John Dillinger and his gang go on a bank robbing spree across the midwest, but one G-Man is determined to bring him down. After a shoot-out kills five FBI agents in Kansas City the Bureau target John Dillinger as one of the men to hunt down. Waiting for him to break Federal law they sort out several other mobsters, while Dillinger's bank robbing exploits make him something of a folk hero. Escaping from jail he finds Pretty Boy Floyd and Baby Face Nelson have joined the gang and pretty soon he is Public Enemy Number One. Now the G-men really are after him. John Milius directed this biographical drama that portrays 1930's outlaw and bank robber John Dillinger(played by Warren Oates) as he rises from obscurity to become public enemy number one, the most wanted man by the FBI led by determined agent Melvin Purvis(played by Ben Johnson) who wants Dillinger in particular because several FBI agents were killed after his last heist. Dillinger leads a gang whose members include outlaws with such colorful names like Pretty Boy Floyd and Baby Face Nelson. His days are numbered by the time he leaves the movie theater on that fateful day… Filmed before with Lawrence Tierney, this version is just a bit too crude, though the two leads are fine. So there have been many movies based on real lives and true stories which have taken poetic license, but why do so to such an extent when the real lives and true stories are head over heels more intriguing and surprising? For instance, think about the John Milius rendering of the Melvin Purvis raid on Little Bohemia lodge. Real life accounts leave no reservation that it was a disaster. But Milius spends a full 10 minutes on gunplay. Special agents collapse apparently by the dozens. Were there enough G-men in the Midwest to supply extra bodies for such a bloodbath? No, it seems more like Milius went nuts on the scene and towed in extras by the truckload so that he could kill them with those skillful little discharging blood pods.<br/><br/>This, more like Milius' Last Picture Show, is just another movie written and directed by a man with an obsession with firearms who plays fast and loose with the facts. As Purvis, Milius has cast Ben Johnson, and it's an bewildering choice. Johnson is measured, laid-back and callous, and swears to take Dillinger himself. Before going into combat, he has a formal procedure: An assistant agent gives him his twin handguns and lights his cigar. This behavior is the farthest thing from the real Purvis Milius could've ever gotten. Or the real Baby Face Nelson, for that matter, who was never a guy you could just slap around and make cry. How stupid. Also Dillinger himself, like many Chicagoans, in July went to the movies as much to evade the high temperature as to see the flick, and the burdensome overcoats worn by the FBI are out of season.<br/><br/>But this is all fine and I dismiss it readily. While Warren Oates is stunning in his physical resemblance to the eponymous anti-hero, which is of course a genetic accident, he also charges the piece with incredible oomph and blistering force. It's a great performance, surrounded by quite a few others. And more than a story about the American gangster, it's a blast of Milius' imaginary outrage toward living during the Depression and rising up against the oppression. Yes, Milius, with his men's men and indulgent shootouts, is often compared to Peckinpah. And while the comparison is apt, most are content to pin him down as merely a Second Amendment-lovin' reactionary, and leave it at that. But there can hardly be a dramatist who's not in some sense a humanist, an observer of humanity's inclinations.<br/><br/>The mantra for the film (quite literally at one point) becomes "hard times." Dillinger doesn't have to do much scheming to stumble on eager accessories or make a prison warden take his cut of a robbery made immediately after escape. As a Dust Bowl vagrant child observes reasonably enough, the one distinction between the robbers and the lawmen is that you have to go to school to be the latter. And what young boy likes school more than guns and money? There's no stylized pleasure extracted from seeing anyone get shot here. Characters scream in anguish as they die, and no one dies unproblematically. It's a film thick with unanticipated poignancy, Dillinger's return to an acquiescent, heartbroken, patient father, or Harry Dean Stanton uttering that "things ain't workin' out for me today" in a way that indeed no one else could.<br/><br/>Like other Movie-Brat suggestions of the 1970s, it's also a story of cinematic fathers and sons: To Milius, and to Bogdanovich and Spielberg, Johnson indicates the olden Ford and Waynes the next film generation at once admires and challenges. Milius' explosions of chaotic modernization is varied with a nostalgia for the propriety of film's past.
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