#663: Dillinger
No “Bonnie and Clyde,” just a gangster movie for Republicans
Initial release: June 19, 1973
Director: John Milius
“My pictures are sentimental and idealistic. I deal with values of friendliness and courtliness and the family and chivalry and honor and courage — not just guts but bigger than life courage. Nobody today writes movies in the style that I do. Nobody. I write characters that are strong and direct, super individuals. The people in my movies fear no one but God.”
— John Milius, showing everyone how good he is at autofellatio
John Milius is one of the biggest names in film you might have never heard of: screenwriter for Apocalypse Now, writer and director of Conan the Barbarian and Red Dawn. Helped write Dirty Harry, Jaws, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, The Hunt for Red October, and Saving Private Ryan. Co-creator of HBO’s Rome. Also behind a couple dozen projects that never got off the ground, a lot of them being Tom Clancy adaptations. In other words, he was the ultimate Hollywood conservative, reactionary and weird and self-serving yet possessed of a damn good filmmaker’s sense. And then there’s Dillinger, a B-list gangster flick desperately trying to recapture the magic of 1967’s landmark New Hollywood film Bonnie and Clyde but instead joined the horde of exploitation films that exploded in number at the turn of the decade.
Veteran actor Warren Oates is John Dillinger, a.k.a. Public Enemy Number One, a career criminal who took advantage of the collapse of the Great Depression to wage a campaign of robbery and murder across the United States. Opposite him is Ben Johnson, who like Oates was a frequent collaborator on Sam Peckinpah westerns, this time around playing Melvin Purvis, dogged agent of the nascent Federal Bureau of Investigation on the hunt for Dillinger and all his outlaw friends. We also get Richard Dreyfuss as Baby Face Nelson and a Harry Dean Stanton who looks 50 and 25 simultaneously.
You might have spotted one of the film’s first problems in that cast list: everyone involved is far too old. In Bonnie and Clyde, Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway were young and pretty enough to convince you they were a couple murderous kids in love, a lot of the actors in Dillinger — Oates included — were playing characters half their age. Melvin Purvis was a dashing agent in his early thirties, who would later go on to have a role in the Nuremberg Trials; Ben Johnson plays him as a rugged cowboy in the twilight of his years. This isn’t the only way the film aggressively plays fast and loose with historical accuracy, but it’s the most jarring.
Nevertheless, there’s a lot to recommend Dillinger for. While the script plays out fairly episodically, with documentary-style narration by Purvis, it’s brisk and quippy, if a little light on characterization. These aren’t really characters in the way that Bonnie and Clyde had characters — they’re archetypes, almost, but certainly not fully three-dimensional. But they get the job done. The action moves fairly briskly from one scene to the next, with lots of shooting, lots of blood; special mention has to go to the lengthy shootout sequence at the Little Bohemia Lodge, site of a botched FBI raid that rather quickly turns into a scene right out of a war movie, genuinely one of the best moments in the movie. Milius has good cinematographic sense, and he gets a chance to show it off in this sequence.
Everyone can make all the jokes about Red Dawn they want and they’d even probably be right about it, but I think it’s Dillinger that most embodies John Milius as a filmmaker. Like Bonnie and Clyde, it makes the obvious connection between the Great Depression and the wave of lawlessness that swept America in that period; like Bonnie and Clyde, its violence is in your face. Unlike Bonnie and Clyde, this is the kind of hypermasculine violence fest that John Milius was born to make, uncompromising and pitiless, full of flawed men and cowboys out of time, but ultimately inherently reactionary. At one point, the Dillinger gang meets for a picnic with two new recruits; they get to talking about the recently-killed Bonnie and Clyde, to which Pretty Boy Floyd calls them mad dogs, and Dillinger complains about “smalltimers” who “ruin it for everyone,” and nobody is sorry to see the duo gone. Tell us how you really feel, Milius.
Dillinger is a product of the 1970s, through and through. Almost as soon as the era of New Hollywood started, so too did the era of seedy 1970s cinema, desperate to capitalize on the success of movies like Bonnie and Clyde and The Wild Bunch by being bigger, bloodier, sexier, sometimes at the expense of everything else. Dillinger lives and dies on trying to be a Bonnie and Clyde for men, as if that movie wasn’t already for men (and particularly thrill-seeking women.) But it just doesn’t have the depth, which honestly checks out for a film that looks at a hyperviolent action film (by 1960s standards) and thinks it wasn’t manly enough.
