The Screengrab : leslie howard

Public Enemies: The Many On-Screen Faces of John Dillinger

Phil Nugent — Tue, 10 Mar 2009 15:00:00 GMT

Michael Mann's Public Enemies doesn't open until July, but the appearance last week of the movie's trailer was enough to get chat rooms buzzing and fan boys clapping and speaking in strange tongues. Based on Bryan Burroughs's book Public Enemies: America's Greatest Crime Wave and the Birth of the FBI, 1933–34, the movie features an all-star Depression-era rogue's gallery that includes Channing Tatum as Pretty Boy Floyd, Giovanni Ribisi as Alvin "Creepy" Karpis, Stephen Dorff as Homer Van Meter, David Wenham as Harry Pierpont, Stephen Graham as Baby Face Nelson, and John Ortiz as Frank Nitti, along with such enforcers of the law as Christian Bale as Melvin Purvis, the G-man who brought John Dillinger to heel and Billy Crudup as J. Edgar Hoover, who was able to turn the headlines about rampaging criminals into a call for a national police force, the FBI. The real attraction, of course, is Johnny Depp as Dillinger, the most charismatic and legendary of the celebrity crooks and a figure who personified the image of the 1930s bank robber as dashing desperado.

Bonnie and Clyde had their doomed-love thing; Baby Face Nelson, who played super-villain team-up with Dillinger for a while, was a genuinely scary thug; Machine Gun Kelly was a hype. But Dillinger, conscious of the good it did him to keep world opinion on his side, actively courted the public with his dimples and courtly manners, so that even his hostages came out talking to reporters about what splendid company he'd been. He tried to avoid the use of violence, pulled off dazzling escapes, and stuck to robbing banks, at a time when nobody had a good word for those financial institutions. It was partly in response to Dillinger's popularity that Hollywood created the movie image of the endearing gangster, and Dillinger himself was not immune to the charms of that image: the movie he was exiting when he was shot down by Purvis's men was Manhattan Melodrama, a juicy ear of corn in which Clark Gable played a lovable rapscallion named Blackie whose best boyhood pal (William Powell) grew up to be District Attorney. When Blackie rubs out a nogoodnik who was threatening to spread some damaging slander about his buddy, who's getting ready to run for Governor, Powell is forced to prosecute Blackie for murder, while Blackie sits through the trial grinning in pleasure at his pal's sturdy principles and courtroom flair. Blackie's last act is to warn Powell, who's now Governor, not to even think about commuting his death sentence, before heading to the electric chair with a smile on his face and a swagger in his walk. Presumably Dillinger spent his last minutes in the theater feeling suitably flattered.

There have been enough wildly different screen takes on Dillinger by now that it's anyone's guess what Depp's will look like. But it seems a safe bet that Captain Jack Sparrow will find a way to clearly differentiate himself from such notable predecessors as these:

Humphrey Bogart, THE PETRIFIED FOREST (1936)

Bogart's character here, "Duke Mantee", represents the playwright Robert Sherwood's theatrical conceit of Dillinger as social outlaw and voice of the blunt common man. (His gang includes a black member, who enjoys goading his opposite number, a subservient black chauffeur.) Duke takes over a roadside diner where the hostages include Leslie Howard as the hero and mouthpiece, a crestfallen intellectual who makes poetic speeches about fate and destiny and other assorted claptrap. Bogart, who has a terrific, untamed look here, had been part of the Broadway cast of the play, as had Howard. His success on stage helped turned around a career that had been stalled, but he was almost denied the chance to be in the movie because Jack Warner wanted his own house gangster, Edward G. Robinson, to play the part. But Robinson was getting tired of waving gats around, and Howard announced that he didn't want to do the movie without Bogart, and there was no way Warner could replace Howard--no one else in the business could have delivered most of his lines with a straight face. The film version did finally get Bogart's movie career properly launched, but his performance wasn't as fresh as it must have been early in the Broadway run, and it would be another five years before another gangster role, in High Sierra, officially made him a star.

