Could have done a lot better -- for an adult audience

Rating: 6/10 (6 September 2009)

The film is perfectly disappointing because the editing is often too slow, after the opening scene of the prison escape. And that very fast makes the film slightly humdrum and even boring. Then John Dillinger is pathetically dramatic because he is at least ten years late on his time. He plays Bonnie and Clyde four years after the Depression. He is all the more pathetic because he is even given some advice by some of his old friends and crime-colleagues who are following their time, history. Now prohibition is finished and alcohol is out, organized crime wants to turn crime into a business, as clean as clean can be. So no drugs, no prostitution, but the exploitation of gambling which is always a high activity in a difficult period, especially since the poorer among us generally gamble to believe or prove that they are not born losers. John Dillinger remains a loner who wants to play crime as an adventure, maybe even a romantic adventure and he runs into history, the new police methods and he is fast abandoned by everyone and those who remain with him are decimated in no time by the police. Clerk Gable is a lot more convincing in the film John Dillinger sees at the end before being killed at point blank. Pathetic I said. But Mann missed another train. He alludes to the political situation by naming Roosevelt once, hinting at the communist menace once and quoting Mussolini once as a model of the modern fight against crime. He could have done a lot more and better by entering the social and political context of the time and behind John Dillinger. He sure got his gloves off, but not to dig some kind of unknown truth, just to give a rather flat picture of that criminal. In our societies, when a rather long crisis develops, a marginal fringe of people would get into such criminal adventures to over-compensate their frustrations in life. Pathetic I said, and pathetic it is.
Dr Jacques COULARDEAU, University Paris 1 Pantheon Sorbonne, University Paris 12 CrÃ©teil, CEGID