Dillinger Dies a Dummy

THE FIRST talking gangster film, Little Caesar, was made in 1930, depicting the gang wars of the '20s. It made an over-night star of Edward G. Robinson ("Mother of Mercy, is this the end of Rico?") and did smashingly well at the box-office. In 1931, Public Enemy followed suit with James Cagney as Tom Powers, a punk kid who becomes a tough-guy criminal. These movies were stories about gangsters' lives. They professed to deter crime by warning the public about violence in the streets, but managed instead to glamourize the gangster as a rebel hero. It was because of the brilliant acting of the likes of Robinson and Cagney, who gave their hoodlums dignity and poignance, that we believed in these gangsters as real people and inwardly wished them success.

In the early '40s, the spy pre-empted the gangster as Hollywood hero. After WWII the national mood turned cynical and gangster movies were revived as grim portrayals of city life, with dark, oppressive lighting, lonely streets in the cold rain, and tough cookies like Barbara Stanwyck who came into their own.

James Cagney was spellbinding in White Heat (1949) as Cody Jarret, a maniacal hoodlum slowly losing his mind. When Cagney goes totally mad, blowing himself up with his famous line "Here I am, Ma, top of the world!", we have seen what pushed Cagney to his end. We are totally immersed in the tension Cagney builds up. All of the action has brought us closer to an understanding of his life, inspiring a fascination with the terror of his homicidal insanity.

IN THE EARLY '60s, the dramatic plot-line suffered a decline as such "slice-of-life" films as Room at the Top and The Misfits grew in popularity. In these movies there was no real development either of story or character, only static episodes describing the nature of characters' lives. In the late '60s, when the gangster film returned, heralded by Bonnie and Clyde, it was afflicted with this same absence of drama (and therefore, lack of audience involvement). Instead of stories of gangsters' lives, the films continued in the vein of the slice-of-life drama. They became superficial chronicles illustrating episodes in a criminal's career, with little explanation of why or how he got there. The films pretend to be socially relevant, but are little more than fashion shows. We know little about Bonnie and Clyde as persons but much about their wardrobe and the kinds of cars they stole.

In Dillinger (the latest cop-out gangster chronicle), written and directed by John Milius, the viewer learns nothing about John Dillinger himself. Dillinger is not developed either as man or myth (although the movie is loaded with pretentious hints at the greatness of his legend). Instead, we merely see a series of overly bloody shoot-outs and Dillinger's eventual death. But we knew from the start that he would die in the end--what we really wanted to know was what Dillinger was truly like.

The movie opens with Dillinger at the height of his career. We don't know how he got to this pinnacle or why he turned to crime in the first place. In a short discussion with his half-Indian girlfriend Billie Frechette (Michelle Phillips), Dillinger (Warren Oates) mentions that he wanted to be a gangster all his life. But this is not enough. We need more.

THERE IS no story and no particular plot. This movie is just a documentary on shoot-outs, with little time spent on the criminals themselves. How do they live? What do they do with their illgotten gains? All we see are some gun fights shot in gory detail, "realistic" to the point of queasiness (but really not of horror, because we're made not to give a damn).

The gangster movies of the thirties and forties didn't need Technicolor bloodbaths to draw audiences. They were thrilling melodramas, gripping in their own right. In Dillinger, all we see are static moments in time without a sense of cause-and-effect. The bloody episodes are strung together with little continuity, merely reaffirming the adage that crime doesn't pay. Life is continually lost to no avail. The gangsters never even seem to have a chance to spend their money. How can we glorify Dillinger? He seems no more than a crook on the run.

Writer-director John Milius claims to be fascinated by men who are legends in their own time. The 29-year-old Californian also wrote the screenplays for Jeremiah Johnson and The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean. He tries to make criminals cult heros, but we are left with no sense of the history or development of the legend. We don't know why the man is a legend and, indeed, don't believe we are watching his story. We disbelieve for several reasons.

First, we see no interaction between Dillinger and the people who love him so dearly. When Dillinger robs banks, he tells the witnesses that they are buying a priceless experience. "You can tell your children you saw the great John Dillinger," he says. We don't see that greatness; the actor develops no aura. The action of the film never creates a legend. We don't find out why everyone loved Dillinger and loathed Bonnie and Clyde, as Pretty Bou Floyd mentions to Dillinger in the film. Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway were certainly as attractive as Warren Oates' portrayal of Dillinger. What made Dillinger so great?

