DVR Diary: DILLINGER (1945)

It's hard to believe that the King Bros's poverty-row biopic, a prestige picture for lowly Monogram, was once controversial. Compared to John Milius's 1973 Dillinger and Michael Mann's 2009 Public Enemies, Max Nosseck's picture is a harshly unromanticized view of its subject, emphasizing John Dillinger's essential viciousness and pettiness as Nosseck's successors do not. The viciousness was part of the problem, however. By 1945 standards Dillinger is a very violent movie, and violence has always been crucial to movies' alleged glamorization of criminals. For those who decried that glamorization, and saw it at work in Nosseck's film, the way a gangster story was told often belied its moral. A wise old man of Hollywood saw the danger.

What gangster film doesn't want to tell the audience that Crime Does Not Pay? The proof was the dead gangster at the end of the picture. It was the same way in comic books. At the time Dillinger came out, a comic called Crime Does Not Pay was arguably the most popular title in the country. Yet crime comics were as controversial as crime movies, and for the same reason. The problem was sensationalism and violence. No matter what your ostensible message is, all the shooting and killing could make a different impression on impressionable youth. What does it matter that crime does not pay if violence becomes an end unto itself? From the time of the first crime movies, the great fear has been that violence will inspire violence, that impressionable youth will imitate what thrills them on screen. In more modern terms, Dillinger may die at the end, but while he's killing and robbing kids may find him cool.

Later Dillinger films practically invite you to find the man cool,but Nosseck's film takes more of a Crime Does Not Pay approach. As you can read above, Monogram defended its picture as "the greatest indictment of crime ever produced." And to be fair, the picture goes out of its way to portray Dillinger as a loser, a broken man in his last days, talking big briefly about forming a new super-gang but quickly deferring the event to the following year he'll never see. As played in his introductory role by Lawrence Tierney -- given unusal billing apart from the other actors and after all the other opening credits, with a fanfare of thunder and lightning - John Dillinger is a jerk who never forgets a slight, the kind of man who remembers being called a chiseler by a waiter years afterward and returns to kill the offender who had probably forgotten him within hours. He's an ingrate who bullies and eventually kills his bank-robbing mentor Specs Green (Edmund Lowe). He's kill-crazy in a way the real man really wasn't. I doubt anyone watching the film found him admirable, but some may still have enjoyed the film's violence for its own sake, tame as it is by 21st century standards.

It's tempting to treat Dillinger as a film noir since Dillinger is undone by a woman. Nosseck and writer Phillip Yordan sacrifice history to dramatic unity by making the "Lady in Red" who betrayed Dillinger in Chicago a longtime girlfriend (Anne Jeffries). She's one of his first stick-up victims, a ticket seller for a movie theater -- there's a movie motif throughout, befitting the man who met his end outside the Biograph Theater -- who's turned on by him enough to back out of identifying him in a police lineup. She proves as cynical and materialistic a customer as her boyfriend, blatantly taking up with another man after Dillinger's arrest in Tucson and finally betraying Dillinger for no other reason than the $10,000 reward money once she realizes he's washed up. In a way Dillinger starts as a Crime Does Not Pay morality play and ends up as something closer to a noir. It's telling that the film forgets its initial framing device. We open in a movie theater watching a newsreel account of Dillinger's exploits. Then an old man walks onstage and identifies himself as Dillinger's father. He explains that his son grew up like any ordinary kid, but as an adult simply never got used to the routine of doing the same thing every day. You may assume that we'll return to Papa Dillinger for the moral of the story, but the film ends with the cops' blunt inventory of the dead Dillinger's worldly possessions. On the surface this is a Crime Does Not Pay moment, but Yordan and Nosseck, or a studio editor, decided against giving anyone a definitive last word. As a result, the last we see of Dillinger is a broken man betrayed by his girl once he's used up and out of money. It looks almost as much like victimization as retribution. Rather than glorifying Dillinger, the picture makes him almost pitiable at the end. It was perhaps too subtle a statement of the Crime Does Not Pay argument for the movie moralists to recognize, and the audiences those moralists were afraid of probably only cared for the violence.

