DVR Diary: PRIVATE PROPERTY (1960)

A hit in Europe but condemned at home for its frankness about sexual need, Leslie Stevens' film was widely thought lost until a restoration premiered at last year's TCM Film Festival. Private Property is frank without being explicit, of course, but the fact that no one could mistake what its characters are after no doubt made many people uncomfortable back then. Duke (Corey Allen, the chicken-run loser from Rebel Without a Cause) and Boots (Warren Oates, whose presence no doubt gave this film instant hipness upon its rediscovery) want to "make it" with a girl, Boots apparently for the first time. Though Oates was several years Allen's senior, Boots is the junior partner of the pair, unless Duke's "When I was your age ..." remark is meant as a joke. These guys are drifters and, apparently grifters who come in from off the beach to shake down a gas station for soda pop and cigarettes, hitch a ride and virtually carjack their way at both explicit (Oates) and implicit (Allen) knifepoint to where they want to go. The tone is set when Duke's threat/bluff proves more intimidating than the actual steel in Boots' hand. Duke's most dangerous weapon is his gift of gab. Casing a neighborhood to find an abandoned house, he starts a long-con seduction of the bored, sexually-frustrated housewife Ann (Kate "Mrs. Stevens" Manx), supposedly in order to deliver her to the waiting Boots. Posing as a door-to-door landscaper (a job he probably did hold at some point), Duke seems to respond to the prospect of genuine emotional and sexual conquest as Ann's need becomes apparent. Yet he also feels honor-bound to fulfill his promise to Boots, who proves a very reluctant rapist. Despite that, the thought of Ann submitting to Boots breaks Duke's heart and his mind. He takes his disappointment out on her, leaving a more realistic bruise on her face than you usually saw in movies at that time, and it's Boots who comes to her rescue, or tries to.

The film ends in Lifetime movie territory and the last line's promise of marital reconciliation is truly awful, but otherwise Private Property lives up to its fresh ahead-of-its-time reputation. Corey Allen gradually moved behind the camera to become a busy TV director but might have lasted long in front of the camera had this been more widely seen in the U.S. His future as a character actor as films grew both more frank and more explicit later in the Sixties probably would have been assured. He gives Duke a certain fragile charisma, the fragility of which may have made him only more attractive to Ann, compared to her aloof though well-meaning husband. Boots is early Warren Oates, from when he seemed typed as a sub-normal, and the actor doesn't get to shine as much as Allen does. His two big moments are the quasi-rape scene and the funnier bit when Boots, finally invited to Ann's house, has to play the role assigned him by Duke, an appliance store sales manager, while explaining his unprofessionally scruffy appearance. If anything, Manx, who broke up with Stevens and killed herself in 1964, is all too convincing in Ann's desperation, and I say that having not known the actress's fate until a few minutes ago. It's probably too soon to call Private Property a rediscovered classic, but it's now doubly fascinating as a historic document, both for what the film itself tells us of its time, and for what the time told us of itself by suppressing it.

DVR Diary: CHINA 9, LIBERTY 37 (1978)

The film with a title like a football score -- it refers to a signpost at a fork in the road -- is a late mating of the Italian spaghetti western with the American revisionist western.  The Italians contributed the script, most of the crew and cast, including action star Fabio Testi, who was top billed on posters in many markets. The Americans contributed director Monte Hellman, whose cult westerns Ride the Whirlwind and The Shooting were contemporary with the spaghettis' golden age a decade earlier; Warren Oates, who needs no introduction to western fans and is top-billed in the film itself; and sex. China 9 is a more adult film in its concern with the call of the flesh than most spaghettis, and for that reason, probably, it feels more like an American film. It feels especially like a revisionist film in its apparent repudiation of violence at the very end, though that comes about, in a part, in a positively archaic manner. It's less an "end of the west" film than an "end of the western," since there's a sense of exhaustion about it that overshadows its positive qualities.

