A new movie on the life and times of infamous US bankrobber John Dillinger is coming to the big screen. For many years such a film simply was not possible, as Stephen Hunter, special to The Washington Post, reports.
It's finally happened. A big-time, big-budget film-maker has finally put the Hollywood limelight squarely on bank robber extraordinaire John Dillinger, who for 13 months in 1933 and 1934 riveted America with his big-time take-downs, full-metal-jacket shootouts, and hairbreadth escapes, all of which climaxed in a bloody denouement in a Chicago alley under the vengeful guns of the FBI.
In fact, it's astonishing to discover that as big as he was, up to now - that is, before the opening of director Michael Mann's Public Enemies, starring Johnny Depp - only two movies had been made about the Indiana bad boy, and really only one.
The two were the 1945 Dillinger, a poverty-row production that introduced now-forgotten tough guy Lawrence Tierney to the screen, and John Milius' Dillinger, of 1973, an early film in the opus of the writer-director who would go on to carve out a niche with such macho tone poems as Conan the Barbarian and Red Dawn.
Was Hollywood, normally so avaricious in gobbling sexy story material, asleep at the wheel on this one? Did the studio system just take its eye off the ball and fail to exploit Johnny's biopic potential for such a long time? The answer is, of course not.
Dillinger, as a movie subject, fell victim to a trick of timing. It so happened that the charismatic gangster went on his spree just as forces were gathering to impress upon the renegade movie industry its responsibilities to provide a moral paradigm for the public - this after a period of plunging necklines, shimmying rear ends and ever-more-diaphanous gowns, as well as a slew of public enemies putatively condemned but actually adored by the movie boys.
Such films as 1931's original The Public Enemy, with the young, beautiful Jimmy Cagney, had given crime a glamorous allure. It was time to clamp down.
Who said so?
The Hays Office, that's who.
The Hays Office was the self-imposed censorship unit of the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors Association, an attempt to stifle government interest in censoring the flicks. It was headed by Will Hays, a former postmaster, Warren G. Harding crony and a man of righteous indignation and dictatorial temperament.
The office came up with a code by which, for at least a couple of decades, the pictures would live and die. It mandated that evil be vanquished and good be triumphant; that the anatomical structure known as the nipple must not be acknowledged; that those without a Mr and Mrs in front of their names never be seen to bed down together; that the flag never be abused; and so forth and so on.
But there was a special place in the Hays Office's hell for bigger-than-life outlaws and their inevitable sexy molls.
"No motion picture based on the exploits of John Dillinger will be produced, distributed or exhibited by any company member," said Hays himself.
"This decision is based on the belief that such a picture would be detrimental to the best public interest."
This meant, as Elliott J. Gorn comments in his nifty primer Dillinger's Wild Ride, that "any company that made a Dillinger film would be frozen out of the theatres".
Thus Dillinger, at least for a long time, was relegated to a kind of shadowy movie existence in a roman a clef fashion.
For example, Bogart - who would have made a better Dillinger? - played a dynamic bank robber named Duke Mantee in 1936's The Petrified Forest, clearly an impersonation that drew on the public's memory of the Hoosier gangster. Then Bogart had another shot, as an ageing, tragic bank robber named Roy Earle in Raoul Walsh's 1941 High Sierra, who goes down hard to law enforcement.
In the most violent of the films noirs, Jules Dassin's 100% kick-butt Brute Force, no less a dynamo than Burt Lancaster played a charismatic incarcerated robber whose memories seemed to recall certain Dillingeresque memes, such as groups of well-dressed, extremely tough men travelling by car to and from mysterious deeds. In this 1947 prison-break film, Lancaster went on to demonstrate the leadership abilities for which the original guy was famous.
But the first film that dared to actually name the man himself was the misbegotten Tierney project of '45. Why they called it Dillinger, other than as a marketing decision based on name recognition, remains a mystery, as the movie is profoundly anti-historical in all senses.
But evidently it went out under the Hays Office radar because it was produced by the nothing indie unit King Brothers. It seems to exist primarily as a method to establish Brooklyn-born Tierney's screen persona, which, too bad for him, was also his real persona: a very tough, hard-drinking no-bull kind of guy who went to fists and head-butts at the drop of a hat.
It made him enough of a star to put together a modest career that lasted almost a whole decade and included one very good film - Born to Kill, 1947 - until his drunken brawls got him essentially booted from the business and he made do as a TV character actor when he wasn't in the hoosegow. (He did have a last trick, making a bravura swan song as Joe Cabot, the growly-voiced mastermind in Quentin Tarantino's Reservoir Dogs.)
