Small time crooks painted larger than the criminals in any given corporation.

An insipid telling of the fast life and crooked times of America’s first Public Enemy Number 1, John Dillinger.

PUBLIC ENEMIES makes all the right moves, with all the right stars wearing all the right hardguy overcoats, but it somehow lacks grip.

Set in the 1930’s Chicago crimewave during the Great Depression, movie opens with John Dillinger (Johnny Depp) breaking his pals out of jail (back in the day when a hoodlum could pose as a guard bringing in Dillinger, then both take the jail by storm – an idea obviously stolen from “a long time ago” when a wookiee infiltrated a Death Star prison the same way).

Melvin Purvis (Christian Bale) is the lawman assigned to bring down Dillinger, using all the new-fangled technological methods like telephones and cars. Billy Crudup is heinous warlock J. Edgar Hoover, who started the Federal Bureau of Investigation, so that police could chase bad guys like Dillinger across state lines. And so that he could jack off over the private lives of homosexuals.

From the book by Bryan Burrough, Public Enemies: America’s Greatest Crime Wave and the Birth of the FBI, 1933-34, directed by Michael Mann (LAST OF THE MOHICANS, THE INSIDER), PUBLIC ENEMIES dutifully goes through the paces of Dillinger’s bank robberies (back when it could be done with three men in hardguy overcoats, big hats, and a getaway car with lots of posing space on the running boards) and just as dutifully shows Purvis chasing Dillinger with his coterie of Keystone Cops. Neither Depp nor Bale create anything memorable with their characterizations, dialogue or posedowns on running boards.

PUBLIC ENEMIES makes the same mistake as AMERICAN GANGSTER – it makes the criminal too sexy to envision as an anti-social thug. Dillinger was notoriously popular and a charmer, but the man was also a sociopath. In a scene lifted from one of Dillinger’s real life breakouts, he uses a plastic gun and manhandles each successive guard past each gate in such a way that none of them discover his ruse until he raids the gun rack for real guns. A man with that kind of force of will and resolve would have something really dangerous inside him that would override his charm. To look upon a man like that in real life would be to fear him. Yet we movie maniacs only glean the guy we wanna party with. While J. Edgar Hoover declares Dillinger the very first Public Enemy #1, the rest of the world is declaring him The Sexiest Man Alive.

Dillinger’s heyday was in a transitional age, when physical bank robbers like himself were slowly being overtaken by virtual bank robbers. Phil D’Andrea plays a mob bookie whose telephone exchange brought in as much during a day as Dillinger could steal from one bank. Which should make one rethink the title of Burroughs’s book – America’s Greatest Crime Wave was, in fact, not during the early ’30s, it is now: AIG, Lehman Brothers, The Ku Bush Klan and the Savings and Loan Scandal, et al…

Dillinger’s friends – scattered around the country in safe houses and brothels – deserted him as the heat was turned up under him. The world crept away from Dillinger in the space of a short lifetime.

Dillinger takes a floosie (Marion Cotillard) as his squeeze and she seems to relish the life of worry of a gangster’s moll. We never really connect with her until the film’s last moments when Dillinger sends his last words, “Bye bye, Blackbird.” Delivered by Stephen Lang, in a small role that packs that last emotional punch.

His final moments, Dillinger watches Clark Gable in MANHATTAN MELODRAMA delivering sage advice from the screen, “Die the way you lived – all of a sudden – don’t drag it out. Living like that doesn’t mean a thing.” It was exiting this theater that Dillinger was shot and killed by authorities, at age 31, just one short year after he was released from prison.

After spending nine and a half years in jail (from 1924 to 1933, from age 21 to 30), it is a wonder how Dillinger’s rep grew so fast into the blaze of glory it would become. And he went out the same way he lived: sexy as Jack Sparrow.

END

Working Class Hero.

Radical flower cukenik

David Leaf’s and John Scheinfeld’s THE U.S. VS. JOHN LENNON is an insular little diversion, showcasing Lennon’s post-Beatles period when his activist voice made the United States government tremble in its widdle booties.

Taking a stand against the Viet Nam War (back in the day when “peacenik” was not a four-letter word), allying with activists Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin, Black Panther Bobby Seale, lending his voice to political issues like the release of John Sinclair on paltry marijuana charges, John Lennon’s “radical” leanings eventually got him noticed by J. Edgar Hoover’s Gestapo (erroneously called the FBI).

In their quest to silence any who disagree with them, the fascist Nixon administration dogged Lennon until Strom Thurmond (then only 179 years old and looking not a day over Nosferatu) figured a way to silence Lennon without resorting to government-sanctioned murder (unlike their usual way of dealing with dissenters) – deport him back to merry olde Liverpool.

Like convicting Al Capone for tax fraud when they couldn’t bust him for racketeering, the Immigration bureaucracy started smearing Lennon and wife Yoko Ono with marijuana charges from years-ago Britain as “evidence” for deportation, but thanks to their canny lawyer, Leon Wildes, they battled until they actually won – on Lennon’s 35th birthday, on the birth day of son Sean, in October 1975.

