Public Enemy No. 1 in film

The French daily Le Monde’s critic Jean-Luc Douin recalls the long cinema history of American outlaw Matt Dillinger in his fulsome review of Michael Mann’s latest film, Public Enemies. Dillinger, officially the FBI’s “Public Enemy No. 1,” who was accused of only one murder, was a gangster-cum-dandy, a show-off who Johnny Depp brings a modern touch to in the film, according to Douin, giving him “the look of a pirate eager to be off to the Caribbean.”

Douin reviews the many screen portrayals of Dillinger, starting with Humphrey Bogart in Raoul Walsh’s High Sierra (1941), with Ida Lupino as the gangster’s moll.  Lesser known are the depictions by Lawrence Tierney in Max Nossek’s Dillinger (1945), Warren Oates in John Milius’s Dillinger (1973) and the more “mature” gangster played by Leo Gordon in Don Siegel’s Baby Face Nelson (1957). Mann takes the liberty of having Baby Face Nelson die before Dillinger while Siegel sticks to the facts and puts Dillinger in the background, soon to be bumped off, to focus on his successor, the trigger-happy Baby Face Nelson.

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Humphrey Bogart and Ida Lupino in High Sierra (Raoul Walsh, 1941), based on the life of John Dillinger

© DR / Coll Institut Lumière

10/07/09