We start with an archetypal spaghetti situation: gunfighter Clayton Drumm (Testi apparently speaks his own accented dialogue in the English version) gets a reprieve from hanging on the condition that he kill a former railroad enforcer whose land (and his stubborness) stands in the way of progress. Matt Sebanek (Oates) knows Drumm for what he is, and the mutual recognition forms the basis for mutual respect. If anything, the fact that Mrs. Sebanek (Jenny Agutter) has the hots for Drumm makes him more reluctant to kill Matt. But when he decides to leave Matt alive and leave the territory, she can't resist one more try, and finally he can't resist. Once Matt realizes what's happened he's ready to kill Drumm and slaps the shit out of Catherine, but she's a fighter, too. She stabs Matt in the shoulder with a kitchen knife and beans him with the housewife's archetypal weapon, the rolling pin. Convinced that she's killed the merely kayoed Matt, she runs off to join Drumm.

Somehow managing to extract the knife -- Hellman shows us his earlier futile effort but leaves the resolution offscreen, Matt gathers his brothers and hits the vengeance trail. Meanwhile, the railroad men send killers after Drumm, who failed to kill as ask, and Matt, whom they wanted dead in the first place. Matt's clan finally catches Catherine and wounds a fleeing Drumm, but as his brothers abuse his wife -- one tries to rape her -- Matt's own anger ebbs. All trails converge back at the Sebanek place, where Drumm and Matt team up to wipe out their pursuers before having their own showdown.

A brilliantly shot scene conveys how Drumm and Matt are men apart. Before everything goes bad, Matt's brothers come to his place for a party. The brothers set up some bottles for target shooting and are pretty bad at it. While we see them fire away ineptly, we see the two real gunmen quietly going about some business. Later, as the extended family sits at a picnic table for some music, we can see Drumm and Matt discussing the former's plans -- he has told Matt he's moving on -- in a far corner of the screen. Overall the film is nicely shot by Giuseppe Rotunno, who had The Leopard on his resume and would move on to All That Jazz between Fellini gigs. Pino Donaggio's score leaves something to be desired, sounding a little too contemporary for its own good. Hellman, who directed some of Oates's best performances in Two Lane Blacktop and Cockfighter, gets dependably good work from here, while Testi struggles for credibility between his accent and his designation as beefcake but manages somehow to project the right attitude of weary arrogance. In the end, there's something too good to be true about Clayton Drumm. In the climactic gunfight he actually shoots Matt's gun out of his hand like a Saturday matinee singing cowboy. Matt is chagrined and a little disgusted, telling him that soft-hearted gunfighters -- Drumm is sparing Matt's life, you see -- don't last long in this territory. The final twist to the story is that Matt takes his own advice to heart. He keeps his wife but quits everything else, burning his house down after they pack their goods on a wagon instead of holding out against the railroad. These end notes of reconciliation and renunciation seem like a betrayal of the hard-eyed realism of the revisionist westerns and the cynicism of the spaghettis. It's arguably valid on the film's own terms but it still looks like giving up, and it looks less like Matt giving up on his land than the filmmakers giving up on the western. Appropriately enough, this was just about the end of the line for the Italian western, while the American genre was in such a virtual dormancy that attempted revival films of the Eighties like Silverado would look like historic events. China 9, Liberty 37 signifies two directions a traveler can take, but the film itself, good as it often is, looks like a dead end.

Yaphet Kotto in DRUM (1976)

Hammond Maxwell went through some harrowing experiences in Richard Fleischer's Mandingo, the hit adaptation of Kyle Onstott's slavesploitation bestseller, and he appears in the sequel, adapted from Onstott's own follow-up novel, a much changed man. What does a man have to go through to change from Perry King into Warren Oates? There are hints of Hammond's adventures since we last saw him boiling his prize fighting slave in a cauldron and mourning his murdered father. In Drum he tells us that he's been married twice, apparently not counting the bride he poisoned in the first film. Actually, there's only one reference to the events of Mandingo in the entire sequel, when Hammond mentions that he had to kill a favorite slave once because he let his pecker do his thinking for him. That may be because United Artists, rather than Paramount, distributed the sequel, but whatever the reason, Drum may as well start from scratch. Rather than the almost offensively tragic figure of Mandingo, where he was shown as much a slave of the system as his chattels, Hammond, as played broadly by Oates, is almost a comedy-relief figure, clownishly boorish and still not really as malignant or corrupt as his slaveholding peers. Most importantly, he isn't really Drum's main character. That's the man the film is named for, played by the returning Ken Norton between heavyweight fights. The point of recasting Norton is somewhat lost, though. From what I've read about Onstott's novel, Drum is supposed to resemble and remind Hammond of Mede, the character Norton played in Mandingo. The resemblance is never noted, however.

