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America's second city has long been associated with movie gangsters, so it's no surprise that another of its sons should tackle one of them in Public Enemies. Director Michael Mann tells FOCUS more.
A quality shared by many great film directors is a keen attention to detail, a fascination with the minutiae of personal traits that combine to create individual characters, the great men and women whose lives inevitably lend themselves to great stories.
So it is with Michael Mann, but more than that his connection to the story of John Dillinger which he tells in Public Enemies is as much to do with the Chicago in which Dillinger met his bloody fate in 1934 and in which Mann was born nine years later.
"I remember driving down Lincoln Avenue with my Dad when I was about seven or eight, and he said 'there's the Biograph, that's where they killed John Dillinger,' 'who's John Dillinger?'. This is the folklore that's embedded in the brown bricks of the city."
Having made a career out of cops and robbers tales, from Crime Stories and Miami Vice on television to Heat and Collateral on the big screen – enjoying critical acclaim with atypical Last of the Mohicans and The Insider - Mann is the first to admit that Dillinger was a thief apart, a charismatic criminal made for the cinema.
"I became fascinated with Dillinger because of certain mysteries in his life. He was very bright, and he was great at doing what he did. He was regarded as one of the best bank robbers in American history, for what that's worth. But he was very sophisticated, he planned his robberies with great precision and forethought.
"He employed techniques picked up from the military by a man named Herbert K. Lam - that's where the expression 'on the lam' came from. Lam mentored Walter Dietrich, and Dietrich mentored Dillinger. Dillinger's time in prison was really a post graduate course in robbing banks.
"But what really interested me was he doesn’t so much get out of prison when he's released he explodes out and is determined to have everything right now. He lives the dynamics of maybe four or five lifetimes in one life that was only 13 months long. It has an intensity, a white hot brilliance and an indefatigable brio that I found stunning in view of the fact that he had no concept of future."
It is, the director states, a fatalism symptomatic of a time when crime stories permeated the fetid atmosphere of a depression that had spread through the nation and ruined lives.
"There were 40 bank failures during this depression in the United States, so the enmity towards banks is palpable," he adds, by no means immune to modern parallels.
"In Chicago alone in 1933, 140 out of 166 regional banks had failed. Unemployment was at 25% so one out of four people were hungry, cold and miserable and those people blamed the banks. And while Dillinger was stealing from those banks he was sharp enough to make sure that he treated female hostages well, because he knows they're all going to be interviewed."
So he was, in one sense, the first media savvy gangster in a period when Hollywood was celebrating these anti heroes, although the stringent Hays Code meant that a criminal on screen could not be seen to profit from his crimes. In Manhattan Melodrama, a film that Variety predicted ‘will never bore, and please generally’, this was certainly true.
Clark Gable, William Powell and Myrna Loy play out a romantic triangle complicated by the fact that childhood pals Gable and Powell have grown up to become, respectively, a convicted killer and the state governor with the power to commute his death sentence. This hokey set up is significant in Mann’s own story as it's the last film Dillinger saw before being gunned down on the Chicago streets.
"What can he have been thinking in the Biograph Theater," Mann ponders, "when Myrna Loy – who looks like his girlfriend - says 'bye Blackie,' and he’s watching Blackie played by Clark Gable who was derived from Dillinger. This is Dillinger watching Gable being Dillinger, and Gable seems to be thinking of things [more] about the future and how he should look at mortality than Dillinger is. Of course he doesn’t know that there’s 30 FBI agents outside who are planning to kill him when he leaves."
It feels as though John Dillinger would thoroughly approve of being portrayed with the appropriate roguish charisma by fellow Indiana native, Johnny Depp. He remains every bit the folkloric anti hero, getting up to the kind of stunts that if they were written into any other movie would be dismissed as wild fantasy. On one occasion he stages a mass prison break armed with only a piece of wood he had carved in the shape of a pistol.
"When he escaped from the Crown Point jail he took 17 guards hostage with that wooden gun he had carved but that wouldn't be credible if you put it in a movie, so we had to tone it down. It's those things that provoke the suspension of disbelief that I’m really interested in."
On another he walks brazenly through the police station that was the base for the operation trying to hunt him down. The challenge for a master dramatist like Mann is in telling the Dillinger story in as convincing a way as possible, being loyal to the facts but remembering that the film should be enjoyable in its own right.
"I hope I don't have a slavish adherence to actuality," says Mann with a philosophical shrug. "It's only when it's magical, or when it means something, that you go there."
ANWAR BRETT
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