John Dillinger, Robbed of a Rich Hollywood Legacy

It's finally happened. A big-time, big-budget filmmaker has finally put the Hollywood limelight squarely on the bank robber extraordinaire John Dillinger, who for 13 months in 1933 and 1934 riveted America with his big-time take-downs, full-metal-jacket shootouts, and hairbreadth escapes, all of which climaxed in a bloody denouement in a Chicago alley under the vengeful guns of the FBI. In fact, it's astonishing to discover that as big as he was, up to now -- that is, before the opening of director Michael Mann's "Public Enemies," starring Johnny Depp -- only two movies had been made about the Indiana bad boy, and really only one.

The two were the 1945 "Dillinger," a poverty-row production that introduced now-forgotten tough guy Lawrence Tierney to the screen, and John Milius's "Dillinger" of 1973, an early film in the opus of the writer-director who would go on to carve out a niche with such macho tone poems as "Conan the Barbarian" and "Red Dawn."

Was Hollywood, normally so avaricious in gobbling sexy story material, asleep at the wheel on this one? Did the studio system just take its eye off the ball and fail to exploit Johnny's biopic potential for such a long time? The answer is, of course not.

Dillinger, as a movie subject, fell victim to a trick of timing. It so happened that the charismatic gangster went on his spree just as forces were gathering to impress upon the renegade movie industry its responsibilities to provide a moral paradigm for the public -- this after a period of plunging necklines, shimmying rear ends and ever-more-diaphanous gowns, as well as a slew of public enemies putatively condemned but actually adored by the movie boys. Such films as 1931's original "The Public Enemy," with the young, beautiful Jimmy Cagney, had given crime a glamorous allure. It was time to clamp down.

Who said so?

The Hays Office, that's who.

The Hays Office was the self-imposed censorship unit of the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors Association, an attempt to stifle government interest in censoring the flickers. It was headed by Will Hays, a former postmaster, Warren G. Harding crony and a man of righteous indignation and dictatorial temperament. The office came up with a code by which, for at least a couple of decades, the pictures would live and die. It mandated that evil be vanquished and good be triumphant; that the anatomical structure known as the nipple must not be acknowledged; that those without a Mr. and Mrs. in front of their names never be seen to bed down together; that the flag never be abused; and so forth and so on.

But there was a special place in the Hays Office's hell for bigger-than-life outlaws and their inevitable sexy molls.

"No motion picture based on the exploits of John Dillinger will be produced, distributed or exhibited by any company member," said Hays himself. "This decision is based on the belief that such a picture would be detrimental to the best public interest." This meant, as Elliott J. Gorn comments in his nifty primer "Dillinger's Wild Ride," that "any company that made a Dillinger film would be frozen out of the theaters."

Thus Dillinger, at least for a long time, was relegated to a kind of shadowy movie existence in a roman à clef fashion. For example, Bogart -- who would have made a better Dillinger? -- played a dynamic bank robber named Duke Mantee in 1936's "The Petrified Forest," clearly an impersonation that drew on the public's memory of the Hoosier gangster. Then Bogart had another shot, as an aging, tragic bank robber named Roy Earle in Raoul Walsh's 1941 "High Sierra," who goes down hard to law enforcement.

In the most violent of the films noirs, Jules Dassin's 100 percent kick-butt "Brute Force," no less a dynamo than Burt Lancaster played a charismatic incarcerated robber whose memories seemed to recall certain Dillingeresque memes, such as groups of well-dressed, extremely tough men traveling by car to and from mysterious deeds. In this 1947 prison-break film, Lancaster went on to demonstrate the leadership abilities for which the original guy was famous.

But the first film that dared to actually name the man himself was the misbegotten Tierney project of '45. Why they called it "Dillinger," other than as a marketing decision based on name recognition, remains a mystery, as the movie is profoundly anti-historical in all senses. But evidently it went out under the Hays Office radar because it was produced by the nothing indie unit King Brothers. It seems to exist primarily as a method to establish Brooklyn-born Tierney's screen persona, which, too bad for him, was also his real persona: a very tough, hard-drinking no-bull kind of guy who went to fists and head butts at the drop of a hat. It made him enough of a star to put together a modest career that lasted almost a whole decade and included one very good film -- "Born to Kill," 1947 -- until his drunken brawls got him essentially booted from the business and he made do as a TV character actor when he wasn't in the hoosegow. (He did have a last trick, making a bravura swan song as Joe Cabot, the growly voiced mastermind in Quentin Tarantino's "Reservoir Dogs.")