By Guest Contributor Chris Ward
Kicking off the new year in explosive style, Arrow Video’s latest addition to their catalogue is 1973’s Dillinger, the directorial debut of John Milius, a filmmaker not known for exploring his sensitive feminine side on the screen. Milius had a hand in several violent movies in the early 1970s, including such macho features as Dirty Harry and its sequel Magnum Force, as well as helming Arnold Schwarzenegger’s breakthrough fantasy adventure Conan the Barbarian, so you should know what to expect going in to a Milius movie about a bank robber and his gang.
John Dillinger was a notorious gangster during America’s Great Depression of the 1930s, robbing banks and courting the press, who viewed him as some sort of Robin Hood-like figure, whenever he got caught. In this movie, Dillinger is played by Warren Oates, who does bear an uncanny resemblance to the real-life Dillinger, and he is joined by several familiar faces in his gang – including Geoffrey Lewis (as Harry Pierpont), John P. Ryan (as Charles Mackley), Harry Dean Stanton (as Homer Van Meter), Richard Dreyfuss (as Babby Face Nelson) and Frank McRae (as Reed Youngblood) – as they go on a robbing spree across America’s Midwest, chasing, kidnapping, shooting and (occasionally, if they have to) killing in order to escape.
However, the gang are being pursued by determined FBI G-Man Melvin Purvis (Ben Johnson) who will stop at nothing to bring down Dillinger and his band of merry men, despite the press and the general public heralding the criminal as some sort of folk hero.
As a story, Dillinger does stick fairly closely to events that actually happened back in the 1930s, although if it’s a more nuanced character piece you’re after, then Michael Mann’s 2009 movie Public Enemies might be more to your liking because John Milius is less concerned with details and more concerned with creating exciting, entertaining and overtly violent set pieces that certainly get the blood pumping – both metaphorically and, judging by the amount of squibs they must have gotten through, literally – if not the editing scissors, because after nearly 110 minutes of serviceable shoot-outs, car chases and some admittedly beautiful cinematography, you do start to wonder if anybody had dared to suggest to John Milius that maybe he should try and pace it out a bit better.
But if you come to gangster movies for dogged detectives, charming antiheroes and screeching female characters there to make the main characters look more manly, then Dillinger delivers, offering up similar insights into historical American figures as Arthur Penn’s 1967 classic Bonnie and Clyde or even the more modern(ish) Young Guns (except the cast of Dillinger aren’t exactly pin-up material). The Sam Peckinpah-esque action scenes add a little more edge than a standard mainstream picture from the era would normally exhibit – and John Milius does not hold back on the blood and pyrotechnic effects as Oates, Lewis, Stanton et al deliver stellar performances, despite some lopsided dialogue – but for sheer adrenaline and manly men doing manly men things then Dillinger is as good a movie as you would need to scratch that particular itch. Double it up with, say, John Boorman’s Deliverance and the amount of testosterone coming through your TV screen could probably encourage beard growth as you watched.
Dillinger (1973) is available on Blu-ray from Arrow Video. For more details, please click here.