As a Chicagoan, I make a point of being annoyed instead of starstruck when film crews take over city streets. But my resistance melted away one afternoon last spring when I turned the corner onto the 2400 block of Lincoln and saw it dressed to look as it did the day John Dillinger was shot down by federal agents outside the Biograph. Walking past the theater, its marquee ringed with a banner that read cooled by refrigeration and iced fresh air, I felt as if I’d stepped into an old gangster movie. The patrons filing out of the Biograph on July 22, 1934, probably had a similar sensation: along with Dillinger, they’d just finished watching a crime drama with Clark Gable called Manhattan Melodrama, and when the feds opened fire it must have seemed as if the story had spilled out onto the street.
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Separating the movies from reality was a prime objective for Bryan Burrough, whose hefty nonfiction book Public Enemies: America’s Greatest Crime Wave and the Birth of the FBI, 1933-34 was the basis for Michael Mann’s new movie about Dillinger. “To the generation of Americans raised since World War II,” writes Burrough, “the identities of criminals such as Charles ‘Pretty Boy’ Floyd, Baby Face Nelson, ‘Ma’ Barker, John Dillinger, and Clyde Barrow are no more real than are Luke Skywalker or Indiana Jones. After decades spent in the washing machine of popular culture, their stories have been bled of all reality.” Armed with newly released FBI files containing nearly a million pages of reports, witness statements, and correspondence, as well as numerous unpublished manuscripts and interviews, Burrough produced a scrupulously factual book that still reads like a hell-for-leather action story.
As it turns out, Mann and Misher aren’t exactly bible thumpers. Public Enemies begins with Dillinger (Johnny Depp) arriving at Indiana State Prison and engineering the escape of several inmates, among them his criminal mentor, Walter Dietrich. After one inmate gratuitously kills a guard, setting off a chain of events that leaves Dietrich dead, Dillinger pushes the inmate out of a speeding car. This gripping sequence establishes both Dillinger’s loyalty and his ruthlessness, but it’s largely fiction: although Dillinger helped set up the Indiana escape by smuggling in some guns, he was locked up in Lima, Ohio, when it actually went down.
Like many of his fans, Dillinger was a movie nut, and some of the film’s most satisfying moments play with the permeable boundary between his life and the silver screen. At one point Dillinger is sitting in a theater watching a newsreel report on the FBI’s nationwide manhunt for him, as the narrator warns patrons that John Dillinger could be sitting right next to them. The houselights come up, and Dillinger squirms as the narrator urges patrons to look to their right, then their left. Mann, a Chicago native who used to go to movies at the Biograph, dwells heavily on Dillinger’s last show, cutting back and forth from the street, as the agents take their positions, and the theater, where Dillinger enjoys Clark Gable as a wisecracking hood on his way to the electric chair. By that time the circle had closed: Dillinger was the inspiration for the sort of movie characters that once inspired him. But a few minutes later, out on Lincoln Avenue, the screen went black for good.
Directed by Michael Mann
