(Ran originally in December 8, 2019 editions of The Times and The News-Star.)

Just about every time Louisiana is depicted in a movie, everyone is a Cajun and every back yard has a bayou and six alligators in it.

Everyone’s Christmas tree is a cypress swamp tree. The tinsel is Spanish moss. The ornaments are ceramic roadkill and pelicans. Or, for the past few years, Drew Brees.

And everyone has a Cajun accent.

I get it. People in Kansas or Idaho won’t believe a movie set in Louisiana is authentic because, well, it’s Louisiana and “that’s how things really are.” Gators in the dirt driveways, bass and gar and ducks in the baptisteries of the church on every other corner, eggs and boudin for breakfast every morning.

Everyone lives and dies with LSU and the Saints, every politician is crooked as a pretzel, and every sheriff needs to mix in a salad now and then.

So again, I get it. People who Aren’t From Around Here wouldn’t believe anything else. But the reason they wouldn’t believe anything else is because that’s how the movies have always portrayed us.

The South gets typecast. Louisiana gets double-typecast.

This irritating notion ambushed me again on Thanksgiving when we watched a Bonnie and Clyde movie.

Our Thanksgiving was so wonderfully boring that the turkey walked out about 1:20 and the green bean casserole took a nap around 3. It was bliss.

We spent Thanksgiving evening at home watching the Netflix movie The Highwaymen, about the law’s side of tracking down Bonnie and Clyde, a very depressing or very uplifting movie, depending on your view of things.

I loved it and will re-watch when time allows. Tip of the hat to screenwriter John Fusco, who didn’t glorify the demon duo like the 1967 version starring Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway did, although that movie is beautiful film making — at least right up until the two get gunned down. Instead, he portrayed the two as they were, cold-blooded killers.

The two movies are entirely different and tell different stories; I like The Highwaymen much better. The story is told from the point of view of Frank Hamer (Kevin Costner) and Maney Gault (Woody Harrelson), the Texas Rangers hired in real life to track down Bonnie and Clyde. Those two and a posse made up of Texas and Louisiana lawmen got the job done.

Everything in the movie was fine until close to the end when the law tracks the pair to Bienville Parish. As soon as Bienville Parish is mentioned, we see a bayou. I know Loggy Bayou is in Bienville Parish but the bayou pictured in the movie is the Classic Louisiana Movie Bayou. And then Hamer and Gault visit the Bienville Parish sheriff, whose accent makes him sound like he’s the sheriff in Plaquemines or Terrebonne or Lafourche.

There might be a half dozen people in Bienville Parish with true Cajun accents, but that’s because they moved there from south Louisiana because of marriage or a job, and they happened to bring their accent with them. A Cajun accent in north Louisiana is a novelty, like finding a guy wearing a top hat in a truck stop.

Despite that, loved The Highwaymen. Lot of subtle humor too. Lots. Don’t blink your eye or you’ll miss it.

Finally, the ambush scene was filmed at the same spot on LA Hwy 154 where the actual ambush took place. They had to put dirt on the asphalt and move some trees and plant some trees to make it “do” right, but it’s the same familiar road many of us have driven down lots of times. People once knew it as “Ringgold Road” because it runs through Ringgold, but of course the guy in the film calls it “Ringeld Road.”

At least he didn’t say it in a Cajun accent.

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