"All we wanted was the money, just like doctors, lawyers and other businessmen. Robbing banks and trains was our way of getting it. That was our business."

For independent filmmaker Richard Linklater, making movies -- Texas-style -- is his business, though he’s not necessarily in it for the money. The recently-released film The Newton Boys, the saga of America’s most successful train robbing gang, opened nationwide on the heels of a gala Hollywood-style premiere at Austin’s Paramount theater on March 14. The $27 million film, the latest (and in this writer’s opinion, definitely the best) effort from Linklater, was a made-in-Texas project from concept to wrap party: A true Texas story, written by Texans and filmed on location in Texas. The Newton Boys also boasts a soundtrack composed and recorded by a little ol’ Austin bluegrass band called the Bad Livers and features two expatriate Texans -- Matthew McConaughey and Ethan Hawke -- in lead roles. Although modestly budgeted for a major Hollywood film, the budget was a large one compared to Linklater’s previous projects -- Slacker, Dazed and Confused, Before Sunrise -- films whose homemade, independent look gave them a sort of underground cachet. The Newton Boys, however, packs incredible firepower and comes off as a slick period action film -- atypical of the genre only in its lack of sex, profanity, and large amounts of graphic violence -- that could easily hold its own with films that cost five times as much. McConaughey plays Willis Newton, the leader of the bank-robbing clan who holds an almost religious conviction that the criminal exploits perpetrated by his five-man operation (with Ethan Hawke, Skeet Ulrich and Vincent D’Onofrio as the other three felonious Newtons, and Dwight Yoakum as an unstable gang member who can be trusted with nitroglycerin but not much else) are nothing more unsavory than "little crooks stealin’ from the big crooks."

Willis Newton’s ironic, hard-boiled philosophy gives The Newton Boys much of its quirky charm. But what the average viewer may not realize until after the film is over is that Linklater has literally ripped Willis’ character straight out of the pages of history. As the final credits roll, Willis appears in documentary footage and Joe Newton is seen on "Johnny Carson’s Tonight Show." Both brothers, then in their seventies, are as unrepentant and hard-bitten as ever. In the documentary footage that accompanies the credits, Willis stares steely-eyed at the camera and almost rants that he and his brothers were nothing more than entrepreneurs.

Linklater, along with co-screenwriters Clark Walker and Claude Stanush, really seem to have nailed the soul of a true Texas story here, and have translated it into a highly entertaining movie with sympathetic, multi-dimensional characters. The film is based on public record and interviews with Willis and Joe Newton conducted and edited by Stanush and David Middleton in the 1970s. These interviews were collected for the book The Newton Boys: Portrait of an Outlaw Gang, published by State House Press in 1994.

The book is a rollicking read and even more quirky than the film version of the Newtons’ story. The book is essentially an oral history, with introductory and transitional sections written by Stanush and Middleton. The great majority of the talking is done by Willis, who describes his childhood with his "restless" father: "My daddy was a cyclone farmer, always looking for a honey pond and a fritter tree." His mother, who once told Willis, "I guess if I had been a man, I’d a-been a bankrobber or outlaw too," would read stories about famous outlaws to the kids at night, and when she ran out of outlaw stories, she’d relate tales from the Bible.

Eventually, Willis grew disenchanted with his father’s search for honey ponds and fritter trees and with the meager opportunities for adventure and high times in hardscrabble Uvalde, Texas. "I wanted something," he says, "and I knew I would never get it following a mule’s ass and dragging cotton sacks down them middles."

If you ask me, the bad guys always get the best lines.

(4/1/98)

Film Ink site
Film Scouts Real Player interview with Matthew McConaughey
E! Online site with "Newton Babes" contest, reviews, bios, more links