Dillinger (1973 film)

"Indiana, 1933". During the Great Depression, various bank robbers and other outlaws have become folk heroes due to public distrust of financial institutions and the law. Following the Kansas City Massacre in June 1933 in which several law enforcement offers were killed brazenly in broad daylight, FBI field office chief Melvin Purvis decides to personally hunt down the men he deems responsible: Charles Arthur "Pretty Boy" Floyd, Lester "Baby Face" Nelson, George "Machine Gun" Kelly, "Handsome" Jack Klutas, Wilbur Underhill and John Dillinger. During a meeting with fellow FBI agent Samuel Cowley, Purvis makes it clear he seeks personal vengeance and that he's willing to use extralegal measures if necessary.

Dillinger is in the midst of his criminal career, accompanied by Homer Van Meter, Harry Pierpont, Charles Mackley and others and is very boastful about his exploits. He meets Billy Frechette at a bar and immediately takes a liking to her, but becomes nonplussed when she doesn't recognized him and robs the bar patrons to impress her. She becomes his lover, accompanying him and his gang on their exploits. During one robbery in East Chicago, the gang loses Mackley and several others, forcing the gang to scatter.

It is during this time that Purvis has begun his purge of the gangsters, hunting down and killing Underhill and Klutas and capturing Kelly. He's unable to move against Dillinger and the others as they have not violated federal laws yet. While lying low in Arizona with the rest of the gang, Dillinger is captured by the local authorities and transported to Crowne Point, Indiana. While imprisoned there, Dillinger makes a daring escape after carving a bar of soap into the shape of a gun and fooling the guards into releasing him. It is during this escape that Dillinger finally commits a federal crime, driving a stolen car across state lines.

He takes a fellow prisoner Reed Youngblood with him, and they eventually meet back up with the gang, including new members Nelson and Floyd. They start a crime spree across the Midwest to the chagrin of Purvis, angry and jealous of the how the media romanticizes their exploits. The gang's luck runs out following a bank robbery in Mason City, Iowa, which leads to a violent shootout ending in Youngblood's death and the wounding of another member. While staying at the Little Bohemia lodge in Wisconsin following the heist, Purvis leads a team of FBI agents on a raid of the lodge, costing numerous agents' lives and sending the gang scattering again. During this chaos, Pierpont, Nelson, Van Meter and Floyd are all hunted down by either federal agents or local vigilantes and summarily killed.

While hiding in Chicago, Dillinger makes the acquaintance of a brothel owner, Anna Sage. Purvis, sensing an opportunity, offers to protect Sage from being deported if she'll help finger Dillinger. While attending the gangster film Manhattan Melodrama at the Biograph Theater, Purvis and his men get into position to capture Dillinger as he, Sage and a female acquaintance exit the theater. At the last minute, Purvis instead goads Dillinger into going for his gun and then shoots the gangster down in the alleyway.

In the epilogue, it is revealed that Sage was eventually deported back to Romania despite Purvis' promise, Purvis eventually committed suicide after retiring from the FBI, Frechette ended up dying penniless, and that Dillinger's likeness is now used for the FBI's targets during shooting practice.

• Warren Oates as John Dillinger
• Ben Johnson as Melvin Purvis
• Michelle Phillips as Billie Frechette
• Cloris Leachman as Anna Sage
• Harry Dean Stanton as Homer Van Meter
• Geoffrey Lewis as Harry Pierpont
• John Ryan as Charles Mackley
• Richard Dreyfuss as Baby Face Nelson
• Steve Kanaly as Pretty Boy Floyd
• John Martino as Eddie Martin
• Roy Jenson as Samuel Cowley
• Read Morgan as Big Jim Wollard
• Frank McRae as Reed Youngblood

• As photographs of Depression-era's impoverished victims pass on the screen during opening credits, "We're in the Money" (from Golddiggers of 1933) is heard on the soundtrack.
• The 1917 tango, "La Cumparsita", still popular in the 1930s, plays during a scene in a Chicago restaurant, followed by "Beyond the Blue Horizon" from the 1930 film Monte Carlo.
• "One More Chance", popularized by Bing Crosby in his 1931 short film of the same name, plays during a scene featuring Machine Gun Kelly.
• Another song popularized by Crosby, "It's Easy to Remember (And So Hard to Forget)", was written for his film Mississippi, released in 1935, one year after Dillinger's death. It is heard during an intimate bedroom scene with Dillinger and Billie Frechette.
• The 1929 song, Happy Days Are Here Again, featured in the Technicolor finale of the 1930 film, Chasing Rainbows, is prominently featured in the aftermath of Dillinger's capture.
• The melody "Honey", a 1929 hit for Rudy Vallée, is heard through the entire length of the closing credits.

Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times awarded three stars out of four and called it "the film, we may speculate, that John Milius was born to make: violent, tough, filled with guns and blood." He added, "Dillinger is played by Warren Oates, a gifted actor with an uncanny physical resemblance to the gangster. Oates is lean in speech and lanky in appearance, and toward the end of the film, he does a good job of getting jumpy."[10] A. H. Weiler of The New York Times wrote, "'Dillinger' does capture the look of the nineteen-thirties, but its violence dominates the scene and the players, who remain largely undefined figures on a bloody landscape."[11] Gene Siskel of the Chicago Tribune gave the film two-and-a-half stars out of four and wrote that it "repeatedly copies the spirit, and a few scenes, of 'Bonnie and Clyde.' But it is distinguished by its acting. Director John Milius has cast fine second-tier actors who lend the familiar story great style."[12] Variety wrote, "Necessarily episodic, it loses somewhat in a lack of straight story line, but there's sufficient fast action of the gangster type to satisfy this particular market."[13] Kevin Thomas of the Los Angeles Times wrote, "The idea that the Depression could create folk heroes out of gangsters was expressed with such freshness and imagination in 'Bonnie and Clyde' that it seemed like a revelation. In 'Dillinger' (at selected theaters) writer John Milius, in his feature directorial debut, attempts to make the same point, but because it has already been made so powerfully it comes out like mere repetition."[14] Gary Arnold of The Washington Post was negative, writing that "Milius doesn't have anything fresh to offer the period or the characters. As usual, he just feeds off certain influential movies, idolizes a strongman with a gun and alternates predictable notes of facetiousness, viciousness and 'poignance.'"[15]

Milius later said in 2003:

I look at it today and I find it very crude, but I do find it immensely ambitious. We didn't have a lot of money, or time, and we didn't have such things – we only had so many feet of track, stuff like that. So I couldn't do moving shots if they involved more than, what, six yards of track. We never had any kind of crane or anything. That's the way movies were made then.[16]

By 1976 Variety estimated the film had earned $4 million in rentals.[17] It holds a score of 93% on Rotten Tomatoes based on 14 reviews.[18]

Steven H. Scheuer's Movies on TV (1986–87 edition) assigns Dillinger 2½ stars (out of 4), opining that "Warren Oates gives a fine performance as Dillinger, but the script leaves no room for insight into the character and thus makes him merely a cartoon book villain". Scheuer ends with, "[W]ritten and directed by John Milius, then 29 years old. Impressive debut in some ways." Leonard Maltin's TV Movies & Video Guide (1989 edition) gives a slightly higher 3 stars (out of 4), describing it as a "[H]eavily romanticized gangster movie" that "is aided by some of the roughest, most violent gun battle ever staged on screen. The last sentence indicates that the "[S]tory follows Dillinger midway through his bank-robbing career up until his death outside the Biograph Theatre." By the 2014 edition, Maltin revised the earlier sentence to indicate, "is aided by some rough, violent gun battles."

Mick Martin's & Marsha Porter's DVD & Video Guide (2007 edition) puts its rating still higher, at 4 stars (out of 5), concluding that "John Milius made an explosive directorial debut with this rip-roaring gangster film featuring Warren Oates in his best starring role. As a jaunty John Dillinger, he has all the charisma of a Cagney or a Bogart."

Among British references there was not much enthusiasm for the film, with David Shipman in his 1984 The Good Film and Video Guide giving 1 (out of 4) stars, specifying that Baby Face Nelson is portrayed by "Richard Dreyfuss acting away like mad". Shipman further notes that "[T]here are a great many gun battles and since this is an exploitation movie there is much twitching and shuddering till the bodies lie still. There is also much borrowed from Bonnie and Clyde."

