Two Views on Public Enemies

The following were submitted to Kasama. The authors Craig Bourne and Jay Rothermel both live in Cleveland. Craig Bourne be read on Twitter:  http://twitter.com/tovX

Public Enemies: A Review

Reviewed by Craig Bourne

Today I saw the film Public Enemies, most of which was banged out on a Chicago Typewriter.

The film condenses a bit of raw 1930s history to a simple clash of three personalities, the bank robber John Dillinger, the excrescence that was J. Edgar Hoover, and Hoover’s FBI henchman Melvin Purvis. The principal character is, you should pardon the expression, fleshed out by the presence of Dillinger’s companion Billie Frechette. Various other names, names associated with Dillinger when he went about his Depression Era business of unorganized crime (as opposed to the organized crime of the bankers and bosses of the period), are dropped and then, just about that quickly, their movie character is dropped with the next sweep of the Trench Broom.

The film has a pleasant aspect. Much of this in the person of Marion Cotillard who portrays Ms Frechette. The Academy should have a special award for enduring a badly written role just to make a damned living.  Cotillard’s every appearance in this film should be preserved in a special shrine to such moments.

Charming too is Johnny Depp in the staring role that transforms John Dillinger into a hapless Edward-Uzi-Hands sort of character. For his character alone I wanted to shout “BOO” when the cartoon poltroon, the flickering shadow of J. Edgar Hoover, was on screen. But then I am reminded that all this is not a patch on the real conflict of the times.

When an FBI agent beats Frechette, a sympathetic sheriff speaks up for her, and a hired thug restrains her attacker, and Purvis (no less) takes her in his arms and carries her to the toilet. Oh Really!

Beyond this we have a brief glimpse of the FBI pressuring one woman, and torturing an injured man for evidence. This sort of prisoner abuse, with murder into the bargain, has a long history in this country, and not only with the FBI. The notion that several would casually step forward from the ranks of the abusers to stop it, without suffering reprisal, is ahistorical fantasy.

One thing that the script does get right, and that perhaps explains the public fascination with Dillinger both in that Depression era and in our own, is his motivation. The script’s author, not trusting his audience to figure it out, has Dillinger tell us several times that he is after “the big score.”

So, comrade, you don’t need revolution. There is pile of money on the ground just waiting for you to pick it up. Will I see you in Vegas next week? Did you buy a lottery ticket today– you can’t win if you don’t buy a ticket. Did you remember to vote?

* * * * * *

A traitor to his class: John Dillinger and Public Enemies (2009)

A review by Jay Rothermel

Michael Mann’s new movie Public Enemies unspools itself at a stately two hours and ten minutes.  Meticulous direction and aesthetic skill are expended to recreate a moment in U.S. history that was transformed into folklore by mass media and cinema as soon as it happened.

On March 5, 1933 Franklin Roosevelt instituted a Bank Holiday to prop up trust in a faltering capitalism.  On May 10, 1933 John Dillinger (1903-1934) and a few fellow knaves began their own bank holiday.  By coincidence, Mann’s recreation of that time is presented to viewers during the start of a new and unprecedented global depression.  Truly, there are no new stories, only depressions to tell them in.

Like his 1995 masterpiece Heat, Public Enemies gives Mann the chance to portray the “high and low” in the United States.  Of course for liberal Michael Mann the “high” is always the professional middle class.  In Public Enemies this social layer is epitomized by cops.  The film is based on Bryan Burroughs’s 2004 book Public Enemies: America’s Greatest Crime Wave and the Birth of the FBI 1933-1934.  The cops we see at work are agents of what would soon become the FBI.  Mighty public relations work and the turning of a few stool pigeons around the Dillinger case were the making of J. Edgar Hoover and his national police outfit.  The FBI is paraded before us as a department of non-political professionals, scientists of crime we may term a cognitive elite – giving a nod to that hymnal of the petty bourgeoisie, The Bell Curve (1994).

As any activist in the labor or civil rights or anti-war movement can attest, there are fewer institutions of bourgeois rule in the U.S. more political and less scientific than the FBI.

*****

Public Enemies organizes a few scenes around the conflicts between individuals in Hoover’s organization.  Billy Crudup plays Hoover as a supremely dismissive and epicene Mussolini-in-becoming.  He acquires his sinecure by commanding newsreel cameras and such founts of propaganda sewage as Walter Winchell.

Mann has a genuine interest in cop institutions of capitalist rule, though I doubt he would define it this way.  He career is founded on depictions of such institutions.  TV shows like Miami Vice and Crime Story presented cops as teams of cool professionals succeeding by wits and teamwork.  In Public Enemies the “Dillinger Squad” is similar to the Major Case Unit in Heat and the 1989 TV movie LA Takedown.  (Mann does not limit his interest in institutions to those of the cops; he also made 1999’s The Insider, which gives us an inside look at both Big Tobacco and CBS News.)

