Dillinger | |
---|---|
Directed by | Max Nosseck |
Written by | William Castle (uncredited) Philip Yordan |
Produced by | Frank and Maurice King |
Starring | Lawrence Tierney Edmund Lowe Anne Jeffreys Elisha Cook Jr. Eduardo Ciannelli |
Cinematography | Jackson Rose |
Edited by | Edward Mann |
Music by | Dimitri Tiomkin |
Production company | Monogram Pictures |
Distributed by | Monogram Pictures |
Release date |
|
Running time | 70 minutes |
Country | United States |
Language | English |
Budget | $150,000 [2] or $65,000 [3] or $193,000 [4] |
Box office | $2 million [5] or $4 million [3] [4] |
Dillinger is a 1945 gangster film telling the story of John Dillinger.
The film was directed by Max Nosseck. Dillinger was the first major film to star Lawrence Tierney. The B-movie was shot in black and white and features a smoke-bomb bank robbery edited into the film from the 1937 Fritz Lang film You Only Live Once . The film was released on DVD by Warner Bros. for the Film Noir Classic Collections 2 in 2005, even though the film generally is not regarded as being film noir. Some sequences were shot at Big Bear Lake, California.
A newsreel plays, summing up the gangster life of John Dillinger in detail. At the end of the newsreel, Dillinger's father walks onto the stage and speaks to the movie audience about his son's childhood back in Indiana, which he says was ordinary and not very eventful, but concedes that his son had ambitions and wanted to go his own way. The young Dillinger left his town to find his fortune in Indianapolis, but soon ran out of money. The scene fades to a restaurant, where John is on a date and finds himself humiliated by the waiter who refuses to accept a check for the meal; John excuses himself, runs into a nearby grocery store and robs it for $7.20 in cash. He makes the clerk at the store believe he has a gun in his hand under the jacket.
John is soon arrested for this felony, and he is sentenced to prison. When incarcerated, he becomes good friends with Specs Green, his cell mate. Specs is an infamous bank robber whose gang –Marco Minnelli, Doc Madison and Kirk Otto –are also in the same prison. John is impressed by Specs and his experience and intelligence, and begins to look up to him as a father figure.
Because John has a much shorter sentence, he decides he will be the gang's outside help when he is released, intending to facilitate their escape. As soon as John is free, he holds up the box office at a movie theater. Before he does, he flirts with the female clerk, Helen Rogers, with the result that she refuses to identify him in the police line-up after the robbery. Instead she goes on a date with John.
John continues his criminal spree of robberies for money to finance the escape of Specs' gang. When he has enough, he devises a plan to smuggle a barrel of firearms to the gang at their quarry job site. The plan succeeds, they add John to their gang, then start a crime wave of robberies in the American Midwest.
Specs sends John to scout for new targets because he is the only one not recognized by the witnesses at the quarry at the time of the gang's escape. John checks out the Farmer's Trust Bank, where he poses as a potential customer to get inside the office. He reports back to the gang that the security system is too sophisticated for them to bypass.
Specs still wants to hit the bank, and getting tired of John's ego and trigger-happiness, he decides to get help from outside the gang. John suggests another way to get into the bank – with gas bombs. John convinces the rest of the gang of his way, and they successfully rob the bank. Back at the hideout, John demands the leader's usual double share of the loot. After John is captured but escapes from jail, he kills Specs and takes his place as the leader of the gang. Running low on cash, they decide to rob a mail train. In the process, gang member Kirk Otto is killed.
The gang part for a few weeks to lie low, and John and Helen go on a big shopping spree. They meet with the rest of the gang at a cabin lodge owned by Kirk's surrogate parents. They stay there for a while, but when the elderly couple calls the police, Dillinger kills them. Later, they realize that the police are closing in on them, so they plan to head to the Western States and continue robbing banks. Before going, Dillinger and his girlfriend spend an evening at the Biograph movie theater in Chicago. Exiting the theater, Dillinger sees the police coming after him. In a gunfight, he is killed in an alley, his only money is $7.20 –the same as what he took in his first robbery.
Philip Yordan was an emerging writer who had been collaborating with George Beck. The King Brothers had a deal with Monogram Pictures and wanted Beck to write them a gangster picture but could not offer Beck's regular fee so he recommended Yordan instead. Yordan wrote Dillinger, but Monogram's head of production Steve Broidy thought it would cost $50,000 and would be too expensive unless they could hire a name actor to play the lead, like Chester Morris. Yordan wanted Lawrence Tierney to play the role as "boy he looked like Dillinger and he was mean". [3] He refused to see the script unless he was cast. Yordan went on to write other scripts for the King Brothers instead, The Unknown Guest and When Strangers Marry . Both were successful, and Tierney was cast in Dillinger, which was given a decent budget. [3]
Yordan says that William Castle was meant to direct the film and he was great assistance on the script. [3]
Robert Tasker also may have worked uncredited on the script. [6]
According to Philip Yordan, all the major studios had an agreement not to make movies that might glorify actual gangsters by name, but Monogram was not part of it. [7] He says Louis B. Mayer asked Frank King to destroy the negative, but King refused when Mayer did not offer any compensation. Yordan says the film made $4 million of which he got a third. [3] It is not known whether this pact actually existed.
Yordan believes he should have won the Academy Award for Best Script, but that the Academy, led by Walter Wanger, deliberately overlooked it in favor of Marie Louise , "some picture made in Switzerland that nobody had ever seen". [3]
Yordan also claims that "Dillinger was one of the early crime films of its type. Darryl Zanuck ran that picture again and again, and used it for the basis of many pictures at Fox. In other words, I had created a style." [3]
Yordan was nominated for the Oscar for Writing Original Screenplay, earning Monogram Pictures its first Oscar nomination for a feature-length film release. [8]
The film is recognized by American Film Institute in these lists:
John Herbert Dillinger was an American gangster during the Great Depression. He commanded the Dillinger Gang, which was accused of robbing 24 banks and four police stations. Dillinger was imprisoned several times and escaped twice. He was charged with but not convicted of the murder of an East Chicago, Indiana, police officer, who shot Dillinger in his bullet-proof vest during a shootout; it was the only time Dillinger was charged with homicide.