"We aint gonna worry 'bout that kind of henshit!" Warren Oates holds forth in Drum.

Drum is a scaled-down sequel, replacing Richard Fleischer with Steve Carver behind the camera and relying heavily on an obvious soundstage set for whorehouse exteriors during the opening New Orleans sequence. Carver is no nonentity; he deserves a small piece of genre immortality, in my book, for directing one of the last great B movies, the Chuck Norris-David Carradine showdown Lone Wolf McQuade. There's comparatively little action in Drum until the end, but Carver keeps things moving briskly with a visceral intensity. He might have kept some of the actors under tighter rein, but there'd hardly be a point to the picture had he done so. If Mandingo itself was an exploitation film, Drum exploits Mandingo. The only direction to go is over the top.

Mandingo plus homophobia plus homoeroticism (female category) plus castration anxiety plus a slave uprising equals Drum. Along with all that, there's a documentary style opening set in Cuba, and a narration detailing the spawning of Drum, the mulatto son of Marianna (Isela Vega), an aristocrat turned madam, and Tambura, a lion-hunting African warrior. To preserve what's left of Marianna's honor, her handmaiden (and lover) Rachel raises Drum as her own son and a refined house servant of Marianna's famous New Orleans bordello. Mild-mannered Drum is no fighter, but is pressed into combat when a slave scheduled to fight for the entertainment of bordello patrons is withheld by his master.

Drum's first fight pits him against Blaise (blogathon honoree Yaphet Kotto), who belongs to the flaming villain De Marigny (champion ham and future betrayer of the human race John Colicos). Blaise has all the advantages of experience and technique, but Drum's raw strength carries the day after he catches his man in a rib-snapping bear hug. Afterward, a disgusted De Marigny decides to castrate Blaise, but when Drum appeals for mercy, he makes a present of Blaise to the victorious slave (to Marianna legally, of course), along with the female slave of his choice. That bit comes with a catch; when Drum beds his female prize, De Marigny wants to join in. Drum can still have the girl to himself; it's not her the white man wants. But neither Drum nor Calinda (Brenda Sykes, also of Mandingo) wants any of that, and the formerly magnanimous De Marigny becomes Drum's mortal enemy, even sending hired thugs to attack him. Fearful for her son's safety, Marianna decides to sell him to Hammond Maxwell, who's always looking for good studs, but she insists on his taking Blaise along as part of a package deal.

This brings us back to dear old Falconhurst plantation, where "we don't grow cattle, just n*ggers." Hammond makes Drum an overseer in all but name, but insists that the newcomer learn to talk more "n*ggerish" as a matter of deference. Both Drum and Blaise become house servants, but while their main job is to breed more slave "suckers" (is this where Barnum got the idea about them being born every minute?) they're also potential prey for Hammond's horny idiot daughter Sophie (Cheryl "Rainbeaux" Smith). Along for the ride are Hammond's new housemistress Augusta, a white lady hired to keep Sophie in line, and his new bed wench Regine ("Pamela" Grier), who for some reason has had five different masters in the past two years. While Hammond's made clear that he has no sexual interest in white women, Gussie is jealous of Regine's bed privileges, and tries to pair off Regine and Drum. Regine likes this idea and coaches Gussie on how to make herself attractive to Hammond.

Pam Grier offers some advice to the lovelorn: crazy white girls like Cheryl 'Rainbeaux' Smith aren't worth the risk of getting nutted for someone like Yaphet Kotto.

