Vitals

Michael J. Pollard as C.W. Moss, slow-witted mechanic-turned-bank robber

Iowa, Summer 1933

Film: Bonnie & Clyde
Release Date: August 13, 1967
Director: Arthur Penn
Costume Designer: Theadora Van Runkle

WARNING! Spoilers ahead!

Background

W.D. “Deacon” Jones may not be as famous as Bonnie Parker or Clyde Barrow, but the Dallas teenager was once among their closest companions in the notorious Barrow gang.

At only 16 years old, Jones was running jobs and riding shotgun on robberies, a role later blended with the gang’s informant Henry Methvin to create the fictionalized composite character C.W. Moss in Arthur Penn’s landmark 1967 film Bonnie & Clyde. Jones lived long enough to see the movie and admitted in a Playboy interview that “Moss was a dumb kid who run errands and done what Clyde told him… that was me, all right.”

Having survived countless shootouts during nearly a year riding with the Barrow gang, Jones ultimately couldn’t escape the fate that had claimed his contemporaries. Fifty-one years ago today in Houston during the early morning hours of August 20, 1974, the 58-year-old Jones was shot three times with a 12-gauge shotgun during an altercation outside a friend’s house.

While the character was clearly modeled after Clyde Barrow’s criminal cohorts, the late Michael J. Pollard drew inspiration for his Academy Award-nominated performance from Bob Dylan, basing C.W.’s accent on Dylan’s singing voice on the then-recently released Blonde on Blonde album. (In fact, Dylan had originally been Warren Beatty’s first choice to play Clyde himself, owing partly to the singer’s resemblance to the outlaw, until Beatty ultimately cast himself in the role.)

Pollard, Beatty, and co-stars Faye Dunaway, Gene Hackman, and Estelle Parsons were all nominated for Oscars, though the film’s two wins from its ten nominations went to cinematographer Burnett Guffey and to Parsons—who won Best Supporting Actress for her shrill but affecting turn as Clyde’s sister-in-law Blanche. Bonnie & Clyde thus became one of only nine films to date to receive five acting nominations at the Academy Awards, but beyond its many accolades, it also stands as a bloody watershed of the emerging “New Hollywood” movement—shaped by the influence of French New Wave cinema and the crumbling of the MPAA’s long-standing Production Code—artistically introducing sex and violence to American screens in ways audiences had never seen before.

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What’d He Wear?

When C.W. Moss is first recruited by Bonnie and Clyde while working at a country gas station, he looks every bit the scrappy mechanic with a year in a reformatory behind him—dressed in double denim with a Type I-style jacket and jeans, topped off with a flat cap, neckerchief, and cowboy boots for a distinctly Texan edge.

Through his tenure with the gang, he follows the suit-wearing Clyde’s example of developing a slightly more sophisticated sense of dressing. His cap, jeans, and boots are mainstays, but he eventually swaps out the denim jacket for a rotation of tweeds like the lightweight herringbone coat over a shirt he buttons to the neck à la Clyde’s usual “air ties”, rather than the neckerchiefs he’d previously worn to catch sweat as the Barrow gang’s designated grease monkey.

Regardless of how he may dress up his duds with smart sport jackets, C.W.’s usual dark-brown tweed flat cap emphasizes his boyish appearance compared to the fedora-sporting Clyde and Buck.

C.W.’s sport jacket when the gang arrives in Platte City—and subsequently fights their way out of it—is woven in a brown-and-tan herringbone tweed, additionally patterned with muted rust-colored stripes that alternate with broken vertical stripes formed by tufts of the darker brown yarn. The herringbone demonstrates Clyde’s continued influence on the younger C.W., as Beatty’s Barrow had worn a similarly toned herringbone tweed suit during the gang’s most successful bank robbery.