The 1945 Dillinger sets itself up as an epic with that thunder-and-lightning opening, but it falls short of the folk-epic quality of the Milius and Mann films. While the role of Dillinger made Tierney a short-lived star, and earned him a part in Reservoir Dogs nearly forty years later (his character says someone is "as dead as Dillinger"), the young actor is neither the perfect fit that Warren Oates was for Milius nor the cool icon Johnny Depp was for Mann. Tierney simply contributes a degree of brutality that was unusual and thus fresh for the time, but hasn't dated well. Nosseck surrounds him with ace character actors: Specs Green's gang includes Eduardo Ciannelli, Elisha Cook Jr. and Marc Lawrence, who are all fine, though the final scenes with Tierney and Jeffries probably have the best acting in the picture. I would say this Dillinger has value for illustrating what the culture thought of the man a decade after his death, but the controversy suggests that the culture still wasn't sure what it thought of John Dillinger. It was easier simply to treat him as a legendary outlaw the further we got away from his own time. This Dillinger also illustrates a new uncertainty about how to portray criminals in general, and that tension between moralizing and noirification will probably keep the film interesting to film buffs for as long as the categories matter.

On the Big Screen: PUBLIC ENEMIES (2009)

To introduce the new Michael Mann film, I want to spoil the ending of Jean-Pierre Melville's Le Duexieme Souffle (1966). The law has finally caught up with Lino Ventura's character, and his dying word, whispered into a detective's ear, is the name of his long-suffering girlfriend. Later, the woman asks the detective if Ventura said anything before he died. The detective says no. It's a final bit of cruelty in a cruel world that makes some lives tragic. The ending of Public Enemies reminded me of that scene, as if Mann meant it as a homage by way of variation on the theme. Mann is not above homage, as an obvious riff on the tennis scene from Strangers On a Train in the current film demonstrates, so I may not just be making stuff up here. Public Enemies is a film full of touches and moments, and I'm not yet sure how the whole adds up compared to the sum of its parts.

More or less inspired by Bryan Burrough's history of the FBI's hunt for the country bandits of the 1930s, Mann's film narrows the focus so much that it could easily have been called Dillinger if two films didn't already have that title. I only started reading Burrough's book this week, but I'm deep enough into it to see that a faithful adaptation would have to make Melvin Purvis the main character rather than any of the outlaw in order for the story to be coherent. The ideal format for a faithful adaptation would be a long-form miniseries reflecting Burrough's day-by-day, sometimes hour-by-hour tracking of the movements of several outlaw gangs, including Bonnie and Clyde, who are conspicuous by their absence from Mann's movie. In any event, something of Burrough's argument gets through, namely that Purvis and the FBI had a lot to learn before they could take out the bandit gangs. Mann only has two hours or so to work with, so the Feds are quicker studies than in the book. Mann and his writers add a note of contemporary relevance that may not be in Burrough, however, by emphasizing the extent to which the FBI resorts to torture, and pointedly showing in one scene with Billie Frechette how ineffective the tactic is. On top of that, Mann pursues a theme that isn't necessarily derived from Burrough: the FBI and the Syndicate are on parallel paths of modernization and systemization that leaves no room for free-spirited outlaws like Dillinger. Frank Nitti's highly organized bookmaking operation mirrors the FBI's surveillance operation. When the latter impinges on the former, Nitti blames Dillinger, and the Syndicate will no longer offer him sanctuaries or supplies. Finnaly, they will help set the bandit up for execution outside the Biograph theater.

But Mann isn't saying anything as simple as "Dillinger was destroyed by modernity." His Dillinger is a romantic hero who dooms himself for love. He could have steered clear of Chicago one things got hot for him, but he could not abandon Billie Frechette. His devotion undermines his survival strategy. As he explains it earlier in the film, because he can strike anywhere, the Feds have to be everywhere. It follows that he benefits from the enemy's overstretched resources. But once love enters the picture, and once the Feds know it, they have a hook in him. They know that he will either go to Billie, who is always under surveillance, or she'll go to him, and she can be followed. Dillinger can't be pragmatic enough to let her go, because he believes in going after what he wants. That's part of living in the moment for him, without concern for the past or the future. The Feds' strategy doesn't actually work, but it does land Billie in jail, and you can assume from that point that Dillinger is doomed once he's told there's no chance of breaking her out. The romance isn't overstated at all; it's pretty much something that happens, Dillinger doing something on impulse. There's no convincing "why" to it, but there doesn't need to be.

