Mini-Review *SPOILERS*

Just got done watching this (finally) so here's some hastily-typed thoughts.

My take is pretty mixed on the whole. There's a lot of good but also a decent amount of bad throughout.

The movie starts with a cool opening and I like the gumball scene which does a nice job establishing character and mood. At the very least I appreciate the film for giving the viewer some background info on the Kansas City Massacre and such (completely lacking in Public Enemies), and it does a much better job of capturing the Depression and popular support for Dillinger than Mann's film, which asserts Dillinger is popular and lets it be so.

The story however plods for most of the first hour. Purvis is by far the more interesting character of the two leads and quite frankly, Dillinger's scenes seem largely in the way. Oates' performance is good (not great) but I don't think Milius does a good enough job developing Dillinger's character; quite frankly, I found his gang mates more interesting in this film. Perhaps for this reason, I thought the movie really took off after Dillinger's jailbreak with the "Supergang"'s crime spree and Purvis in hot pursuit. This is a complete mirror of Public Enemies, where Dillinger is a fairly interesting character but no one else gets enough screen time to make any impression. If Milius had done a better job with his nominal protagonist he might have made a truly great film. As it was, I thought Ben Johnson and Dillinger's gang mates (particularly Harry Dean Stanton and Steve Kanaly) steal the film from Oates, which is only a bad thing considering the film is called Dillinger.

Also the production values are lacking. Throughout, the movie very much looks like the cheap movie it is. I know it was an AIP production so I won't be too critical but there's very little variance in locations, it looks like all the scenes were shot on the same farm in Oklahoma during the fall (even though most of the film's key events occurred in summertime). Also, the bit actors and extras are lousy actors - particularly the caricature Tucson Policemen - another sign of a low budget. Public Enemies certainly looks a lot better, shaky cam and all; Milius uses a good amount of handheld set-ups and no better than Mann does.

Another area where Dillinger is really lacking is the romance. I didn't much like the hackneyed soap opera romance in Public Enemies but it was miles better than what's here. I hate the way their love story "develops" - Dillinger kidnaps Billie, practically rapes her, and suddenly she's in love with him? I don't care what planet you're on, that's pretty darn misogynistic, and it really put me off. Besides that, Michelle Phillips is a lousy actress and she has no chemistry with Oates. Both films probably focus too much on the love story, but PE's is less obnoxious and disturbing to my way of thinking.

I'm not going to comment on historical accuracy for obvious reasons. Suffice it to say, the HUGE errors here are less glaring than in Public Enemies, which has pretensions to realism. I could take the film as primarily a work of fiction and I don't really care about "Super Purvis" or chronology of deaths. I do think the killing of Dillinger (which I'd seen previously) is poorly staged, not so much for accuracy but because the set-up is very poor - we hardly see Dillinger after he escapes from Little Bohemia, there's no real tension or build-up to it.

The movie's strongest sequence is the whole Little Bohemia part of the film, from the shootout to the gang's escape and eventual deaths. Twenty minutes of brilliance by Milius - the pacing is perfect, giving each of the gang members their own unique death scene, the action well-staged if a bit over-the-top (Floyd chucking grenades at the G-Men kinda threw me off), the acting and writing top-notch - everything clicks, and this sequence easily surpasses everything in Mann's film aside from the shooting of Dillinger. If the rest of the film was on this level I'd probably find it a masterpiece.

I'm not sure what to rate it rate now - I'm leaning towards a 7 but an 8 is possible given the positives noted above. Slightly better than Public Enemies, but with its own set of flaws. Unless the TV movie with Mark Harmon is an overlooked masterpiece, I'd say the definitive Dillinger film still needs to be made.

"It's a joke. We'll laugh about it in the car."