Public enemies cast
In response, Hoover sends him, from Texas and Oklahoma, a handful of hardened mugs, in the most literal sense of the term. One of the best scenes in the film takes place after Purvis informs Hoover (Billy Crudup, feigning jowls) that the handsome young college graduates whom the latter favors for the Bureau are not up to the task of apprehending killers. The rest of the cast is made up mostly of men with thick faces and big hands, a Midwestern menagerie of the swollen and surly. If Depp and Bale provide enough masculine good looks for a spring catalogue, it may be a lucky thing. Having earlier this summer played last-hope-for-humanity John Connor in Terminator: Salvation, Bale finds himself this time on the side of the Machine-and frankly it suits him. Instead, he boasts of the FBI's modern, "scientific" techniques as he rallies the embryonic army of J.
In contrast to the exuberant Dillinger, we're given no sign that Purvis enjoys his life outside of work, or, indeed, that he has one. For once he does not try to overwhelm us with the intensity of his craft but instead allows the film to come to him. Though characteristically closed off, Bale's performance is nonetheless effective. In classic form, though, Dillinger's true life partner is not Billie, but the G-man sworn to hunt him down, Melvin Purvis (Christian Bale), the yang to his yin. What else do you need to know?" His grandiose boasts are also self-deprecations: He knows he's a showoff, and he needs her to know that he knows. When his squeeze-to-be Billie Frechette (Marion Cotillard) reveals her Native-American ancestry, noting that "most men don't like it," Dillinger is succinct: "I'm not most men." Later, when she protests she doesn't know him, he explains, "I like baseball, movies, nice clothes, fast cars, whiskey, and you. But the bones of the story are all here, and Mann buffs them to a characteristic polish.ĭepp is sly and magnetic, playing Dillinger as a man of casual irony in an era not yet accustomed to it. The prison break that opens the film is an amalgam of two separate escapes, for instance, and while contemporaries Pretty Boy Floyd (Channing Tatum) and Baby Face Nelson (Stephen Graham) pre-decease Dillinger (Johnny Depp) in the film, in reality the FBI ushered him to the other side before it did them. Loosely based on Bryan Burrough's book, Mann's Public Enemies takes plenty of historical liberties. If John Dillinger had not existed, in other words, Michael Mann would have had to invent him.
He was as famous as FDR and Charles Lindbergh-and, by most accounts, more popular than either. In 1934, the FBI reportedly spent a third of its entire budget trying to apprehend him. Over the subsequent 14 months, he was involved in three daring prison breaks, dozens of bank robberies, the theft of weaponry from multiple police stations, and the deaths of several law enforcement agents.
#PUBLIC ENEMIES CAST TV#
It's taken countless hours of TV crime-drama ("Crime Story," "Miami Vice") and nearly a dozen feature films (Heat, Collateral, Miami Vice again), but in John Dillinger, Michael Mann may finally have found an ideal vessel for his particular vision of masculine cool: stylish, charismatic, unflappable, adept at violence but not hungry for it.Īfter spending nine years in prison for his rookie robbery (a grocery-store heist that allegedly netted him $50), Dillinger emerged in May 1933 to launch perhaps the most storied crime spree in American history.