But why didn't the FBI plan work? Why couldn't they catch Dillinger with Billie as the lure? The explanation is a little hard to swallow, since it depends on us accepting Mann's thesis that the most wanted man in America, played by Johnny Depp, is an almost invisibly inconspicuous person. Surrounded by unwitting FBI men, he can get out of his car and walk around while Billie's being arrested without being noticed -- perhaps because the Feds had lost track of which days he wore a moustache and which he didn't. Then, as if you weren't baffled enough, he decides to stroll into the Chicago Police Department, into the Dillinger Unit, to moon over photos of deceased comrades and say hello to the unit who are huddled over the radio listening to a baseball game. This is why the Feds need Dillinger's date at the Biograph to wear conspicuous clothes. This is why during the newsreel at an earlier show (this is the Strangers homage I mentioned) audience members can look right at him while watching his image on the screen and not recognize him. Now I know Dillinger says at one point that he thrives by living among the people, but I thought he meant by that that he had to stay popular (hence he rejects Alvin Karpis's offer to take part in a kidnapping) -- not that he had the power to cloud men's minds. But I can see where Mann is coming from. He's cultivated a rather introverted performance from Depp, quite a contrast from Warren Oates's cocky flamboyance in the 1973 film. I would say this was typical of Mann, but I haven't seen as many of his movies as other people and wouldn't want to be caught in an error.

Nevertheless, Depp is a more sensitive, intimate bandit than Oates. He feels the pain of friends' deaths when Oates is in too much of a hurry to worry. There's a lot of watching people die in this picture, the point being that a certain old breed of men can stand the sight while a more modern type like Melvin Purvis (historically about the same age as Dillinger) can't. But though Depp can stand it, that doesn't make him exactly stoic. He may not fall to his knees and cry "Noooo!" when someone dies, but it isn't exactly hard boiled, either, so it seems a little anachronistic, though not as much so as some of the music on the soundtrack. Please don't mistake me; I think Depp gave a good performance, but it's not as open to audience identification as was Oates's Dillinger, who is living out a debased version of the American dream while Depp pursues a more personal style of freedom. Both actors are convincing as hard men, but Depp is bound to suffer in a superficial comparison with Oates because Oates gave a broader performance without sacrificing his inherent authenticity, while Mann's conception of Dillinger seems to be such that Depp would rather that we all left him alone until he got interested in us.

As Purvis, Christian Bale suffers in comparison with Ben Johnson in the Milius Dillinger because the Mann script underplays Purvis's rivalry with J. Edgar Hoover, who appears here as Billy Crudup but was only ever mentioned in the Milius, which came out only a year after Hoover died. Hoover is a showier, more mannered role that Crudup makes the most of, while Purvis, despite being the slayer of Pretty Boy Floyd, is forced to declare his inadequacy against Dillinger and is taunted for a supposed lack of hardness by Dillinger himself. Having Bale in this role is ironic in a sense, since the perceived superhuman prowess of criminals like Dillinger probably fueled the public appetite for super-heroes like Batman, who first appeared five years after Dillinger's death. Bale's South Carolina accent is serviceable if not necessarily credible, but Mann's conception of the story prevents the Purvis-vs-Dillinger conflict from being the mano-a-mano showdown of glory hounds that Milius portrayed, and Bale is limited as a result. For Mann's purposes he's fine, but Mann may not have done Purvis full justice here. Speaking of accents, I distracted myself for a while in an effort to determine whether or not Marion Cotillard as Billie was dubbed, but I finally decided it was her own voice, betrayed occasionally by just a hint of her home accent. Now watch someone prove me wrong.

Curiously, Mann repeats a historical error Milius made, and both cases were probably on purpose. The error is having Baby Face Nelson die during the battle of Little Bohemia. Nelson actually outlived Dillinger by several months, not being hunted down until November 1934. But in a Dillinger movie Nelson can only serve as a foil, a mad dog killer who makes Dillinger sympathetic by comparison. Having Nelson with Dillinger at Little Bohemia but having him escape leaves a loose end that's irrelevant to the Dillinger story, so it makes sense dramatically to kill him there. It might be better to do away with Nelson as a character altogether except for the contrast he provides.