Lawrence Tierney, DILLINGER (1945)

Made a decade after Dillinger's death, this was the first film that claimed to tell his story and call him by name, and it also marked the big-time starring debut of Lawrence Tierney. These two things do not compute. In his mid-twenties, Tierney still had a thick head of black hair and a handsome profile, but he already had the voice of a mudslide survivor and emitted mean vibes potent enough to turn sunflowers black and fill nearby rivers with dead fish. He was simply not ideally cast as man for whom violence was a last resort, and the screenwriters, Philip Yordan and the uncredited William Castle, having taken a quick check of which of the two men, Dillinger or Tierney, they had greater need to fear, astutely shaped the script to Tierney's personality. Shot under the working title "John Dillinger, Killer", it's a portrait of a hell-raising psycho with a chip on his shoulder. Directed by the no-name Max Nosseck, it's also an energetically slapped-together knuckle buster of a poverty row production, with a running time of an hour and ten minutes and an especially exciting bank robbery scene that Nosseck didn't shoot: the footage was lifted from Fritz Lang's 1937 Bonnie-and-Clyde movie, You Only Live Once.

Warren Oates, DILLINGER (1973)

This film marked the directing debut of screenwriter John Milius, whose nostalgia for old movies and the era they were made in almost matches his enthusiasm for flamboyantly choreographed displays of bloody mayhem. Warren Oates, in one of his rare flings as a leading man, is Big John, while Ben Johnson, who played Oates's brother in The Wild Bunch, is supposed to be Melvin Purvis. (Twenty years older than Purvis was at the time and radiating a confident, bearlike serenity, Johnson might have been more convincing as Hoover than as the junior agent who, a title card at the end of the movie informs us, ultimately committed suicide, but Milius must have just loved the idea of the two time-tested character actors battling it out in the field.) The movie is full of people like Harry Dean Stanton (who goes out in a blaze of shotgun fire, wearing a fur coat he's taken off a carjacked college student, soon after delivering the line that ought to be on his family crest: "Things ain't workin' out for me today."), Geoffrey Lewis, Richard Dreyfuss (as a surly, punk-ass Baby Face Nelson), Frank McRae, and Cloris Leachman as the Lady in Red, and Milius seems to be having a good time staging many of the actual highlights of Dillinger's and the other gangsters' careers--in scrambled order, so that he can close with the killing of Dillinger, which actually predated some of the other events he wants to include. Weightless, never as dangerous as it wants to be, but kind of lovable, seeing this picture is like watching a bunch of people in period dress play cops and robbers on a movie studio's dime.

Robert Conrad, THE LADY IN RED (1979)

Of all the actors who've been cast as Dillinger, Conrad strikes me as perhaps the most unlikely, though all votes for Mark Harmon (who played the role in a 1991 TV movie that somehow never came across my radar screen) will be counted. Dillinger is actually a supporting character in this film, which was one of the first produced screenplays by John Sayles. Sayles told the story of how a poor farm girl (Pamela Sue Martin) who traveled to Chicago and had to use whatever means came to hand to survive life in the cold, hard city during the Depression came to be on Dillinger's arm the night he was gunned down faster than you can say, "Boy, that Clark Gable's a pisser, ain't he?" Tapping into his trademark liberal concern, Sayles tried to use the Pamela Sue Martin character to show how people are driven to desperate measures by an unfeeling capitalist society, and just to make sure that audiences wouldn't miss that she was meant to be sympathetic, he revealed that she had gotten a bad rap as the woman who set Dillinger up; both she and her new boyfriend (who tells her that he works for "the Board of Trade") were the victims of her Linda Tripp-doppelganger "friend" Anna Sage (Louise Fletcher), who deduced the boyfriend's identity and sold them out to the Feds. This protective screenwriting device has the downside of making the Martin character seem more stupid than necessary, and Conrad gives his usual convincing impersonation of a self-satisfied macho dickweed so full of himself that it's easier to see why people would want to gun him down on the sidewalk than it is to understand how he got a date to the movies. The Lady in Red, which was later re-issued under the title Guns, Sin and Bathtub Gin, was directed by Lewis Teague, who would team up again with Sayles a year later for Alligator, a probing, class-conscious exploration of the worst that can happen if you flush your pets.

Yesterday's Hits: Romeo and Juliet (1968, Franco Zeffirelli)

Paul Clark — Tue, 05 Aug 2008 19:00:00 GMT

What made Romeo and Juliet a hit?: While it’s debatable whether Romeo and Juliet is Shakespeare’s finest play, it’s almost certainly his most beloved. After all, not everyone can relate to the trials and tribulations of kings, but most of us know what it’s like to be young and in love. Yet until 1968, all “straight” big-screen adaptations of the play had been cast with adults. By casting a pair of age-appropriate teenagers Leonard Whiting and Olivia Hussey (who were 17 and 15, respectively, during filming) in the title roles, Zeffirelli’s take on Romeo and Juliet appealed to youth in a way previous productions could not.