Dillinger was a big hit in its release year, even if it was banned in Chicago. But it's significant that the movie isn't one of those old-timers that lasted, probably because of the disconnect between its account of Dillinger and the well-known reality of his career. It touches on none of the high points of the robber's magical mystery tour, such as the famous wooden gun escape or the Little Bohemia shootout.
The next crack at Dillinger came in 1973, when Milius used him as a platform by which to construct a kind of cavalcade of the entire '33-'34 robbery campaign.
It was an extraordinary year, when heavily armed desperadoes prowled the highways of the Midwest and South delivering mayhem - and giving rise, in response, to a single federal agency to combat such shenanigans, the FBI. (The symbiosis between the bureau and its quarry is the subject proper of Bryan Burrough's book Public Enemies, on which the Mann film is loosely based.)
The Depression-era events were created by a weird window of opportunity: The criminals possessed better vehicles and more powerful armaments. (Their weapon of choice seemed to be the Browning automatic rifle, widely available in poorly secured National Guard armouries.) At the same time, the police lacked high-speed radio communications and were hamstrung time and again in pursuit by jurisdictional protocols, as state lines marked the limits of police effort.
Both the 1973 Dillinger and today's Public Enemies play fast and loose chronology and with character. Both absolutely love the Thompson submachine gun and both skip the same parts - such as Dillinger's less famous but more lethal breakout from the Lima, Ohio, jail, and the slaying of Sheriff Jess Sarber.
Milius was far more interested in the vivid gang members and doesn't do much with Dillinger's sometime girlfriend Billie Frechette (played by then-Mama Michelle Phillips); Mann uses the Frechette love affair as the absolute centre of the film, and chose a solemn Johnny Depp for the role for his quality of brooding romanticism, and French actress Marion Cotillard (she played Edith Piaf, for God's sake) as his ostensibly tragic lovebird.
Neither movie contemplates the central mystery of the Dillinger career. They take as a given his charisma, his leadership, his ability to woo high-talent professionals to his cause, his impeccable criminal craft and his ability (which, for example, Bonnie and Clyde utterly lacked) to use the resources of the professional crime environment for maximum benefit. But they don't ask: Where did this come from?
The reality is that farm boy and navy deserter John Dillinger was sent to prison as a 21-year-old punk in 1924 for the low-wattage crime of sticking up a grocery-store owner. Seeking to "make an example out of him," a judge sentenced Dillinger to an unduly harsh nine-year sentence. So he goes off to state prison a nobody; yet when he comes out in 1933, he is the favourite son of all the best guys.
He had their loyalty. He had connections to the network of brothels, doctors, armourers and mechanics who sustained the logistics of professional crime.
What explains Dillinger's extraordinary rise in crime culture before he'd robbed his first bank?
One could say it was his ebullient personality, his star qualities, his handsomeness, the same qualities that work outside prison. I have another theory: He was a superb athlete. He played shortstop on the prison team, the position always ceded to the best jock.
In a permanently adolescent culture like that of the Big House, that talent probably counted for a lot more than it should have. It probably got him at the cool table in the prison mess hall, got him known and loved, and gave him opportunities to deploy his charm and to dazzle men who were much further up the criminal pecking order than he was.
Both the Milius and Mann movies take on the untidy problem of the Dillinger narrative the same way. That is, truth is a lousy storyteller, especially when it comes to crime. The problem with the Dillinger story was that Johnny died too early, way before his cohorts.
He died before Homer Van Meter, before Harry Pierpont, before Pretty Boy Floyd (who may or may not have accompanied him on his last bank job), and he died before Babyface Nelson. Messy, messy! Thus both Milius and Mann after him rewrite the story and place the deaths of the supporting gang members as a consequence of the FBI's completely botched (they were very inexperienced, after all) assault on the Little Bohemia Lodge near Rhinelander, Wisconsin.
Public Enemies opens with absurd, unnecessary inaccuracies: The September breakout of six later gang members from Indiana state prison under Dillinger's leadership (Dillinger was at the time in the Lima jail; they would break him out next); and the killing of Pretty Boy Floyd by lead G-man Melvin Purvis, played by Christian Bale.
If you care at all about history, you have to wonder: What's the point? They couldn't spend all this money and come up with something better than this?
