Warren Oates is a dead ringer for John Dillinger, Harry Dean Stanton as Homer Van Meter has the best overall scene ("I got his gumball machine! Drive!") as well as the most breathtaking death scene, and the interstitial montage sequences using black-and-white still photography, newspaper headlines, and stock footage work well to illustrate the escalating nationwide fascination with the Dillinger gang. John Milius' first feature is a good one.

Everything Public Enemies does wrong, this movie does right. Which is...pretty much everything.

Warren Oates is a dead ringer for John Dillinger, Harry Dean Stanton as Homer Van Meter has the best overall scene ("I got his gumball machine! Drive!") as well as the most breathtaking death scene, and the interstitial montage sequences using black-and-white still photography, newspaper headlines, and stock footage work well to illustrate the escalating nationwide fascination with the Dillinger gang. John Milius' first feature is a good one.

Everything Public Enemies does wrong, this movie does right. Which is...pretty much everything.

Milius can't quite figure out how he wants to approach Dillinger, part myth, part man, part history lesson. He ends up not really settling for any one thing and the whole thing falls apart as it goes along. The most compelling character for me was actually Ben Johnson's FBI G-man Melvin Purvis, who feels like the amoral gangster hunter who wishes his name carried the same weight in the public as it does for the gangsters. Even though he narrates the first 30 minutes of the movie, even that fades away at some point. The best scene is when Dillinger beats the crap out of Baby Face Nelson, but Milius inexplicably cuts away from the action to a wide shot, completely undermining any emotional weight or allegorical shift that could have and (in my opinion) should have happened there. It's an ambitious movie, but not as successful as it should have been.

John Dillinger's story is so well known that any film about him, I've found, lives and dies by the cast and direction. I was fairly underwhelmed by Michael Mann's Public Enemies, and while I wasn't blown away by Dillinger either, I think I enjoyed this version more based primarily on the cast. Ben Johnson, Harry Dean Stanton, and especially Warren Oates steal the show whenever they're onscreen, and Steve Kanaly and Richard Dreyfuss are really fun to watch when they pop up toward the third act as well. There's nothing amazing about John Milius' direction, but Oates' presence alone sets this film apart from the pack.

Interesting look at Dillinger.