The single-breasted jacket is well-cut with padded shoulders and a full chest, building the slumping young man’s silhouette. He typically wears the notch lapels with the collar turned up, a touch of rakish rebellion that illustrates he isn’t yet as comfortable in tailored clothing as the Barrow brothers. The ventless jacket is sportily detailed with patch pockets over the hips and breast, and the sleeves are finished with two buttons at each cuff.

The two woven leather buttons have a high-positioned stance on the front of the jacket; C.W. wears the lower button fastened—not only because it aligns more closely to his waist but also presumably a tactical decision to cover the revolver shoved in his jeans. (Of course, this only works if he keeps the jacket buttoned… especially in the presence of law enforcement.)

C.W. wears a deep indigo-blue work shirt patterned with a tight white field of dense but evenly spaced pin-dots, plain-woven in a crisp cotton with a contrasting beige thread along the seams that present a denim-like appearance. The shirt has a point collar, two patch-style breast pockets (with a pen slot on the right pocket), single-button cuffs with buttoning gauntlets, and a front placket with a slightly extended tab at the top that buttons through one of two buttonholes—allowing the wearer to adjust the tightness when closing the shirt over the throat. The clear plastic two-hole buttons shine white against the darker blue shirting.

I always thought this shirt was an interesting wardrobe choice for C.W., as it actually somewhat resembles the white-flecked light-blue shirt that the real Clyde Barrow was wearing when he was killed in May 1934.

C.W.’s shirt, faded blue jeans, and black leather cowboy boots through this sequence are all the same as he had been wearing when first recruited to join Bonnie and Clyde’s crime spree. Together, these humble, hardworking clothes that lean on durability and rural Texas practicality reflect C.W.’s role in the gang rather than the leader Clyde’s aspirational tailoring.

His straight-leg jeans are made from a light-to-medium blue wash denim, realistically faded from wear and the elements. With a hint of that familiar red tab visible against the seam of the jeans’ back-right pocket, we can decidedly identify them as the classic button-fly Levi’s 501, albeit with the leather or Jacron “Two Horses” patch removed from the back-right side of the waistband; Theadora Van Runkle’s costume team may have also intended to cut off the red tab, explaining why we only catch a subtle glimpse of it in certain shots.

Though Levi’s had been producing their “waist overalls” since 1873, C.W.’s jeans are an anachronistic post-World War II model as evident by the lack of suspender buttons (removed in 1937) and a back cinch (removed in the ’40s to conform to War Production Board standards). However, the non-centered back belt loop at least suggests C.W.’s jeans were produced before 1964.

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The Guns

Colt Police Positive

Bonnie & Clyde attributes the Colt Police Positive spotted by a Platte City deputy in C.W.’s waistband as the quiet flashpoint that sets the gang on their path toward destruction. Colt had introduced the Police Positive in 1905 as a modernized double-action revolver for the law enforcement market, with a six-round swing-out cylinder for somewhat anemic .32- and .38-caliber rounds. The stronger-framed Police Positive Special was rolled out later in the decade, capable of firing the more powerful .32-20 Winchester and .38 Special rounds—the latter in particular making it a police favorite for decades to follow.

With a .38 Special model manufactured in 1922 in my collection, the Police Positive remains one of my favorite early 20th century handguns. It blends the cool factor of a .38 Special six-shooter favored by cops and crooks alike into something with Colt’s signature reliability and something that can be a little more easily carried and concealed than full-size contemporaries like the Colt Official Police or the Smith & Wesson Model 10. That said, you should still carry it in a proper holster and not crudely stuffed into your waistband (sans belt, no less!) like C.W.

Thompson M1921AC

C.W. joins Bonnie and Clyde in using Thompson M1921AC submachine guns to lay down a storm of fire during the Platte City gunfight that keeps the encircling police at bay long enough for their escape—though not without injury. In truth, Clyde Barrow preferred the heavier Browning Automatic Rifle, but Thompsons weren’t entirely absent from the gang’s history. Early in their spree, Clyde and Ralph Fults acquired several from a pawn shop in Illinois in spring 1932, and kidnapped policeman Tom Persell reported seeing a Thompson among the gang’s arsenal after he was taken by Clyde, Bonnie, and W.D. Jones in January 1933.