While the handsome production values and timeless source material appealed to older moviegoers, it was the attractive stars- along with the story of two idealistic lovers defying their oppressive parents to be together- that helped the film hit home with younger audiences. Romeo and Juliet became one of the great big-screen romances of the late 1960s. Not incidentally, it also spawned the hit song “A Time For Us” (based on Nino Rota’s love theme from the film) that quickly became a staple of many weddings of the day- my own parents' wedding included.

What happened?: For years, Romeo and Juliet sustained a degree of popularity among movie lovers, even after it had disappeared from first-run theatres. But after the rise of video, the film took on a new life as a teaching aid in classrooms across the country. However, rather than increasing the film’s popularity with audiences, this favorite of sixties-era youth suddenly turned into something dry and academic, a movie that was to be suffered through rather than enjoyed. As the years passed, fewer audiences came to Zeffirelli’s film on their own, and by the time Baz Luhrmann made his own pop version of the play in 1996, the love it had once received from moviegoers had long since subsided.

Does Romeo and Juliet still work?: Much to my surprise, it does- quite well, in fact. Like many people my age, I hadn’t seen the film since it was shown to us back in high school, during freshman-year English class. At the time, I barely paid attention to the movie itself, mostly being grateful that we didn’t have any reading to do on the days the movie was playing. But the intervening years- and my greater love for Shakespeare’s work- have allowed me to appreciate how well Zeffirelli captured the spirit of the original play, while at the same time making it completely cinematic.

Naturally, it’s hard to argue with the source material- after all, it’s Shakespeare. But while he made judicious trims to the original text, Zeffirelli was extremely successful at capturing the universal appeal of Romeo and Juliet on film, while keeping it completely in period. It couldn’t have been easy, but Zeffirelli immerses us in the world of pre-Renaissance Verona so sure-handedly that I never once scoffed at the idea of watching actors prancing around in tights and speaking in verse.

Even more than most classical playwrights, it’s difficult to fully appreciate Shakespeare simply by reading the plays. On the page, the language has a tendency to overwhelm the story, so that a reader will often find it difficult to puzzle out everything that’s happening, what with all the dialogue. One of the triumphs of Zeffirelli’s production is how un-stagy it feels. As the events play out onscreen, they work as drama rather than filmed theatre, which gives them an immediacy lacking in many other Shakespeare adaptations.

This is where Zeffirelli’s decision to cast age-appropriate unknowns, rather than older established stars, paid off beautifully. Watching previous productions of Romeo and Juliet- say, the George Cukor version starring Norma Shearer and Leslie Howard- there’s always a degree of self-consciousness to the performances, as if the actors are trying to recapture the impetuousness of youth in order to make the story work. This wasn’t a problem for Whiting and Hussey, who although they sometimes struggled a bit with Shakespeare’s language, had no trouble whatsoever with the tempestuous emotions that are so often stirred up by young love. It’s because of this that I believed these two as Romeo and Juliet in a way I’ve never been able to with other actors, no matter how talented they might be.

Another reason the movie works is because Zeffirelli doesn’t shy away from the more comedic aspects of the film. Many filmmakers are so in awe of Shakespeare that they approach his work like pious students, making stone-faced adaptations of Great Works of Literature. But Zeffirelli recognized that, like almost all of Shakespeare’s plays, Romeo and Juliet contains crowd-pleasing- even “low”- humor. For example, on the page the Nurse feels like little more than a plot device, a servant character who secretly aids the lovers. But as played by Pat Heywood in the film, she’s a serial scene-stealer, attending to her business as she tries- and usually fails- to keep her bawdy side in check.

Zeffirelli’s embracing of the play’s humorous material pays off magnificently in the film’s centerpiece, the confrontation between Mercutio and Tybalt. Most directors would have their sword fight play out solemnly, accompanied by exciting music. But instead, Zeffirelli has the irrepressible Mercutio (John McEnery) clown around with Tybalt (Michael York), as a way to defend himself against a superior swordsman. Of course, the crowd eats it up, and the scene is accompanied by a great deal of laughter by those gathered around. As a result, it hits that much harder when Tybalt stabs Mercutio in earnest, since the almost slapstick-y sword fight has suddenly turned deadly serious.