Samuel “Steve” Broidy was an American executive in the U.S. motion picture industry.
Lester Joseph Gillis, also known as George Nelson and Baby Face Nelson, was an American bank robber who became a criminal partner of John Dillinger, when he helped Dillinger escape from prison, in Crown Point, Indiana. Later, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) announced that Nelson and the remaining gang of bank robbers were collectively "Public Enemy Number One".
The Petrified Forest is a 1936 American crime drama film directed by Archie Mayo and based on Robert E. Sherwood's 1934 drama of the same name. The motion picture stars Leslie Howard, Bette Davis and Humphrey Bogart. The screenplay was written by Delmer Daves and Charles Kenyon, and adaptations were later performed on radio and television. The film is set in Petrified Forest National Park in Arizona.
Lawrence James Tierney was an American film and television actor who is best known for his many screen portrayals of mobsters and tough guys in a career that spanned over 50 years. His roles mirrored his own frequent brushes with the law. In 2005, film critic David Kehr of The New York Times described "the hulking Tierney" as "not so much an actor as a frightening force of nature".
Monogram Pictures Corporation was an American film studio that produced mostly low-budget films between 1931 and 1953, when the firm completed a transition to the name Allied Artists Pictures Corporation. Monogram was among the smaller studios in the golden age of Hollywood, generally referred to collectively as Poverty Row. Lacking the financial resources to deliver the lavish sets, production values, and star power of the larger studios, Monogram sought to attract its audiences with the promise of action and adventure.
Born to Kill is a 1947 RKO Pictures American film noir starring Lawrence Tierney, Claire Trevor and Walter Slezak with Esther Howard, Elisha Cook Jr., and Audrey Long in supporting roles. The film was director Robert Wise's first film noir production, preceding his later work on The Set-Up (1949) and The Captive City (1952).
Where the Sidewalk Ends is a 1950 American film noir directed and produced by Otto Preminger. The screenplay for the film was written by Ben Hecht, and adapted by Robert E. Kent, Frank P. Rosenberg, and Victor Trivas. The screenplay and adaptations were based on the novel Night Cry by William L. Stuart. The film stars Dana Andrews and Gene Tierney.
Philip Yordan was an American screenwriter, film producer, novelist and playwright. He was a three-time Academy Award nominee, winning Best Story for Broken Lance (1951).
King Brothers Productions was an American film production company, active from 1941 to the late 1960s. It was founded by the Kozinsky brothers, Frank, Maurice, and Herman, who later changed their surname to "King". They had notable collaborations with such filmmakers as Philip Yordan and William Castle and are particularly remembered today for employing a number of blacklisted writers during the Red Scare of the late 1940s and 1950s. Some of their films include Dillinger (1945), Suspense (1946), Gun Crazy (1949), Carnival Story (1954), The Brave One, Gorgo (1961), Captain Sindbad (1963), and Heaven With a Gun (1968).
Dillinger is a 1973 American biographical gangster film, dramatizing the life and criminal exploits of notorious bank robber John Dillinger. It is written and directed by John Milius in his feature directorial debut, and stars Warren Oates as Dillinger, Ben Johnson as FBI Agent Melvin Purvis, and Michelle Phillips in her first film performance as Dillinger's moll Billie Frechette. Other actors in the film include Cloris Leachman, Harry Dean Stanton, and Richard Dreyfuss.
Public Enemies is a 2009 American biographical crime drama film directed by Michael Mann, who co-wrote the screenplay with Ronan Bennett and Ann Biderman. It is an adaptation of Bryan Burrough's 2004 non-fiction book Public Enemies: America's Greatest Crime Wave and the Birth of the FBI, 1933–34. Set during the Great Depression, the film chronicles the final years of the notorious bank robber John Dillinger as he is pursued by FBI agent Melvin Purvis, Dillinger's relationship with Billie Frechette, as well as Purvis' pursuit of Dillinger's associates and fellow criminals John "Red" Hamilton, Homer Van Meter, Harry Pierpont, and Baby Face Nelson.
Homer Virgil Van Meter was an American criminal and bank robber active in the early 20th century, most notably as a criminal associate of John Dillinger and Baby Face Nelson.
John "Red" Hamilton was a Canadian criminal and bank robber active in the 1920s–1930s, most notably as an associate of John Dillinger. He is best known for his lingering death and secret burial after being mortally wounded during a robbery.
Wheeler Oakman was an American film actor.
The Dillinger Gang was a group of American Depression-era bank robbers led by John Dillinger. The gang gained notoriety for a successful string of bank robberies, using modern tools and tactics, in the Midwestern United States from September 1933 to July 1934. During this crime spree, the gang killed 10 and wounded 7. They managed to pull off three jail breaks which wounded two guards and killed a sheriff.
The Hoodlum is a 1951 American film noir crime film directed by Max Nosseck and starring Lawrence Tierney, Allene Roberts, Marjorie Riordan and Lisa Golm.
Badman's Territory is a 1946 American Western film starring Randolph Scott. It was followed by the loose sequels Return of the Bad Men (1948) and Best of the Badmen (1951).
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A gangster film or gangster movie is a film belonging to a genre that focuses on gangs and organized crime. It is a subgenre of crime film, that may involve large criminal organizations, or small gangs formed to perform a certain illegal act. The genre is differentiated from Westerns and the gangs of that genre.
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