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Dillinger
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by 20th Century Fox
Sales Rank: 47183
Price: $14.98
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Jean-Luc Godard dedicated his first film, <i>Breathless</i>, to Monogram Pictures, and <i>Dillinger</i> (1945) was probably the main reason why. Short and brutal, like the Depression outlaw's brashly improvisatory career, Max Nosseck's picture was a bit of an outlaw enterprise itself. In the '40s the major Hollywood studios had all taken a vow of chastity when it came to glorifying the headline-grabbing gangsters of the previous decade; Monogram ignored the embargo and barreled ahead, grabbing some headlines of its own and more box office than usual for a Poverty Row operation. Philip Yordan's script was Oscar-nominated (on the DVD's commentary track he co-credits his friend William Castle, director of Monogram's excellent <i>When Strangers Marry</i>), though the film has a patchwork feel to it, as if assembled and reassembled on the run. Directed by Max Nosseck, it's a hypnotic mix of bargain-basement filmmaking (lotsa stock footage and stark, minimalist sets), astute ripoff (the rain-and-gas-bomb robbery sequence from Fritz Lang's <i>You Only Live Once</i>), and Brechtian bravura. The storyline actually scants the ultraviolence (no Bohemia Lodge shootout) and all-star supporting cast (no Pretty Boy Floyd, no Baby Face Nelson) of Dillinger's real life--likely a matter of cost-cutting rather than abstemiousness. Newcomer Lawrence Tierney nails the guy's coldblooded freakiness and animal magnetism, and the supporting cast includes such éminences noirs as Marc Lawrence, Eduardo Ciannelli, and Elisha Cook Jr. Producers Maurice and Frank King would make the great <i>Gun Crazy</i> four years later. <i>--Richard T. Jameson</i>
Viewer Reviews
Monogram's 1945 Dillinger is a dreary little B-movie that ignores not just period detail but also anything and everything even remotely interesting about the real-life Public Enemy No. 1 in favor of tired fictional clichés and plenty of stock footage from Fritz Lang's You Only Live Once (which completely stumps John Milius on the audio commentary: unaware of their provenance, he seems to think they're sequences they ran out of money to finish). It does offer a chance to see a young Lawrence Tierney when he still had a full head of hair, but despite some interesting credits (music by Dimitri Tiomkin, an inexplicably Oscar-nominated screenplay by Philip Yordan) that's pretty much all you can say for it.
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