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Dillinger

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Dillinger (1973)

July. 20,1973
|
6.9
|
R
| Drama Action Crime
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After a shoot-out kills five FBI agents in Kansas City the Bureau target John Dillinger as one of the men to hunt down. Waiting for him to break Federal law they sort out several other mobsters, while Dillinger's bank robbing exploits make him something of a folk hero. Escaping from jail he finds Pretty Boy Floyd and Baby Face Nelson have joined the gang and pretty soon he is Public Enemy Number One. Now the G-men really are after him.

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GamerTab
1973/07/20

That was an excellent one.

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Matrixiole
1973/07/21

Simple and well acted, it has tension enough to knot the stomach.

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Quiet Muffin
1973/07/22

This movie tries so hard to be funny, yet it falls flat every time. Just another example of recycled ideas repackaged with women in an attempt to appeal to a certain audience.

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Fleur
1973/07/23

Actress is magnificent and exudes a hypnotic screen presence in this affecting drama.

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JLRVancouver
1973/07/24

Ben Johnson is 'Melvin Purvis, G-man' and Warren Oates is 'public enemy number one' in this violent, fedora-rich biopic that takes some liberties with the facts. The film follows John Dillinger's rise from bank robber to criminal icon, portraying him as violent and vain, but also an anti-hero to some poor depression-era Americans (similar to the superior "Bonnie and Clyde", 1967). The rest of the gang is a bit of a 'who's who' of period gangsters: Pretty-boy Floyd, Baby Face Nelson, Machine Gun Kelly, etc. Oates and Johnson (the Gorch brothers in Peckinpah's great "The Wild Bunch", 1969) are quite good in their roles, as are the rest of the cast except for a hammy Richard Dreyfuss as Baby Face Nelson. As Billie Frechette, Dillinger's moll, Michelle Phillips (of 'The Mamas & the Papas' fame) seems like a bit of gimmick casting and she certainly does not look 'half Indian', which, as is mentioned several times in the film, Frechette was. Typical of the trend in late '60's/early '70's R-rated action films, lots of blood-squibs were used, so the shootouts are quite messy and 'realistic'. Many of the gang-members' demises are fictionalised to allow Purvis to be pulling the trigger (or at least be on hand), and while I appreciate that movies are not meant to be history lessons, I dislike it when they rewrite the past for simplistic dramatic effect. Not a great gangster film, but entertaining enough to warrant a viewing, especially by fans of the genre. One interesting side-note: Oates actually resembles Dillinger. No mention is made of Dillinger's mythic monstrous member, which urban-legend states is in the custody of the Smithsonian.

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alexanderdavies-99382
1973/07/25

"Dillinger" is one of the best films from Warren Oates. He is better known as a character actor, supporting player and a fine one at that. Occasionally, he was given the lead. The film has great action and Warren Oates bears a striking resemblance to the real life bandit, John Dillinger. Ben Johnson is terrific as the F.B.I agent who is on Dillinger's trail. A minor classic.

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kenjha
1973/07/26

This film looks at the final years of the infamous bank robber. Ineptly written and directed by Milius, the story has no narrative flow. It's a series of vignettes that become repetitive and tiresome. There are a lot of shootouts but the action scenes are poorly executed, with overly dramatic deaths. The acting is mostly bad. Oates seems miscast in the title role. Although Dillinger died at 31, Oates was 45 when this was filmed but looked even older. Also, he plays Dillinger as something of a goof ball rather than a tough guy. Johnson does OK as G-Man Ellison. Oates and Johnson played brothers in the classic "The Wild Bunch," but this will never be mistaken for a classic.

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jzappa
1973/07/27

So there have been many movies based on real lives and true stories which have taken poetic license, but why do so to such an extent when the real lives and true stories are head over heels more intriguing and surprising? For instance, think about the John Milius rendering of the Melvin Purvis raid on Little Bohemia lodge. Real life accounts leave no reservation that it was a disaster. But Milius spends a full 10 minutes on gunplay. Special agents collapse apparently by the dozens. Were there enough G-men in the Midwest to supply extra bodies for such a bloodbath? No, it seems more like Milius went nuts on the scene and towed in extras by the truckload so that he could kill them with those skillful little discharging blood pods.This, more like Milius' Last Picture Show, is just another movie written and directed by a man with an obsession with firearms who plays fast and loose with the facts. As Purvis, Milius has cast Ben Johnson, and it's an bewildering choice. Johnson is measured, laid-back and callous, and swears to take Dillinger himself. Before going into combat, he has a formal procedure: An assistant agent gives him his twin handguns and lights his cigar. This behavior is the farthest thing from the real Purvis Milius could've ever gotten. Or the real Baby Face Nelson, for that matter, who was never a guy you could just slap around and make cry. How stupid. Also Dillinger himself, like many Chicagoans, in July went to the movies as much to evade the high temperature as to see the flick, and the burdensome overcoats worn by the FBI are out of season.But this is all fine and I dismiss it readily. While Warren Oates is stunning in his physical resemblance to the eponymous anti-hero, which is of course a genetic accident, he also charges the piece with incredible oomph and blistering force. It's a great performance, surrounded by quite a few others. And more than a story about the American gangster, it's a blast of Milius' imaginary outrage toward living during the Depression and rising up against the oppression. Yes, Milius, with his men's men and indulgent shootouts, is often compared to Peckinpah. And while the comparison is apt, most are content to pin him down as merely a Second Amendment-lovin' reactionary, and leave it at that. But there can hardly be a dramatist who's not in some sense a humanist, an observer of humanity's inclinations.The mantra for the film (quite literally at one point) becomes "hard times." Dillinger doesn't have to do much scheming to stumble on eager accessories or make a prison warden take his cut of a robbery made immediately after escape. As a Dust Bowl vagrant child observes reasonably enough, the one distinction between the robbers and the lawmen is that you have to go to school to be the latter. And what young boy likes school more than guns and money? There's no stylized pleasure extracted from seeing anyone get shot here. Characters scream in anguish as they die, and no one dies unproblematically. It's a film thick with unanticipated poignancy, Dillinger's return to an acquiescent, heartbroken, patient father, or Harry Dean Stanton uttering that "things ain't workin' out for me today" in a way that indeed no one else could.Like other Movie-Brat suggestions of the 1970s, it's also a story of cinematic fathers and sons: To Milius, and to Bogdanovich and Spielberg, Johnson indicates the olden Ford and Waynes the next film generation at once admires and challenges. Milius' explosions of chaotic modernization is varied with a nostalgia for the propriety of film's past.

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