Americas 250th Birthday Cinemathon #41: Public Enemies

 

There were so many famed outlaws during the early 30s that I chose to do another one. My choice is John Dillinger, and the movie is Michael Mann’s Public Enemies. It originated as a book by journalist Bryan Burrough’s Public Enemies: America’s Greatest Crime Wave and the Birth of the FBI. It encompassed all the great criminals and Burroughs hoped to see it turned into a dramatic miniseries. After a few twists and turns, however, it became a theatrical film with a singular focus on John Dillinger.

John Dillinger grew into a troublesome youth in Mooresville, Indiana and committed a robbery. He was sentenced to a surprisingly harsh sentence of ten to twenty years in prison. Instead of turning him straight, his incarceration hardened him and kept him around experienced criminals who taught him all sorts of things. When he came out, he developed into the infamous bank robber. Like Bonnie and Clyde, he received exaggerated press and some romanticizing, but even professional historians and journalists note that he had his good qualities. This made him a good subject for Michael Mann, who specializes in showing the good and bad sides of cops and criminals alike.

Most of what’s in Public Enemies is true, but jumbled around chronologically for narrative purposes. For example, the Sioux Falls Robbery combines elements of three of Dillinger’s crimes, with Dillinger’s wounding and the incident of a teen jumping onto the back of one of the robbers before being thrown off through a window. In another example, the Little Bohemia hideout and shooting actually occurred after, not before, the arrest of Dillinger’s girlfriend Billy Frechette (Marion Cotillard, more on her later). Furthermore, Baby Face Nelson, while present, made his escape and would actually die four months later than Dillinger on November 27, 1934. While the chronology is mixed, Mann did go to a lot of trouble to shoot on real sites and even had some locations altered to look more like they did back in the 30's.

Americas 250th Birthday Cinemathon #40: Bonnie and Clyde (1967)

 

The cities saw the rise of organized crime in the early 20^th Century. Meanwhile, for a few years at the end of the 20s and into the early 30s, the small towns and rural areas of the American Midwest and South saw a collection of the classic outlaw, updated for modern times. Instead of gangs of robbers riding horses, the likes of Machine Gun Kelly, John Dillinger, and the Ma Barker Gang drove from town to town, hitting banks or in some cases pulling off kidnappings for ransom. The stars of this particular movie are Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker, more simply known as Bonnie and Clyde.

Aside from their long string of crimes, the duo was widely known for the simple fact that they were a devoted romantic couple (Wikipedia doesn’t even give them separate pages). Also, like many of the highway robbers of the time, they displayed a “ride-or-die” attitude, engaging in illegal and violent activities with seemingly no actual exit plan. Eventually a posse of Texas and Louisiana lawmen ambushed them on the Louisiana State Highway 154 on May 23, 1934, riddling them with about 130 bullets. Over 30 years later, the famed villains were turned into antiheroes in Arthur Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde.

Bonnie and Clyde was one of the first New Hollywood films. By the late 60s, the stringent Hays Code was on its way out. At the same time popular culture was starting to grow more cynical and anti-authoritarian. As a result, Bonnie and Clyde (Faye Dunaway and Warren Beatty) as well as their fellow gang members got a heroic lift. They can be chummy with random strangers (including hostages), openly sympathize with farmers struggling with the effects of the Great Depression, and are just all around likeable people when not robbing banks. Actually, one of the stranger aspects of the movie is that while romanticizing the leads it still presents a couple of their ugly moments, such as when Clyde blasts a civilian in the face for hanging onto their car in an attempt to slow them down. For the most part, though, their violence is directed at law enforcement, reflecting the counterculture of the time.