As someone comments, looking back on it, it’s hard to believe that this pop star could have stirred up the government in such a manner and, although his effect on the Nixon administration may be heightened for the purpose of this film, the fact that the FBI involved itself at all in bugging, tailing and keeping secret files on Lennon illustrates the petulance, paranoia and panicky ignorance of what is supposedly the greatest superpower on Earth.

Released in 2006, THE U.S. VS. JOHN LENNON has all the potential to be another stab through the heart of an administration struggling for credibility (the Bush Klan), but never quite extricates itself from its own subject matter, ultimately about an activist who is dead (Lennon) and his dissent over a conflict that is over (Viet Nam), so misses the mark on compelling.

My greatest quibble with the film is that it never strays from Lennon twisting the government’s panties; it misses the opportunity to analogize the events of the early 70s with the repeated history of the early 2000s. The closest it comes to crossing historical boundaries is when Gore Vidal comments, “He [Lennon] was everything they hated. He represented Life, which was admirable, and Mr. Nixon and Mr. Bush represent death – and that is a bad thing.”

The overarching message Lennon promoted was simply PEACE. Granted, it was on a superficial level, with nary a nod to the political machinations that prompted war in the first place, but isn’t the raw sentiment noble enough even without political posturing? Why does or should anyone oppose him at all? Legitimate arguments may have criticized his execution of the message or advised him on protocol – but the few opposing press opinionators and government lackeys who dogged him were not concerned with legitimate issues – they debated Lennon on the message itself. What is the matter with these people? (Well, we know what the matter is – the creation and perpetuation of conflict for ulterior agenda – but that would take us more off topic than a Yoko Ono song.)

The movie loses street cred by calling Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin “Radical Activists” as opposed to other protesting voices who are termed simply “Activists.” Isn’t that The Man’s point of view? What makes an activist “radical” anyway? Telling the Truth? Through a megaphone?! Speaking of peace in a time of war? – how radical!

Dictionary definition of radical is: “Favoring or effecting fundamental or revolutionary changes in current practices, conditions, or institutions” – but this movie uses “radical” to describe an affront to the government’s criminal war policy. And there is no consistency. Seems if you’re on the soapbox at enough rallies, you one day cross the line into “radical” – as opposed to guys like David Fenton, who is labeled simply an “activist” (sans radical – therefore, lame duck? Pussy? Slave to The Man?).

Paul Krassner is tagged a “radical journalist” (for hanging with Rubin and Hoffman and writing subversive newsletters, I guess), while Carl Bernstein (labeled merely a “journalist,” of ALL THE PRESIDENT’S MEN fame) helped bring down Nixon’s Satanic White House! You tell me: what’s more of a “fundamental, revolutionary change”?

Meanwhile an ex-con and felon who planned the Watergate break-in – G. Gordon Liddy – instead of being labeled with either his prisoner number, his bitch name in jail, or even “criminal mastermind” is titled “Former Nixon Administration Official.”

If it can’t get its labeling right, how do we take this movie seriously at all?

From interviews with Ron Kovic (author, Born on the Fourth of July), to Geraldo Rivera (radical mustachio), Mario Cuomo (ex-Governor of New York) to legendary author Noam Chomsky and former presidential candidate George McGovern (to name but a few), the film tries to cover all angles, but neglects to impart major reasons for world events – we get no explanation of why the Viet Nam war is even happening; Nixon is suddenly ousted from the White House with no Watergate; Mark David Chapman (Lennon’s killer) is not even mentioned by name (which is a good thing, I guess). Lennon songs are strewn non-chronologically throughout the movie, mirroring the almost arbitrary, stream-of-consciousness events, like the bed-ins, the bag-ins and those oh-so-radical megaphone rallies – though it truly is stirring to hear Power To The People and Give Peace A Chance in the contexts for which they were written.

Lennon understood the power of repetition, but unlike George W. Bush, he wanted the TRUTH repeated over and over until – as he says – even the housewife will say to herself, “Peace or war – those are my options? I’ll choose peace.” It is truly a tragedy that truth has to stoop to the methods of lies to become evident.

What could be clearer than “War Is Over (if you want it)”?

Under Imagine the film hits another low point in cliché, giving us still-frame flashpoints in Viet Nam (the bloated dead in graves, the child soldier, the gun to the head of a prisoner – you know the manipulative mantra).

Ironically, the current terrifyingly Orwellian rumored “North American Union” (a Free Trade treaty between the Head Eggs of the three countries of Mexico, the United States and Canada) seems to be congruent with John’s vision: “Imagine there’s no countries / It isn’t hard to do / Nothing to kill or die for / And no religion too” – the “brotherhood of man” “sharing all the world…”

But then Lennon gets all crazy again: “Imagine all the people / Living life in peace…”

Now THAT would be radical.

END