John Ford once said, When the legend becomes fact, print the legend. In real life she was wearing a white blouse and an orange skirt, and she does in the movie.
#Public enemies cast movie#
If I mention the Lady in Red, Anna Sage ( Branka Katic), who betrayed Dillinger outside the Biograph when the movie was over, how do you picture her? I do too. Edgar import some lawmen from Arizona who had actually been in gunfights. After the catastrophe at Little Bohemia (the FBI let Dillinger escape but killed three civilians), Purvis said to hell with it and made J. Edgar Hoover, but Hoover is a romantic, dreaming of an FBI of clean-cut young accountants in suits and ties who would be a credit to their mothers. Just military precision and an edge of steel.Ĭhristian Bale plays Melvin Purvis in a similar key. Dillinger was a big movie fan on the last night of his life, he went to see Clark Gable playing a man a lot like him, but he didn't learn much. My friend Jay Robert Nash says 1930s gangsters copied their styles from the way Hollywood depicted them screenwriters like Ben Hecht taught them how they spoke. For once an actor playing a gangster does not seem to base his performance on movies he has seen. This Johnny Depp performance is something else. I saw more than you will unlike some directors, he doesn't indulge in beauty shots to show off the art direction. Mann redressed Lincoln Avenue on either side of the Biograph Theater, and laid streetcar tracks I live a few blocks away, and walked over to marvel at the detail. He shot in the Little Bohemia Lodge in the same room Dillinger used, and Depp is costumed in clothes to match those the bank robber left behind. Mann shot on location in the Crown Point jail, scene of the famous jailbreak with the fake gun. It even bothers to try to discover Dillinger's speaking style. The movie is well-researched, based on the book by Bryan Burrough. There's an extraordinary sequence, apparently based on fact, where Dillinger walks into the "Dillinger Bureau" of the Chicago Police Department and strolls around. It is him against them, and the bastards will not, can not, win. He probably hates the government too, but he doesn't think that big. He needs someone to protect, in order to affirm his invincibility.ĭillinger hates the system, by which he means prisons, that hold people banks, that hold money, and cops, who stand in his way. She needs to be protected, because she is so vulnerable.
He is particular about the way he presents Dillinger and Billie. You might not think it was possible to make a film about the most famous outlaw of the 1930s without clichés and "star chemistry" and a film class screenplay structure, but Mann does it.
He allows himself a tiny smile when he gives her the coat, and it is the only vulnerability he shows in the movie. Against what? Against the danger of being his girl. It is all about his vow to show up for her, to protect her. They had sex, but the movie is not much interested. That is, he took her out at night and bought her a fur coat, as he had seen done in the movies he had no real adult experience before prison. He had no exit strategy or retirement plans.ĭillinger saw a woman he liked, Billie Frechette, played by Marion Cotillard, and courted her, after his fashion. His gang members loved the money they were making. Here is an efficient, disciplined, bold, violent man, driven by compulsions the film wisely declines to explain. Johnny Depp and Michael Mann show us that we didn't know all about Dillinger.
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