ONE MIGHT ASSUME that desperately poor people during the Depression, would feed on the myth of a rich gangster. But where is the Depression? Behind the opening credits, we see black-and-white photographs (mostly Walker Evan's) of America in the throes of Depression. But when the film proper begins in vivid '70s color, any sense of the period vanishes. Although Depression comes up once or twice in dialogue, none of the locals really has that lean and hungry look. The scenery is so picturesque and colorful that we get no sense of the drabness of the period. Even boarded-up banks in abandoned towns look like quaint tourist attractions. Even with its clothes, cars, and real American accents, the film fails miserably as a period piece.

Our biggest disappointment, however, is that we see nothing of Dillinger's private life. We see strategy meetings to plan robberies and even a fight between the compulsively violent Baby Face Nelson and the more even-tempered Dillinger, but we don't find out how he lives or even where he lives. Once in a while, he'll slap his girl Billie around but this doesn't seem to fit in with Dillinger's character, and because Billie takes it so obligingly we are not moved. Billie is a vacuous sex-object. Without literal or figurative dimensions, she is unlike the tough-bitch gun molls of the '30s and '40s. In White Heat, Cody Jarret's wife cheats on him, lies to him, and fears him. She is real. In one scene of Dillinger, Billie goes so far as to slap her man for calling her a whore, but her heart isn't in it. She is completely unbelievable and uninteresting.

Dillinger clings to the coat-tails of Bonnie and Clyde (and no doubt hopes to be as big a financial success). Unfortunately Bonnie and Clyde is based on a lie, and Dillinger, as a remake of the original phony, is worse. The real Bonnie and Clyde were not beautiful, like Beatty and Dunaway. On the contrary, they were hideous, violent hoods, who, as Dillinger says, "gave gangsters a bad name." Several gimmicks in Dillinger were lifted straight out of Bonnie and Clyde, beginning with the use of the song "We're in the Money" sung over the credits. Dillinger tries to be more factual, but turns out to be just as artificial. There is a scene between Dillinger and Billie on a wide stretch of plain with huge clouds rolling by that could have been done with the same footage used in a scene in Bonnie and Clyde where Beatty and Dunaway roll in the grass. One of Dillinger's gang steals a car from two young lovers, too preoccupied to notice, just as the Barrow gang did. Dillinger's violence is as bloody as Bonnie and Clyde's, its accents and clothes as realistic. Dillinger's blatant theft is the motif of the vengeful cop, relentlessly pursuing the outlaws, finally ambushing them with as little respect for human life as the cheapest crook.

IN DILLINGER, the cop thirsting for revenge is F.B.I. man Melvin Purvis (Ben Johnson). He is by far the most interesting character in the movie. Purvis is obsessed with killing all of the biggest bank robbers who are responsible for killing a G-man friend of his in a jail break. This G-man had once given Purvis a box of expensive Havana cigars. Purvis phallically puffs on one of the Havanas at the shoot-out killings of each of his sworn enemies. In Sergant Friday-monotone, he relates in voice-over the location and date of each shooting. He personally (with hundreds of cops standing behind him) shoots his victims with a lighted cigar hanging from his mouth. The cigar goes out once, and Purvis' sidekick lieutant runs to relight it to satisfy his fetish. This is the significance of the line "Don't shoot Dillinger until you see me light my cigar."

The famous cigar, and the Lady in Red (Cloris Leachman) who betrays Dillinger are two of the very few things explained in the film. We are left with too many unanswered questions. At the end of the film we discover that dedicated G-man Purvis retires from the force after killing Dillinger and that thirty years later he shoots himself with the same gun that he used to kill Dillinger. This is the movie's interesting tale and yet it is tacked on as an afterthought. What drove Purvis to such a symbolic end? We would rather explore Purvis' character deeply because we learn nothing of Dillinger.

Milius himself must have had nagging doubts about this point. He can't make up his mind about whose story this really is. Purvis, on the screen as often as Dillinger, appears in many scenes not directly connected with Dillinger's biography. We see Purvis as a more powerful and intriguing figure than Dillinger, although the movie only teases us with glimpses of his real life. A fascinating film could have been made of Purvis' life. (But one can hear Milius ask, "Who would go to a picture called Purvis?").

Warren Oates is a fine Dillinger as far as the script will allow, which isn't very far. He even looks a little like Bogart in several scenes, especially in a jail sequence where you expect. Ann Sheridan to visit him any second with a nailfile baked in a pie. The rest of the cast is excellent, and everyone has a terrific American southwest accent. The only disappointment is Michelle Phillips as Billie Frechette, who manages to look like both Faye Dunaway and Ali McGraw, the new gun molls of the '70s (Eecch!). Her acting regrettably takes faithfully after Ali McGraw's (as if the Real McGraw isn't enough). Though not quite as smug, Phillips has the same simpering voice and snotty facial mannerisms that have made Quick-Draw McGraw's twitching mouth and flaring nostrils so unjustly famous. One thing for Phillips, though--she sure can scream.