But consider what happens afterward. Tybalt, realizing what has happened, runs away with his men. But Mercutio’s friends interpret his stumbling as yet another jest, and continue laughing. The more he visibly suffers, the more they laugh at his perceived joke, while only Romeo begins to see the truth. It’s not until Mercutio struggles up a flight of stairs and screams, “a plague o’er both your houses!” that they realize what’s really happened.

In the end, this is probably the greatest triumph of Zeffirelli’s Romeo and Juliet- that he’s able to find the emotional truth behind Shakespeare’s beloved romantic tragedy in a way that gives it immediacy. It’s the difference between a director who simply respects Shakespeare and one who loves him enough to do justice to his work. Romeo and Juliet isn’t simply a dutiful Shakespeare adaptation; it’s an involving and emotionally satisfying movie in its own right.

Home Video Rep Report: "Forbidden Hollywood Collection - Vol.2"

Phil Nugent — Wed, 12 Mar 2008 19:00:00 GMT

As Paul Clark recently pointed out, this is the week that No Country for Old Men came out on DVD. Which is all well and good, but I just saw it a few months ago. So did you, probably, but when's the last time you saw Clark Gable, in a mondo-bondage chauffeur outfit, punch out Barbara Stanwyck for interfering with his plans to keep their employer drunk so he can starve her children to death, or Humphrey Bogart taking one look at wide-eyed Ann Dvorak and miming sniffing something powdery while flashing his dirtiest grin and snickering, "Uh-oh!" These charming relics of Hollywood's early wildcat period can be found in the new three-disc set Forbidden Hollywood Collection - Vol.2, assembled from the vaults of Turner Classic Movies. (Volume One, which came out last year, included the long-lost Stanwyck vehicle Angel Face and the giddily scandalous Jean Harlow movie Red Headed Woman.) The discs provide a handy sampler of what Hollywood comedies and melodramas got into in the Pre-Code days before censors roused the rabble and threw a corset around Mae West. For sheer entertainment value, the new set is worth picking up just for 1931's Night Nurse, the hard-headed, hard-boiled nifty starring Stanwyck, Gable, and the platinum wisecrack dispenser Joan Blondell, and the 1932 Three on a Match, in which Blondell is the smart good girl who gets the guy, Ann Dvorak is the good-time girl who doesn't appreciate the guy, and Bette Davis is the one who makes contemporary audiences go, "Jesus Christ, Ann Dvorak makes Bette Davis look like a whipped mouse!" Match makes the case that the cult icon Dvorak, best remembered now as Paul Muni's sister in the original Scarface, deserves to be remembered as the quivering embodiment of the Pre-Code spirit. In the inevitable TCM documentary that's included in the DVD set, she's likened to a sputtering live wire, and she seems to be having a more exciting time than anyone else onscreen whether she's resisting temptation (which was something she never did for long), giving in to temptation (diving in with both feet), or paying for her sins by diving out a window with instructions to the police written on her nightie with lipstick.

The set also includes two Norma Shearer pictures, The Divorcee, which won the boring old thing an Academy Award for Best Actress of 1930, and A Free Soul, which came out the next year and won a Best Actor Award for Lionel Barrymore, who played her father. As that data may suggest, these were A-pictures in their day, but they don't hold up as well as the B's do. But they do have some historical interest, in part because they reveal what people who thought they were looking for something wild and steamy but who couldn't deal with the sight of Ann Dvorak in full writhe were prepared to settle for. Coiffed and dressed to the nines, Shearer could pass for a pretty hot number, though she could never act for shit, and the whole point of her pictures was to let her get just enough of a whiff of liberated hedonism to get her to run back to hubby and daddy. Like Night Nurse, A Free Soul is notable for bottling the dirty essence of Pre-Code Clark Gable, who is once again cast as a magnetic crook who keeps a highborn gal, Shearer, in sexual thrall, to the point that her fiancee. Leslie Howard, is obliged to shoot the blighter. (After that, Barrymore, a lawyer, is obliged to defend Howard in court by telling the jury that none of this would have happened if he'd just had the foresight to lock his daughter in the bedroom until her hormones settled down.) Also included is Female (1932), which stars Ruth Chatterton as a rich car company owner whose casual affair with George Brent turns all serious and shit. It falls between the two stools set by Dvorak and Shearer; Chatterton gets to have some fun early on treating her employee pool as her own personal stud stable, but by the end she's imploring Brent not just to marry her but to take charge of her company so she'll be free to stay at home and turn out enough kids that they can start their own baseball team.