Conceived in the aftermath of World War I by Brigadier General John T. Thompson, the compact “submachine gun” quickly earned favor with both lawmen and outlaws, capable of unleashing .45 ACP firepower from 20-round box or 50- and 100-round drum magazines at blistering rates exceeding 700 rounds per minute. This ferocity came at the cost of accuracy, as barrels had a tendency to climb, leading to the 1926 introduction of the Cutts compensator (the “AC” suffix denoting Automatic with Compensator) and, two years later, the Navy’s slower-cycling M1928 with a heavier actuator.

Though designed with military applications in mind, the Thompson earned its notoriety on American streets as the “Chicago typewriter”, immortalized in headlines during the bloody Beer Wars of the Prohibition era. Its reputation shifted during World War II, when simplified wartime variants like the M1928A1, M1, and M1A1 shed the signature vertical foregrip and moved the charging handle to the side, recasting the Tommy gun as a heroic battlefield weapon rather than the gangster’s tool of choice.

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The Car

Though Clyde Barrow so strongly preferred Ford V8 models that he reportedly wrote a letter to Henry Ford praising them, few Fords actually appear in Bonnie & Clyde—at least until the final act. Bonnie & Clyde depicts C.W.’s theft of the now-famous “death car”—a Cordoba gray 1934 Ford V8 DeLuxe Fordor (Model 730)—from an Iowa farm in the aftermath of the bloody Dexfield Park ambush that claimed Buck’s life and resulted in Blanche’s capture.

In real life, Clyde stole this Ford from outside of the Topeka, Kansas home of Ruth Warren, who had recently purchased the Ford from the Mosby-Mack Motor Company. At the time that Clyde stole it on April 29, 1934, it still had Mrs. Warren’s Kansas license plates (#3-17832), which Clyde would swiftly replace with a set of Arkansas plates (#15-368) stolen from Fayetteville.

After Bonnie and Clyde were killed inside the car nearly a month later on May 23, 1934, a Dallas Associated Press reporter called Mrs. Warren to verify the details of her missing Ford, such as the original license plates and the engine identification number (#649198). Delighted that her car was found but baffled as to why an AP reporter would make a long-distance call to confirm it, Mrs. Warren receives the shocking explanation that “Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker were just killed in your car,” before the reporter hangs up.

Ford had introduced their famous flathead V8 engine in 1932, an automotive milestone that gave Ford a performance edge over its competition. By 1934, this 221 cubic-inch engine’s output had increased from 65 to 85 horsepower as the result of carburetor and ignition improvements over the preceding two years. It’s perhaps no coincidence that this period completely overlaps with Clyde’s crime spree, as the will-‘o-the-wisp bandit powered his freedom through the most powerful weapons and cars he could steal.

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How to Get the Look

C.W. Moss’ wardrobe feels surprisingly timeless and rugged, smartly pairing coarse textures and workwear staples like a tweed sports coat, dotted work shirt, blue jeans, and cowboy boots—as if he’d stepped from the same mood boards that pin Ralph Lauren and Harrison Ford under #menswear. The look is topped with a ’30s-inspired flat cap, cut from a similarly hardy tweed that ties the whole outfit together.

• Brown-and-tan herringbone (with woven brown broken-stripe and muted rust stripe) tweed single-breasted 2-button sport jacket with notch lapels, patch breast pocket, patch hip pockets, 2-button cuffs, and ventless back
• Blue (with white pin-dots) plain-weave cotton long-sleeved work shirt with point collar, 2-button throat tab, front placket, two patch chest pockets, and button cuffs with gauntlet buttons
• Light-blue denim jeans with belt loops and five-pocket layout
• Black leather cowboy boots
• Dark-brown tweed flat cap

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Do Yourself a Favor and…

Check out the movie.