos of Bonnie
Parker, and she ain't no Faye Dunaway.

__________________
In Omnia Paratus

Bonnie looked like Dun Fayaway.
She looked like 40 miles of bad road.
She was as ugly as a detour in Arkansas.
(Old corps saying. Pre-Rockefeller AR had terrible roads)

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NRA LIFE MEMBER

Last week I ordered that book from Abebooks (usually much cheaper than Amazon). Haven't yet received it.

Spittin images they are....






.

__________________
"IN GOD WE TRUST"

And as my old Pa said her face could stop a clock.
----as a mud fence.
Looks good enough to be on radio.

__________________
In Omnia Paratus

Yeh, if Warren would just part his hair on the right side they
would look like twins. (Like Arnold and Danny in the movie)

__________________
In Omnia Paratus

One of the members of the posse that finally took down Bonnie & Clyde was Bob Alcorn. My 8th Grade History teacher was his cousin. My teacher, Mr. Alcorn, was one of the best. He was very proud of his cousin's part in taking down these criminals.

I had a number of photographs of Hamer's Colt Single Action revolver, Old Lucky. I wanted to have USFA make a duplicate of Old Lucky, right down to the engraving and serial number. Before I could do that, that's when USFA stopped making the finest revolvers in the world and started making those plastic "things".

...real Frank...



...and faux Frank...

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A Country Boy Can Survive

We all like pictures..........


Frank Hamer with his Ford V-8 (top photo)

(bottom pic, standing left to right are, Oakley, Hinton, Alcorn, Gault, kneeling on the left Hamer and Jordan.




.

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"IN GOD WE TRUST"

Great vintage wanted poster.

The man noted as #3 whose identity was unknown to the sheriff was Henry Methvin, a younger member of the Barrow gang. Methvin was described as "just a dumb kid who ran errands for Clyde Barrow." I read somewhere that Clyde and Bonnie bought him that suit he's wearing in most of the photos of him with the gang...they wanted him to look presentable. He was basically a semi-literate punk from Louisiana who was destined to be a career criminal.

Methvin was from Louisiana, and it was his father's logging truck that was used as a decoy for the final ambush that killed Bonnie and Clyde.

Methvin was one of two gang members who were used as models to create the character played by Michael J. Pollard in the film, Bonnie and Clyde.

Henry Methvin is shown in the photo below with Bonnie Parker, and in a 1931 Texas mug shot when he was twenty-years-old. Sheriff Maxey was way off in his description of Methvin, by the way. Methvin was 5'9" and weighed about 190 pounds. He was only about twenty-three-years-old when he hooked up with the Barrow gang.

Henry Methvin served time in prison for murder, then was paroled.

He was killed in 1948. His body was found on train tracks in Louisiana, cut in half. Some say he was drunk and just stumbled onto the tracks and maybe passed out.

Other people speculate that he was the victim of foul play...perhaps knocked out and put on the tracks as revenge for the part he and his father played in the ambush and killing of Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker.

I have never seen a southern lawman with a Savage 99.

OK seeing the pictures of Dunaway and Parker and Barrow
and Beatty I now realize that Dunaway and Barrow are
spitting' images of each other and Parker and Beatty
look like twins.

You gents sure take postings seriously at times.

Now again, I kid you not.

It's been reported that Hamer was purty progressive in his choice of arms.

It's been said he like the 38 Super and the Remington auto loading rifles of the day.

The photo of Hamer with the Savage 99.........I'd kinda speculate that might be a .22 Savage High-Power.

Hamer may have heard of Caldwell using it on tigers in China and of
Bell using the 22 High-Power on cape buffalo on the dark continent.

or mabee the 300 Savage cartridge, I don't really know.

And no I don't think the likes of Barrow gang could capture a
Frank Hamer neither....jest to stay on topic here.


.

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"IN GOD WE TRUST"

Not sure what your standards of beauty are, but Bonnie Parker was not unattractive, and certainly not ugly by anyone's stretch of the imagination.

This photo shows her circa 1925, at the approximate age of fifteen.

She was killed just nine years later at the age of twenty-four.

They're all purty when their young.

But dang,

Living in a ford car, drinking whisky and chain-smokin' Camels on the run....

Sure can age a gal...Or so it seems.


.

__________________
"IN GOD WE TRUST"

What’s funny is real Frank looks far more like a movie star than Denver Pyle. I sure would not give the real Frank any back sass.

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No school like the old school.

Frank Hamer put lots of guys down for good starting in his teens when a local rancher got into a difficulty with Hamer. Back then it was legal to call out"Stop or I'll shoot"! No cop will do that today.

Frank not only dealt out a lot of lead, he absorbed quite a bit too. Read up on the Johnson/Sims feud in NW Texas. Frank and Gladys went to California for his recuperation after that one.

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Bob.
SWCA 1821

Well, sir, some are, some aren't.

That's true...and I know what you're saying. Years on the run will take it out of you. I'd be inclined to blame it more on ridin' around in that Ford than I would on the whisky and cigarettes, though. I had a Ford once, and I swear that car aged me about five years.

In all seriousness, though, I'll say this. I've photographed a lot of beautiful women in my life (Just can't post the photos on this forum. )

Looking at the photo below, Bonnie Parker was no slouch. This photo was made in March of 1933, about 14 months before she was killed. I think it was made somewhere in Indiana. There are a series of these photos. Clyde may have made the photo, or Henry Methvin may have, since he was with them at the time.