But while Mann is fascinated by professionals, he typically organizes the dramatic axis of his crime films by alternating scenes of travails of the head cop and head crook as they each try to outwit the other.  In Heat the cop was played by Al Pacino as a narcissist so obsessed with victory he rarely slept; the crook, Robert De Niro, as such a supremo of his craft he could only defeat himself.  The final image of that film, with the victorious cop and dying crook holding hands to comfort one-another, perfectly sums-up a century of Hollywood crime dramas: always focus on the individuals.

*****

To its producers Public Enemies must have looked like the perfect money-spinner.  It would depict a great cops-and-robbers struggle; there was sex appeal and a love story (of a kind), and it explored one of the great tragic themes: a hero (in this case Dillinger) undone by his own flaws.  To those who say moviegoers will not pay to see a story already filmed as drama and documentary so many times, the producers could retort that another well-known subject, the Titanic sinking, generated a veritable Fort Knox for its makers.

Public Enemies suffers (as Titanic and Heat do not) from centering its attention on real historical characters.  Even when Mann changes facts and alters the chronology, he cannot overcome the stultifying fact that however dramatically he builds his scenes, viewers will always be ten steps ahead, waiting for him to catch up.  The shoot-out at Little Bohemia Lodge might have surpassed the LA street shoot-out in Heat, but it cannot because viewers know Dillinger has a rendezvous with death on July 22, 1934.

As Dillinger, Johnny Depp does well portraying the youth of a man dead at 31.  Depp’s Dillinger is a tragic loner, a wounded hero sensitive to his fate, a rebel without a cause alive to the belated nature of his last days.  He appreciates his moment of media glory, but seems to sense it has nothing finally to do with him.

The real Dillinger, like all past and future Dillingers in the real world, was a lumpen parasite lobotomized by the cash nexus.  However charming the old folk songs about Jesse James and Pretty Boy Floyd sung by Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger, these crooks were cretinous individualists and reactionary to the core. They were slapped-down and executed in the streets by cops serving the institutional bandits of Wall Street as an example to others. Crime and theft are expressions of class division and conflict, but only in the most reactionary manner; Dillinger, Karpis, and their ilk aped the most diehard and vile habits of the acquisitive bourgeoisie.

Christian Bale’s Melvin Purvis is the ostensible second lead in Public Enemies.  This is because the Purvis-Hoover conflict has been the subject of so much scholarship which attempts to portray Purvis as a true alternative to Hoover’s organizational blueprint and personal rule.  While liberals may pine, “If only Purvis had defeated Hoover,” there were no ideological or organizational differences between the men, only a conflict over pelf and place.

As an actor, Christian Bale has no equal in the “stony glare” department.  Michael Mann lavishes him with numerous contractually required close-ups.  But who can remember anything Purvis says?  Purvis is shown to be a tyro surrounded by pencil pushers who must request help and guidance from older hands.  Said hands arrive seemingly out of the past, through waves of steam from a passenger train, and look like reincarnations of the Earp brothers.

The movie attempts to present Purvis as the agent who defeated Dillinger, but shows us by simple allegiance to historical fact that that role was played by an agent named Charles Winstead.  Throughout the second half of the film, it is Winstead who outwits, out-fights, and finally executes Dillinger.  Mann telegraphs his own respect for Winstead as against Purvis by casting the fine character actor Stephen Lang in the role.  (Lang is an actor Mann has employed before, most memorably as obnoxious and ill-fated Freddy Lounds in the 1986 movie Manhunter.)  Winstead is portrayed as embodying all the wit and professionalism of western lawmen, much as Tommy Lee Jones was used in The Fugutive (1993) and No Country for Old Men (2007).  Lang’s Winstead is given the final scene, a gem after two ours of predictability.  Dramatic logic would demand the Purvis character be given the final scene, as a proper emotional resolution; but since Mann must depict actual events, Purvis is erased before the movie ends.

Charles Winstead is unknown and unportrayed in previous Dillinger films.  Mann has missed a real chance for some fireworks by hewing to the Purvis-Hoover and Purvis-Dillinger line.  (Winstead quit the FBI during the Second World War after making some anti-USSR comments, and went on to become chief of security at Los Alamos.  Well, body’s perfect; at least he got Dillinger.)

*****

The Dillinger Public Enemies presents is certainly the most handsome movie-star Dillinger we have had.  Does every generation get the Dillinger it deserves?  In the 1930s, we were given the “mad dog” Bogart-style version.  In the 1970s, it was the electrifying and now-forgotten Warren Oates in a pseudo-John Ford style directed by John Milius.  Today we get Johnny Depp, a handsome and self-knowing Dillinger who dies pursuing the “get rich quick” dreams that still bubble-up to bewitch the desperate and outcast in class society. (And not just the desperate and outcast.)

The true remedy for crime is solidarity and class consciousness.  That is not the subject of summer movies.  Or any movies.  For the billionaire families that own and run the United States, class consciousness and solidarity will always be Public Enemy Number One.