• Theodore "Handsome Jack" Klutas is shown being killed by Melvin Purvis; in fact Klutas of the College Kidnappers was killed by Chicago Police on January 6, 1934.
• Wilbur Underhill is shown being shot and killed by Melvin Purvis; in fact Underhill died on January 6, 1934, of wounds inflicted more than a week previously by an inter-jurisdictional group of law officers led by FBI Agents T.H. Colvin and Frank Smith, a survivor of the Kansas City Massacre. Purvis had nothing to do with the apprehension.
• In this film and in a related John Milius film Melvin Purvis: G-Man, George "Machine Gun" Kelly is shown being hunted down and captured by Purvis on September 26, 1933; in fact Kelly was captured by the Memphis, Tennessee Police and the Birmingham, Alabama Office of the FBI . (Also Kelly's alleged quote "Don't Shoot, G-Men" is apparently a myth.)[19] Ironically the film's newsreel footage of Dillinger being transported from Arizona is actually that of Kelly being extradited.[20]
• In the film, a Chicago bank guard named O'Malley is killed by the Dillinger gang during a robbery attempt. In fact William Patrick O'Malley was a member of the East Chicago Police force killed on January 15, 1934. Likewise, Dillinger gang member Eddie Green is shown being killed in the getaway; in fact Green was killed in March 1934.
• Dillinger gang member Herbert Youngblood is shown being killed during a bank robbery by the Dillinger gang in Iowa. In reality, Youngblood had been killed alone in a gunfight with police in March 1934.
• The Little Bohemia Lodge shootout was filmed at the Chickasaw Country Club near Ardmore, Oklahoma. The film implies that about four of the Dillinger gang are killed and half a score of federal agents were casualties. In fact the first three men shot in the raid were two Civilian Conservation Corps workers and a local resident shot by the FBI by mistake (one killed and two wounded), while one FBI agent was killed, one FBI agent was wounded, and one constable was critically wounded.
• Homer Van Meter is shown escaping from Little Bohemia and then being killed by vigilantes in Iowa, which was filmed in Dougherty, Oklahoma in the foothills of the Arbuckle Mountains. In fact he was killed in St. Paul, Minnesota. Dillinger gang member Tommy Carroll was mortally wounded during a shootout with police in Waterloo, Iowa on June 7, 1934.
• Charles Makley is shown dying of a wound and being buried by Dillinger; in fact Makley was killed September 22, 1934 while trying to escape from prison. Dillinger gang member John Hamilton did die of wounds, and his remains were later found in a grave.
• Pretty Boy Floyd is shown greeting Dillinger at a picnic and then after the Little Bohemia shootout being shot by about a dozen FBI agents; in fact there were only about four FBI agents present. Likewise he was killed on October 22, 1934; gang member Baby Face Nelson was killed November 27, 1934; both died after Dillinger was killed July 22, 1934. There is also doubt that these two "Public Enemy's No 1" ever actually meet one another in real life.
• The Dillinger film was inspired by the classic Bonnie and Clyde film; contrary to both films, the real Barrow gang used BARs instead of Colt machine guns. Likewise in real life the Dillinger gang used Colt machine guns instead of BARs.

Shortly before the release of the film, following the era's customary timing, Curtis Books published a novelization of the screenplay by Edward Fenton (1917–1995) as by his tie-in pseudonym, "Henry Clement." Under his own name, Fenton was an award-winning author best known for his juvenile mysteries; books on Greek mythology, history, and culture; and English translations of the works of Greek children's author, Alki Zei.

Dillinger was released to DVD by MGM Home Video on August 12, 2003 as a Region 1 widescreen DVD and by Arrow Video (under license from MGM) on April 26, 2016 as a Region 1 widescreen Blu-ray & DVD combo pack.

Dillinger premiered on Turner Classic Movies January 14, 2017 as part of its three-film tribute to Warren Oates. It was preceded by 1967's In the Heat of the Night and 1960's Private Property.

• List of American films of 1973

• Dillinger at IMDb
• Dillinger at AllMovie
• Sample frames by cinematographer