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Public Enemy #1: The Legendary Outlaw John Dillinger

2002; Oxford University Press; Volume: 89; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.2307/3092518

1945-2314

David E. Ruth, Ben Loeterman,

Crime, Deviance, and Social Control

John Dillinger, remarks a historian in this engaging film, was “one of the hugest stories of the 1930s.” In its retelling of that story, Public Enemy #1 focuses on the fourteen-month crime spree that brought Dillinger national notoriety in 1933 and 1934. Just released after nearly nine years' imprisonment for a bungled robbery, Dillinger held up a string of small-town banks, arranged the prison break of three confederates, himself escaped from prison (twice), raided police stations for weapons and bulletproof vests, and repeatedly eluded what seemed like certain capture. Dillinger, we are told, was cool headed, loyal, charming, funny, and, not incidentally, capable of vaulting six-to-seven-foot walls. Originally shown on PBS's American Experience series, much of Public Enemy #1 seems geared to entertaining viewers with tales of audacious criminal exploits. Perhaps as a result, the film occasionally slips into hyperbole and crime-buff hagiography. “If his plan [for springing friends from an Indiana prison] worked,” the narrator intones, “no bank would be safe.” Told that robberies such as that of a Greencastle, Indiana, bank were “precisely planned, meticulously executed . . . the work of a master at his craft,” viewers may wonder why so many of Dillinger's schemes seem ill planned and ineptly executed.