Public Enemies at 15: Michael Mann’s End to the Wild West

It is not as if the robbers reject the modernity of technology that the cops also use—Thompson submachine guns and wicked-fast automobiles are just as useful for robbing banks as they are for catching criminals. Instead, what Dillinger and his ilk reject, knowingly or not, is modernity itself. Under modernity, these tools start to fuse with their users the same way bureaucratic society affects every way in which one interacts with the world, and the weapons they wield to try and feel the rush of liberation are ultimately the forces of a death drive. Mann represents this poetically. He ends the opening prison break battle with a man dying as the Earth is literally pulled away under his feet by an escaping car. When “Baby Face” Nelson (Stephen Graham) is gunned down by detectives, his Thompson’s fire mimics his own scream of death, the gun left smoking as his dying breath leaves his body into the cold night. These sequences, along with the innumerable ear-splitting and highly textured gun fights, are intensely immediate. Mann has talked about how they did camera tests for Public Enemies on both digital and celluloid, and while the filmic images lent a grandiosity and classicism to the visual sensibility of the film, the digital added an irreplaceable sense of immediacy, as if what we were seeing was present-tense, not historic. 

People often forget that the genre as it exists in cinema was solidified by Edwin S. Porter’s 1903 film The Great Train Robbery, a movie not about a mythic past, but the present. Although, this still worked with a romanticized frontier past that was also part of the genre form, and which dated back in American literature even before Manifest Destiny, like with James Fenimore Cooper’s Leatherstocking Tales (as rendered on screen by Mann himself in The Last of the Mohicans). This is all to say that the place where silent crime and Western films diverge might have less to do with historical perspective and more to do with the local. Crime films take place in large, predominantly East Coast cities; Westerns take place on the frontiers or frontier towns. Eventually, Los Angeles and Chicago cease being frontier outposts and instead become “civilization” in the way the East has been. For Dillinger and the public enemies, it was a Golden Age of bank robbing, but also the last time such freewheeling criminals could be as successful as they were. It was certainly the end of an on-the-ground technical parity between cops and criminals, with legislation like the National Firearms Act of 1934 seeking to throttle criminals’ ability to get automatic weapons, and tech capabilities on the crime-end going more towards subversive tools to evade detection and capture, or towards behind-the-scenes operations like Nitti’s bookie operations. This was the real end to the Wild West.

“We are in the modern age, we are making history,” Hoover tells Purvis. “Take direct, expedient action. As they say in Italy these days, ‘Take off the white gloves.’” This off-handed line, spoken in hushed tones before Hoover goes to meet the media, is the most explicit insinuation (if it wasn’t already clear) about how fascist American society was becoming. The hints are everywhere—from the film’s opening where Dillinger busts his friends out of a brutally modern concrete castle of a prison, to the way Hoover’s G-men start working with questionable judiciality. By the end of the film, they’re even ripping Billie off the street and torturing her for information like a band of Blackshirts. This all subverts the romanticism: while early heists are like if they got away with the “big one” in Heat, the way Hoover’s cops breach a door by blowing its hinges off with a shotgun foreshadows the same tactic used 60 years later when the LAPD is trying to track down Neil McCauley, that paralleling of the past revealing a fascist specter hiding in the present. 

Following the moment when Hoover tells Purvis to “take off the white gloves,” Hoover goes up to an awaiting crowd of cameramen who watch him award a group of children “junior G-men” status, building his own Hoover Youth. The sequence becomes a newsreel that Dillinger is watching in a theater, which proceeds a public notice to be on the lookout for him—public enemy number one could be anywhere, even in that very theater. “Look to your left,” the narrator tells the audience, and they turn. “Look to your right.” Dillinger stands out in a crowd of obeying faces. This bulletin is followed by a newsreel about Ethiopia (presumably, Fascist Italy’s invasion), and then a Looney Tunes. For the average theatergoer, it is all just background noise. For Dillinger, it would seem that his world has become cinema as much as it has become real life. Never is this more present than in his final hours, at a showing of the Clark Gable pre-Code crime film Manhattan Melodrama, where we slowly start to see the movie from Dillinger’s perspective, with the non-diegetic and haunting score overtaking Manhattan Melodrama’s soundtrack and the aspect ratio bending from a theatrical projection to widescreen, consuming the frame of Public Enemies. 

Dillinger is a completely self-aware figure, a perfect protagonist for a story examining its own demise. “Who cares what the public thinks?” Dillinger is asked early in the movie. “I do,” he responds. He’s a folk hero and enemy of the state, all at once, with all the contradictions that entails. Near the end, in Public Enemies’ most surreal sequence, Dillinger walks right into the FBI office that has been hunting him down, bathed in orange light of a setting sun. He wanders around the near-empty office, seeing boards with photos of himself and all of his associates who’ve been long-since gunned down. He knows the end is near: both the criminal Syndicate and the FBI have little use left for him. 

Public Enemies stands as one of Mann’s great works, but there are two obvious reasons it hasn’t been reclaimed in the 15 years since its release. First, the digital immediacy of Public Enemies, while an effect that is now embraced for its beauty in films like Collateral and Miami Vice, creates an insurmountable dissonance for some viewers because of the historic setting. But this also creates a truly unique filmic experience not replicated elsewhere to such a stunning effect (not even in Mann’s Ferrari, since digital itself has now reached a film-emulating fidelity). Second is Depp, whose utter monstrosity in his personal life has been very publicly litigated in the subsequent years. It creates a troubling tension for the modern viewer (not unlike watching, say Clark Gable), where we are all too aware of how horrible the man’s behavior is off-screen, and have to reckon with how he is still oddly, uncomfortably charismatic on-screen. But this again speaks to the power of the immediacy of the film (and I’ll be the first to admit, this may say something about me as a viewer): When I watch it, everything else in the world falls away, as if the only thing that exists are the images in front of me, like John Dillinger sitting in a movie theater where, suddenly, the movie becomes life itself.

Alex Lei is writer and filmmaker currently based in Baltimore. He can usually be found on Twitter.