![]() Frank Nitti, Al Capone's successor as Chicago's mob boss, makes common cause with the FBI to destroy the threateningly independent Dillinger the way the German cops and crooks get together to crush the outsider in Fritz Lang's M.īonnie and Clyde and John Milius's Dillinger (1973) set the scene with montages of celebrated Depression photographs: soup kitchens, foreclosed farms, dust-bowl devastation. And at a couple of significant points he's brought together the two strands of the gangster film. But Mann has opted for a more classical style than the New Wave-inflected Bonnie and Clyde. It is from Burrough that Michael Mann and his screenwriters, Ronan Bennett and Ann Biderman, have drawn their account of the last fatal 14 months of John Dillinger's career. The same ground is covered by Bryan Burrough in his excellent 2004 book, Public Enemies, for which he was able to draw on extensive FBI records not available to Toland. They were seen by the new generation of movie-struck rural hoodlums, and it is appropriate that the most notorious of them, John Dillinger, who grew up before the first world war on a small Indiana farm, should have been killed by the FBI in July 1934 aged 31 after watching the gangster picture Manhattan Melodrama at Chicago's Biograph Theatre.īonnie and Clyde took its facts from John Toland's The Dillinger Days, the seminal 1963 account of the Midwestern crime spree of the early 1930s and based largely on interviews with contemporary witnesses. The first cycle of gangster movies arrived with the coming of sound, which provided the necessary accompaniment of screeching tyres, chattering machine guns and rasping dialogue, and concerned big city crooks like Capone and included such classics as The Public Enemy and Little Caesar. Both streams offer contrasted images of the American Dream, the first embracing the promise of success, the second responding to the inevitability of failure. The lineal descendents of the James gang and other post-civil-war outlaws, they roamed from state to state, robbing banks and kidnapping rich victims, outdriving and outgunning the local police, recklessly heading for early graves. Penn's film dealt in a wry, romantic mock-heroic way with the crime wave that occurred in the early years of the Depression, involving disorganised, uprooted farm boys and girls of Anglo-Saxon Protestant stock. ![]() Corman's film belonged in the world of organised urban crime, run mostly by recent Catholic immigrants of Italian and Irish origin who profited from prohibition, and dealt in an objective, anti-mythical fashion with the celebrated 1929 massacre through which Al Capone established his grip on the city's vice. ![]() The Hollywood gangster movie seemed a moribund form until it was suddenly given a new lease of life with the simultaneous appearance in 1967 of Roger Corman's only big budget film, The St Valentine's Day Massacre, and Arthur Penn's Bonnie and Clyde, which defined the two streams of the genre.
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