Dillinger

John Dillinger starts with a petty theft in the countryside and lands in prison. Inside he meets experienced criminals. When he gets out he gets them out too and forms a gang. In the early thirties they start robbing banks across the Midwest, and the man is soon declared the country's public enemy number one. The end comes outside a cinema in the summer of 1934. It is a cheap seventy-minute film out of a small studio like Monogram, but its effect was large. It is Lawrence Tierney's first big part and he makes no attempt to make Dillinger likeable; the man is cold, coarse and without taste. Philip Yordan's screenplay was nominated for an Oscar. Because the budget would not stretch, archive footage from older gangster films was used. The real Dillinger was a more complicated figure; the film reduces him to a single line and does so deliberately.