Meanwhile, Drum and Blaise have all they can handle keeping Sophie out of their pants, though Blaise is somewhat less steadfast on this point than Drum. Our hero tries to keep Blaise in line for his own good, since otherwise Hammond "will kill Blaise, or even worse, castrate him!" Blaise resents Drum's officiousness and picks a fight with him. Then, though they try to cover for one another afterward, he more deeply resents the fact that Drum gets just five strokes on the buttocks while Blaise has to take thirty -- approximately, since Hammond seems to get squeamish about it before the end. The fact that Drum gets favorable treatment factors at least as much as his sore butt in Blaise's new ambition to run away. "I got freedom in my heart and I'm gonna grab it," he says, stating later that "Blood is the color of freedom." Any escape plans are aborted, however, when Sophie, in a fit of pique against her father and prospective stepmother, denounces Blaise for enticing her into masturbating him. Hammond shackles Blaise and wants to hang him, but when he catches Sophie flashing and teasing the prisoner he becomes uncertain of whether to kill, castrate or simply sell him.

"Free at last my ass!"

Things come to a boil when local slavedriver Montgomery (Royal Dano) parks a troupe of down-the-river bound slaves in Hammond's barn, where Blaise remains a prisoner. Still fearing that Hammond will castrate his friend, Drum frees Blaise, not suspecting that Blaise will incite Montgomery's charges into a violent uprising and attack on the Hammond mansion, where familiar faces from New Orleans, including Marianna and De Marigny, are visiting. With the whites besieged, but little prospect of the blacks making good any escape, Drum offers to negotiate a cease-fire, and Hammond takes up his offer. What better time could there be for De Marigny to try to settle old scores with Drum and Blaise? Mistaking De Marigny's treachery for Hammond's, Drum joins in the uprising, but soon has second thoughts....

While there was something appropriately unsettling about the intimacy of masters and slaves in Mandingo, Drum too often comes across as comically sleazy. It ups the ante of decadence by introducing homosexual desires that were part of Onstott's original novel, but misses the point somewhat by making the homo-or-bisexual characters outsiders to Falconhurst. Worse, Colicos's villain is impossible to take seriously, making Susan George in Mandingo look like a model of something resembling restraint. The sequel's obsession with castration (or "nutting") -- a subject that miraculously failed to come up in Mandingo -- quickly becomes ridiculous rather than menacing, climaxing in Marianna's coming-out toast at the Hammond party: "I would like to make a toast...to castration...of all men."

In Drum's defense, Carver does a good job of gradually building tension until, as the ads, said, the fuse lit by Mandingo explodes here. Here's where Yaphet Kotto should take a bow, since Blaise is the most catalytic character in the story. His perils often motivate Drum's actions, the title character being pretty passive otherwise, and his desire for freedom and resentment of Drum and the Hammonds alike sparks the climactic uprising. It may have been just so in the novel, but it also looks like a vote of no confidence in Ken Norton's ability to carry the film. He obviously can't compete with Kotto as an actor, but he does convey a fundamental decency despite Drum's disreputable childhood environment. But where Norton lacks passion, Kotto has it to spare. The two make a halfway decent team, and it must have been fun in the initial fight scene for the character actor to have the man who beat Ali sell his punches.

If Mandingo lacked the analytic rigor and apocalyptic scale of atrocity of Goodbye Uncle Tom, then Drum lacks much of whatever moral seriousness Mandingo itself had. As entertainment, however, Drum could easily be somebody's guilty pleasure. It has a super Seventies lineup and the singular sight of Oates and Grier in bed together. It has instant camp in the form of John Colicos ("On your feet, you piece of merde!" is a typical utterance) and Cheryl Smith's wild, shameless performance. And it has just the sort of slave-rebellion climax, reminiscent of or anticipating window-breaking zombie attacks of besieged buildings, that I said a truly crowd-pleasing slavesploitation film should have. Drum is dumb, but it can be endearingly so for audiences in the right mood.

As with Mandingo, robatsea2009 has uploaded a trailer for Drum to YouTube


This review is part of a weeklong blogathon appreciation of Yaphet Kotto organized by the Lost Video Archive. Visit The Goodkind's site to find out more about Kotto's distinguished diversity of work from the Sixties to the present day.