By now, some readers may think I've missed the point of a Michael Mann movie, so let me say that the film is often gorgeous to look at thanks to Dante Spinotti's cinematography and Mann's own framing vision. The opening prison break is probably the film's best action sequence, with the movie's most arresting moment perhaps being when Dillinger's mentor dies while hanging out a car door in Dillinger's grasp. It's the first of those many looking-at-the-face-of-death moments and sets the tone for the rest. The other set-pieces are effectively done, but if Public Enemies was an opportunity for Mann to top the bank robber in Heat, I don't think he pulled it off. Elliot Goldenthal's original score was cliched and weak; he's done a lot better a lot of the time.

So Public Enemies gave me a lot to talk about, and I think I ought to leave it at that for now. I've watched the Milius Dillinger too recently for me to judge Mann's film with full fairness, and Mann's departures from Burrough's book are also prejudicing me slightly. I think I can be objective enough to say that the film is rich with content that each viewer must judge for him or herself. Whether anyone agrees with Mann or Depp's interpretation of Dillinger differs from the question of whether they made a good film. For the time being, while I lean toward liking Milius's film better, I think I can say safely that Mann's is also a good film and a worthy addition to the Dillinger canon.

DILLINGER (1973)

Michael Mann's Public Enemies, the latest cinema version of the hunt for John Dillinger, opens this week. That makes this as good a time as any to revisit a past favorite account of the same story, John Milius's directorial debut from 1973 with the great Warren Oates as the title bandit and Ben Johnson as Melvin Purvis as a Gorch-vs-Gorch showdown across the American midwest. I don't do this to set the Milius up as a standard for Mann to match. Dillinger's story is eminently available for anyone to make a movie from, and it had been done long before Milius, back in 1945 with Laurence Tierney starring. Many different takes on the Dillinger or Purvis stories are possible, but it's inevitable when I go to Public Enemies this weekend that I'll be comparing it to the 1973 film.

Dillinger is a product of its own time as much as it is of Dillinger's own. It's part of a cycle of films about country bandits of the Depression years that dates back at least as far as Bonnie and Clyde and probably can be traced all the way to the Untouchables TV show. As part of that cycle, a key ingredient of the film is extreme violence. I think it's safe to say that more characters die in this movie by a wide margin than were killed during the actual Dillinger crime wave. This is violence for its own sake, killing for the love of killing, not to mention the love of squibs and blood packs and stuntmen falling off rooftops and landing on cars. There's a gratuitous visual focus on the moments of impact that probably won't be seen in Public Enemies, but some of the set piece battles staged by Milius could well look like a challenge to the director of Heat.

Violence: A woman run down by Dillinger's getaway car.

Dillinger steps over the corpse of accomplice Reed Youngblood

(Milius stock player Frank McRae)

There Must Be Blood: From the Little Bohemia raid.

Michelle Phillips as Billie Frechette stands by her man.

"Things ain't been going right for me today." Harry Dean Stanton goes up in a puff of gunpowder.

The country bandit films have a kind of master premise that crime was the only way some poor people were ever going to realize their particular American dreams. Dillinger embraces that idea, with emphasis on fame as the real goal for both Dillinger and his publicity-hungry pursuer. As one wannabe gang member says, "I'm already a murderer, so I might as well be famous." In one scene, Dillinger forces bar patrons to cough up their money, only to throw it all down on the floor once he's satisfied that they know who he is ("Look at my face, you sons of bitches!"). In his opening scene, he makes the fame-matters-more-than-money argument to a bank teller at gunpoint.

These few dollars you lose here today, they'll buy you stories to tell your children and your great-grandchildren. This could be one of the big moments of your life. Don't make it your last.

For Dillinger, fame is to be enjoyed while alive. When one of his partners is killed, he buries him in an unmarked grave with a twenty-dollar bill in place of a cross. He calls his pal a "well-known man" and compares him with the legendary outlaws of the Wild West, but he buries the man anonymously in order to save the corpse from exploitation by people who might dig it up and put it on exhibit. Fame is double-edged, however. Hiding out in Arizona under an assumed name, he finds that people tell him, "You look like John Dillinger." Photographs and newsreels make his face perhaps even more famous than his name. During a prison break, he accosts a mechanic who gapes at the sight of him. "I've seen your picture in the newspapers!" the mechanic exclaims, "You're him!"