Now the Barrow gang didn't have a professional photographer traveling with them, and they probably weren't using a top drawer camera, either. But looking at this photo, it's one of their better ones. Bonnie was a pretty girl, and took pains with her appearance. She had a really good figure, too, which is apparent if you look closely at the photo and others made of her.

If she'd shown up at the door to my studio in 2005, I'd have been more than happy to photograph her. Fact of the matter is, in my opinion, Bonnie Parker was a good looking young lady from Texas.

While we're on the subject of Bonnie Parker, this doesn't come up often in discussions, but she seemed to be attracted to bad boys. And vice versa, too, I reckon. When she was just shy of turning sixteen, she married a guy from her school named Roy Thornton. Ol' Roy embarked on a life of crime, but wasn't very good at it. Got caught and thrown in the pokey for robbery in 1929. Bonnie hooked up with Clyde not long after that and drove off into history and folklore.

So Bonnie was still legally married to Roy all through her time with Clyde and at the time of her death. She still wore his wedding ring when she was killed. She also had a tattoo on the inside of her right thigh...two interlocking hearts with an arrow through them...it read "Bonnie and Roy".

Watchdog,

I agree, Bonnie is made-up right pretty in that photo.

We all know purty is as pruty does....

She looked purty rough in the autopsy photos.

I read somewhere that when Hamer saw Parker with her head down between her knees in the front seat of the car...

Hamer later said, "I would have gotten sick, but when I thought about her crimes, I didn't."

.

__________________
"IN GOD WE TRUST"

Hamer's Savage 99 (1899?) was more likely chambered in .303 Savage, and could possibly be a takedown model by its appearance. The .303 Savage was the first caliber offered by Savage and it remained popular for a long time, well into the 1930s. Ballistically, it was pretty much a twin to the .30-30. Savage also chambered the 99 in .30-30 but it was not as popular as the .303. The .303 Savage used a 190 grain bullet and was noted for its superior penetrating capabilities in large game. Just what a lawman needed.

I've seen those photographs.

I'm thinking none of us would look our best after being riddled with who-knows-how-many high caliber rounds.

Judging from what the bullets did to the Ford, you can only imagine the internal injuries suffered by Clyde and Bonnie. I imagine death hopefully would have been almost instantaneous.

NO KIDDING!
IIRC, the outlaws were fired on with shotguns, BARs, Thompsons, who knows what else! Hard to look you best under those conditions.

The picture with Dunaway and Pyle:
Is that a Colt M1917 with stags? Looks like a 5.5" barrel.

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You're shy a few manners.

This thread got me interested in learning more and I found this excellent PBS special from the American Experience series. It is free and very good. It is just under an hour.

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No school like the old school.

Charlie Askins wrote of carrying a Model 99 .300 Savage in the Border Patrol.

During a shootout with (more like “shooting of”) six Mexican cattle thieves, he described reloading the spool magazine in the dark as dangerously slow. That’s probably when we went to the 1907 .351 SLR.

That little incident reportedly took place south of the border.

I doubt any of Clyde Barrow’s descendants sued, but they were reported none too happy with the depiction of Clyde as gay, or at least not very interested in women.

It is a very well done documentary that goes deeper than all the surface folklore we've all heard and seen in the movie.

I've watched it several times. Granted that the Barrow gang was made up of petty crooks and killers, they and that time in America make for fascinating study.

When I was in school, I wrote several papers/studies about Depression-era gangsters and the times they lived in. In the Roaring Twenties and into the thirties, America was not that far removed from the Wild West and its collection of outlaws.

Considering the conditions of the country at that time...the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl years...it's surprising there weren't more crooks like Barrow, Dillinger, and the like.

The building where the Barrow family lived and ran a service station on Singleton Blvd. in West Dallas, though vacant, was still standing and looked to be in reasonably good repair less than twenty years ago.

Same for the building on Swiss Circle in East Dallas (near Baylor Hospital) that housed the café where Bonnie Parker once worked as a waitress.

It sure looks like one.

I've been over this stuff a lot and I never heard anything about a rape. Do they think Clyde did the deed? Was really any truth to his sexual ambiguity? I thought he had a kind of "take it or leave it" attitude? I believe I read something Bonnie said that vouched for Clyde being 'normal'.

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"He was kinda funny lookin'"

The sunlight was at a pretty awful angle in some of those photos that you commonly see. Still, I didn't know she was THAT attractive.

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"He was kinda funny lookin'"

What you say about the angle of the sun is exactly on point with what I said earlier about the Barrow gang not having a pro photographer traveling with them.

In a lot of the photos, the light is just totally wrong. Some shots seem to have been made at high noon or shortly thereafter, which is guaranteed to create shadows on facial features.

And remember...these are film images, images made with cameras that had only manual adjustments if they had any adjustments at all...there were no "auto" settings on cameras in the thirties, unless you were shooting with one of the box cameras like the Kodak Brownie. Some of the shots were exposed wrong. Then the end results depended on the skill of whoever processed the film and made the prints.

I've shot with vintage cameras because I like the look those classic lenses give to a print. But it's often trial and error.

That was a very interesting and well made piece. Thank you for bringing it to us.

They were likely completely innocent of that crime. They simply could not have covered the distances involved to have committed the crime.

Clara Rogers

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No school like the old school.