![]() ![]() Warren Oates is a gangster trying to act like a film star. Depp is a film star impersonating a gangster. Indeed, Depp is at times almost ethereal, with none of that feral quality Warren Oates has in Milius's Dillinger. ![]() The affair with the half-French, half-Indian moll Billie Frechette (a touchingly devoted Marion Cotillard) is treated with a soft romanticism. The other gangsters (even the psychotic "Baby Face" Nelson) remain rather vague figures, difficult to recognise when seen briefly and usually in the shadows. Though there is reason to believe that Harry "Pete" Pierpont was the true leader of the gang, Johnny Depp's Dillinger dominates the movie both dramatically and visually. This led to a murder warrant and the prospect of the electric chair. But he only committed a single murder (a bank guard in east Chicago). He was a violent man, much more brutal towards women than Mann suggests. He dressed smartly while going about his work, acted fearlessly, and became a self-conscious performer, behaving courteously to female hostages, developing a smart line in repartee, and never taking money directly from ordinary folk. He'd emerged into a troubled America with a warped code of honour, a ruthless drive and a new sense of self that over the next year would make him a legendary figure, part Robin Hood, for the way he stuck to robbing the bankers who'd been robbing the people, part Houdini, for his astonishing ability to escape from jails and police ambushes. His nine years in jail for a relatively minor robbery had given him professional tuition that turned him from a teenage bad boy into a dedicated crook. Mann's sleek movie (shot with a needle-sharp, unnostalgic realism by Dante Spinotti) takes us right into Dillinger's life as a man of action as he boldly springs from the Indiana state penitentiary the experienced criminals who are to form his gang. Frank Nitti, Al Capone's successor as Chicago's mob boss, makes common cause with the FBI to destroy the threateningly independent Dillinger the way the German cops and crooks get together to crush the outsider in Fritz Lang's M.īonnie and Clyde and John Milius's Dillinger (1973) set the scene with montages of celebrated Depression photographs: soup kitchens, foreclosed farms, dust-bowl devastation. And at a couple of significant points he's brought together the two strands of the gangster film. But Mann has opted for a more classical style than the New Wave-inflected Bonnie and Clyde. It is from Burrough that Michael Mann and his screenwriters, Ronan Bennett and Ann Biderman, have drawn their account of the last fatal 14 months of John Dillinger's career. ![]() The same ground is covered by Bryan Burrough in his excellent 2004 book, Public Enemies, for which he was able to draw on extensive FBI records not available to Toland. They were seen by the new generation of movie-struck rural hoodlums, and it is appropriate that the most notorious of them, John Dillinger, who grew up before the first world war on a small Indiana farm, should have been killed by the FBI in July 1934 aged 31 after watching the gangster picture Manhattan Melodrama at Chicago's Biograph Theatre.īonnie and Clyde took its facts from John Toland's The Dillinger Days, the seminal 1963 account of the Midwestern crime spree of the early 1930s and based largely on interviews with contemporary witnesses. The first cycle of gangster movies arrived with the coming of sound, which provided the necessary accompaniment of screeching tyres, chattering machine guns and rasping dialogue, and concerned big city crooks like Capone and included such classics as The Public Enemy and Little Caesar. Both streams offer contrasted images of the American Dream, the first embracing the promise of success, the second responding to the inevitability of failure. The lineal descendents of the James gang and other post-civil-war outlaws, they roamed from state to state, robbing banks and kidnapping rich victims, outdriving and outgunning the local police, recklessly heading for early graves. Penn's film dealt in a wry, romantic mock-heroic way with the crime wave that occurred in the early years of the Depression, involving disorganised, uprooted farm boys and girls of Anglo-Saxon Protestant stock. ![]() Corman's film belonged in the world of organised urban crime, run mostly by recent Catholic immigrants of Italian and Irish origin who profited from prohibition, and dealt in an objective, anti-mythical fashion with the celebrated 1929 massacre through which Al Capone established his grip on the city's vice. T he Hollywood gangster movie seemed a moribund form until it was suddenly given a new lease of life with the simultaneous appearance in 1967 of Roger Corman's only big budget film, The St Valentine's Day Massacre, and Arthur Penn's Bonnie and Clyde, which defined the two streams of the genre. ![]()
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