Public Enemy Number One - John Dillinger  

You write an article about John Dillinger and immediately fall into the glorification of a villain, it's inevitable. His life was too dramatic, the stuff of movies, the stuff of James Cagney audiences across America in films like "The Public Enemy (1931) and G-Men (1935) was exciting. Cagney while strutting his stuff on the sets of Hollywood was Dillinger's doing it for real, impossible to catch them, thrilled the public through his work. It is the complexity, how can we not marvelthese acts, if we goo and gaa at the fictionalization of such things? In truth, at the time Dillinger was as public enemy number one, but many in the public is not branded it as such. The Depression was ravaging the country, and many had seen their savings disappear in the rubble of the collapsing banks, seized, while the same banks their homes. So if Dillinger et. al robbed them were not cut the people, so often the mortgage Dillinger destroyed, the records wereheld in the safes that he is thief, leading many to him as a modern Robin Hood.

Watch Modern day, curious, I write this, in the sequel to Johnny Depp's presentation of Dillinger in Public Enemies directed by Michael Mann (2009), and it seems to me that Dillinger the end of something that the public is excited since Robin Hood had, and was in front. Man leaves us with some old pictures of wild and vast, unspoiled and free America that you feel the prairie of movement, yousense that the land was not yet tired, there was still a choice for what America may still become. Similarities with the outlaws Jesse James, William H. Bonney or Butch Cassidy are not too far-fetched, likewise comparisons with the later Bugsy Siegel and Lucky Luciano are not too stretched. Dillinger was a man trapped between times, when you could still rob banks Sundance style but drive away in a Ford V8 and dress in sharp suits and live in opulent surroundings. Criminal he was but social leper, he was not. Yes, participation in Mann's film, where he was interviewed in a room in an Indiana prison in hordes of reporters, while embracing his accuser and poses with the sheriff seems daft, until you see the actual pictures and see is that, what actually happened. It was nothing less than to eradicate idolatry, swearing what J. Edgar Hoover, director of the FBI. Something he achieved, and so Dillinger, although the definition of wild America, also brought on themselves of UseDestruction.