92 IN THE SHADE (1975)

To set the stage for novelist-screenwriter Thomas McGuane's directorial debut, Wikipedia relates that McGuane's first wife left him to marry his star, Peter Fonda, while McGuane himself married Fonda's romantic interest, Margot Kidder, and had an affair with another actress in the film, Elizabeth Ashley. To this volatile mix add Seventies stalwarts Warren Oates and Harry Dean Stanton. The film doesn't live up to the set-up.

McGuane, who had written the screenplay for Arthur Penn's The Missouri Breaks, here adapted one of his own novels. 92 in the Shade chronicles the feud between fishing guides Tom Skelton (Fonda) and Nicholas Dance (Oates). Dance is sometimes suicidal and reputedly homicidal. When he goes to jail for attacking a man, Skelton exploits the vacuum to get a job from wharf boss Carter (Stanton) guiding a vacuous old couple. Dance's stay in stir is short, however, and while Skelton is following a line into marshy waters to fetch a trophy for his client, Dance and Carter reclaim the clients and leave Skelton in the water. To them it's all a big joke, but Skelton tops them by burning Dance's boat.

"If it costs a cent to rent a tuxedo for an elephant, I couldn't rent a t-shirt for a flea." Warren Oates in Thomas McGuane's 92 in the Shade.

Dance doesn't exactly go berserk, but he does warn Skelton not to guide anymore in his territory, on pain of death. Undeterred, Skelton gets money from his cranky attorney of a grandfather (Burgess Meredith) to get a boat of his own built. Despite Dance's matter-of-fact reminders of his ban, Skelton intends to make the awkward, eccentric Ollie Slatt (Joe Spinell) his first client, forcing Dance to back up his threat if he can....

As a beginner, Joe Spinell must learn that fishing is something you do to the fish, not with it.

To spoil things, it seems that McGuane bowdlerized his own source material. In the novel, Wikipedia says, Dance follows through and kills Skelton. In the film, the men struggle on board Skelton's boat while Slatt jumps ship, but Skelton disarms Dance and chucks his gun into the water. The rivals then settle down to finish the film with Peckinpavian laughter. Between novel and film came a life-threatening, life-changing car crash. It may have altered not only McGuane's attitude toward his art (he began screenwriting after recovering) but his attitude toward the story -- though a reported alternative ending may betray some indecision. The anticlimax, following an ineptly filmed scuffle, fits the laid-back if not passed-out spirit of the picture. The film is all novelistic observation of eccentric personalities and their relationships, with little sense of dramatic urgency despite the inherent credibility (or as he says here, "credence") of Warren Oates's threats. He can make laid-back threats and have them taken seriously, except if the director himself ultimately refuses to do so. That may be a deliberate authorial strategy, but it leaves the film begging the question, "So what?"

The answer should be that we've enjoyed a rich slice of regional life and shared the experiences of colorful characters, but McGuane stretches himself too thin accommodating too many eccentric personalities, all of whom probably have a proper place in the novel. In the film, however, there doesn't seem to be a point to Mrs. Carter's (Ashley) obsession with her cheerleading past, her determination to impress people with her enduring baton-twirling skills, or Carter's opposition to her doing so. Likewise, the grandfather-grandson dynamic of pride and dependence between Meredith and Fonda leaves room for Skelton's actual father who, being played by William Hickey, is just another weirdo. McGuane may have thematic reasons for including these oddballs and their obsessions, but whenever these characters reappear the movie loses a lot of what little focus it had.

As a novelist, director McGuane is predictably fond of long-take dialogue scenes. Here's one with typically eccentric details between Margot Kidder and Peter Fonda.

If McGuane gets anything right as a first-and-only-time director, it's atmosphere. 92 in the Shade has a grungy, lived-in quality and a good feel for the principals' working environment. The best scene in the movie may be Skelton's long day with that boorish, bickering old couple, culminating in his long tracking of the line through the marsh and climaxing in the disappearance of his clients. It's the sort of extended anecdote that might have been extended further into a coherent feature in its own right. As a whole, however, McGuane falters somewhere between extended anecdote and novelistic closure. Despite an incredible cast, the performances aren't enough to justify a story that ultimately lacks a point. Lacking a point isn't necessarily a problem, except that McGuane apparently meant to make one.

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