Re: “Public Enemies” too cool for its own good

[Bruce Appelbaum]

The book was very good, weaving the stories of multiple bad guys (not  
just Dillinger) with the developing FBI.

My wife and I saw the movie the other night.  The movie focussed on  
Dillinger, with a couple of mentions and brief appearances by Baby  
Face Nelson, Pretty Boy Floyd, Albert Karpis (no Bonnie and Clyde).

The film was too long, too dark (even the Hialeah scenes appear to be  
shot through orange tinted sunglasses).  Christian Bale is a terrible  
actor -- he seems to have trouble remember to maintain the Purvis  
accent.



Bruce

> "If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don't have to  
> worry about answers."

        --- Thomas Pynchon





On Jul 4, 2009, at 8:54 AM, Dave Monroe wrote:

> July 3rd, 2009 04:56pm
> “Public Enemies” too cool for its own good
> by Christian Kallen
>
>
> John Dillinger used to be one of the touchstones of American culture.
> A one-man crime wave in the darkest year of the Great Depression, he
> robbed and escaped his way into the country’s heart, creating a myth
> of the solo gangster that persists to this day. If the Western hero –
> Wyatt Earp, Buffalo Bill, the fictitious Ethan  Edwards – gave way in
> the last half of the 20th century to the Sopranos and Corleones, it
> was Dillinger who led the way.
>
> So hopes are high for Public Enemies, the new film about Dillinger and
> his G-man nemesis, Melvin Purvis, starring Johnny Depp and Christian
> Bale. The cast alone should sell the movie, these are both interesting
> actors who can bring bodies to the box office, and together there’s
> promise of real tension: cool vs. heat, expression vs. repression.
>
> So why does it take the audience fully 20 minutes to feel some empathy
> for John Dillinger? ...
>
> [...]
>
> Ultimately, though, at well over 2 hours, Public Enemies fails to
> carry us into either the myth of Dillinger, or even its own storyline.
> Which is too bad, mostly because of the elevated role that John
> Dillinger has ably worn for 75 years. As well as the newspaper legends
> that grew around him in the 1930s, and the newsreels that created his
> first cinematic fame, in the 1970s he seemed to enjoy a revival in pop
> culture, even an unlikely appearance in psychedelic literature.
>
> “John Dillinger, at the end, found a few seconds’ strange mercy in the
> movie images that hadn’t quite yet faded from his eyeballs—Clark Gable
> going off unregenerate to fry in the chair, voices gentle out of the
> deathrow steel so long Blackie…” evokes Thomas Pynchon in Gravity’s
> Rainbow (1973). And later, “… there was still for the doomed man some
> shift of personality in effect—the way you’ve felt for a little while
> afterward in the real muscles of your face and voice, that you were
> Gable, the ironic eyebrows, the shining, snakelike head…” This is a
> scene Mann labors over in the film’s concluding minutes, as if in
> attempting to visualize what is best expressed through literature.
>
> [...]
>
> http://inthedark.blogs.pressdemocrat.com/10117/public-enemies-too-cool-for-its-own-good/
>
> Dillinger, John (1903-34)
> 368-69; American gangster specializing in bank robberies; "As B/4"
> 436; killed at Biograph Theatre in Chicago, 516; bloody shirt, 741
>
> http://www.thomaspynchon.com/gravitys-rainbow/alpha/d.html
> http://gravitys-rainbow.pynchonwiki.com/wiki/index.php?title=D
>
> Pynchon writes: Lyrical and fast-driving, this tale of Dillinger's
> last days restores to us with brilliant fidelity a long-unredeemed
> part of our true outlaw heritage.
>
> http://www.themodernword.com/Pynchon/pynchon_essays_blurbs.html
>

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