Bonnie and Clyde weren't even especially well known outside Texas. The only time they ever made the front page of the New York Times was the day after they died.
When recast as beautiful hippie-era rebels, however, Bonnie and Clyde were transformed into unforgettable movie characters, so much so that after "Bonnie and Clyde" just about every Depression-era crook got a film, even the little-known Alvin Karpis of the Barker gang. I dimly remember a forlorn Martin Sheen in 1974's "Pretty Boy Floyd."
The most vivid, and wrongheaded, of these films may have been Roger Corman's 1970 "Bloody Mama," which featured Shelley Winters as the grandmotherly Ma Barker, the supposed brains of the Barker-Karpis gang. (Yes, that was a very young Robert De Niro playing one of her sons.)
Newly released FBI files show conclusively that Ma Barker was never even a criminal, much less a mastermind. A lonely old hillbilly woman who knew of her sons' crimes but spent much of her time doing jigsaw puzzles, her posthumous notoriety was concocted by J. Edgar Hoover, whose men inadvertently killed her in a gunfight with her son Fred. Rather than explain this, Hoover portrayed Ma as an evil genius who was symptomatic of everything he believed was wrong with the American family. She has gone down in American lore as just that, spawning characters and references in everything from Dick Tracy comic strips ("Maw Famon") to the "Batman" television series ("Ma Parker") to "Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles." Her name has even escaped the lips of Homer Simpson.
Movies about the Depression-era marauders have been made since the 1970s, though none are especially memorable. Ma Barker was portrayed by Theresa Russell, of all people, in a forgettable 1996 movie. Even the psychopathic Baby Face Nelson got his own movie a few years back; he was played, unfortunately, by C. Thomas Howell, an actor who was about as frightening as Count Chocula. A far better Nelson, played by Richard Dreyfuss, stood alongside Warren Oates' Dillinger. Nelson was a chattering bore, and Dreyfuss nailed him as such.
Oates, alas, was far too tough, not to mention too old, to play his role. He played a mean Dillinger, a Cagney-like tough who punched out his girlfriend, Billie Frechette, who was portrayed as a kind of Depression-era Malibu Barbie by the pop singer Michelle Phillips of the Mamas & the Papas. (Every time poor Phillips cast her gaze around a smoky barroom, you thought she was looking for the beach.) The real Dillinger, unlike Nelson or Clyde Barrow, was never the indiscriminate killer Oates seemed to be. He shot and killed exactly one man, a detective who fired on him outside a bank in East Chicago.