Fame matters to the lawmen, too. The officer who first captures Dillinger makes sure to identify himself as Big Jim Willard, the killer of 35 men. Purvis is desperate to be recognized as a hero and envious of his boss J. Edgar Hoover stealing the spotlight. He's offended that children would rather play crook than G-Man and see no point in going to school since Dillinger didn't. But Purvis earns a good name at least among his enemies. When he takes down Pretty Boy Floyd, for instance, Floyd says, "You must be Purvis...I'm glad it was you." On both sides, it seems, a concern for reputation extends to having worthy opponents. Purvis himself says of Dillinger, "I've grown rather fond of him myself in a strange sort of way." Historically, Purvis never got the degree of fame he considered his due; the movie reminds us that he committed suicide in 1961 (Wikipedia says 1960) after breaking with Hoover and failing as a private detective.

Ben Johnson as Melvin Purvis exults in press coverage of his single-handed destruction of Wilbur Underhill, the Tri-State Terror.

To an extent, however, Milius loses track of the fame theme as the violence escalates, climaxing in his exaggerated version of the Little Bohemia raid. The film sort of sputters to a stop after that, as Cloris Leachman appears for little more than a one-scene cameo to set up the ambush outside the Biograph theater. While Milius has been exaggerating if not falsifying events throughout the picture up to this point, he fails to dramatize Dillinger's last days in any way. The statement that Dillinger likes to go to the movies is maybe meant to remind us that the man is sort of starstruck, but this is told of him rather than expressed by him. It seems like there should have been a final scene to give Oates a chance to sum up his and Milius's interpretation of the doomed criminal, but it either didn't happen or it ended up on the cutting-room floor.

Richard Dreyfuss as Baby Face Nelson picks on someone his own size.

A perfunctory finish and a bit of overindulgence in montages that mix black-and-white stills of the cast with newsreel and old movie footage are flaws, but overall Milius's Dillinger is a dynamic action film that is also a kind of American idyll in Fordian scenes that reunite Dillinger with his family and show a camaraderie among criminals that extends (perhaps improbably) across racial lines. The exception to this spirit is Richard Dreyfuss's surly hothead, Baby Face Nelson, a big man when threatening nuns but easily put in his place with a good bitch-slapping at the hands of Oates, one of cinema's master bitch-slappers in perhaps all senses of the term.

Billie Frechette once dared say that John Dillinger looked like Douglas Fairbanks (senior, presumably). The bandit was not flattered.

A glory of Seventies cinema is the fact that such a man as Oates could become a top-billed star of such mighty works as this one, Cockfighter, and Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia. There's an uncanny quality to the man that I can't quite call charisma. It's more like a sense that here is a man, perhaps the last real man or the last of a certain kind that was once more common hereabouts. It comes through even when he plays a cocky narcissist like Dillinger. It's a telling difference between then and now that Johnny Depp is the Dillinger of our time -- no offense intended to Depp, but you see what I mean. It's the same difference between Ben Johnson and Christian Bale, again with no offense to Bale, who I believe is actually closer to Purvis's real age at the time of the story. I look forward to Public Enemies and expect good things from it, but these are differences that mean something, if not to the particular film than to the movie industry as a whole.

This guard's skeptical declaration, "That ain't real!" when confronted with Dillinger's soap gun has long been my private mantra whenever I see an unconvincing special effect in a movie.

When I was a kid in the 1970s, it seemed like the past was just around the corner. I could go into used book stores and antique stores and buy old issues of Life, Look, the Saturday Evening Post, National Geographic, etc., for pittances by today's standards. There were parts of town that seemed to have hardly changed from twenty, thirty, forty years earlier. When I look at the location work in Milius's Dillinger and the open country roads I feel like I'm transported not directly to 1934 but to my own childhood, when it seemed that I could reach the Thirties on foot if I only knew the right route. If this be nostalgia, make the most of it. I don't expect the same sensation from Public Enemies, but if it achieves that on top of what I do expect, it'd be icing on a cake.

Here's the trailer, uploaded to YouTube by tvsdavid316


And as a bonus, old time newsreel footage of the real man in life and death, narrated by Lowell Thomas, who calls our culprit "Dilling-grr." It was uploaded by mrpitv