The Screengrab : william powell

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.

Honorable Mention: The Top Leading Men of All Time (Part Six)

Andrew Osborne — Fri, 10 Oct 2008 00:00:00 GMT

BURT REYNOLDS (1936 - )

It may be hard for you young whippersnappers to believe, but 30 years ago, Burt Reynolds was the biggest star in the world. He'd be the first to admit that his career management skills were never a match for his good ol' boy charisma and winking, bubblegum-popping likability – in fact, he's practically made a second career out of admitting it. His forgettable early career in television and B-movies (Navajo Joe, anyone?) isn't what convinced John Boorman to cast Reynolds in his breakthrough role in Deliverance; rather, it was his easy command of the Carson panel as a guest host of The Tonight Show that led to his star-making turn as Lewis Medlock. His Southern charm and Marlboro Man looks led to a series of redneck roles, from White Lightning to Smokey and the Bandit, which became the second-highest grossing movie of 1977, behind only Star Wars. Reynolds went to that well a few times too many, famously turning down Terms of Endearment to reteam with hick flickster Hal Needham for Stroker Ace. His career never came close to returning to the heights of Smokey, but he was nominated for a Best Supporting Actor Oscar for his role in Boogie Nights. True to form, he fired his agent after seeing the rough cut, fearing his career was ruined…and then when the movie instead revived his career, he squandered the comeback opportunity by going right back to making crap again.

STEVE McQUEEN (1930-1980)

Steve McQueen's best-known roles didn't require him to do much other than be Steve McQueen, but really, who cares? A lot of leading men coast by on personal charm; that's sorta what people like about them. And the thing that made Steve McQueen popular had nothing to do with his acting chops and everything to do with how fucking cool Steve McQueen was. He was so cool that just typing his name over and over again makes me feel cooler. So he made himself a star by stealing The Magnificent Seven from bigger-name actors, just by being cool. He convinced John Sturges to put a motorcycle chase into The Great Escape, because motorcycle chases were cool, and he was Steve McQueen, dammit. He effortlessly makes The Thomas Crown Affair a fun movie to watch. And Bullitt, man! There's nothing even approaching acting in that movie, but McQueen just kills. I think people were surprised when it turned out that McQueen could act after all. His roles in Junior Bonner and Papillon called on him to do something with all that legendary cool, and McQueen delivered in spades. He wasn't so great in The Getaway, and no one got out of The Towering Inferno without some stink. He made only a few more movies before his all-too-early death in 1980. But he left a legacy of untouchable cool backed by unsuspected competence that's unique among actors too fucking cool to break a sweat while making something as inconsequential as a movie.

HARRISON FORD (1942 - )

For a lesson in the importance of Leading Man star power, one need look no further than the disparity between the first Star Wars trilogy and the second. Sure, The Phantom Menace, Attack of the Clones and Revenge of the Sith had shinier special effects, and Ewan McGregor, Natalie Portman and even Hayden Christensen have all been known to deliver fine acting performances (albeit in non-green screen environments)...but Ford managed to bring a recognizably human heart to his half of the trilogy despite the hokey dialogue and distracting special effects, and then he went on to prove his Leading Man status in all the Indiana Jones, Jack Ryan and other ‘80s and ‘90s tentpole action flicks that followed. For some, none of Ford’s films matter as much as the cult classic Blade Runner, and his female fan base may have a particular soft spot for Witness or Working Girl...but Ford’s inability to expand his range much beyond the action genre (despite interesting against-type anomalies like The Mosquito Coast, What Lies Beneath and “I’m Fucking Ben Affleck”) keeps him batting clean-up the Honorable Mention list rather than enshrined in our Top 25.

WILLIAM POWELL (1892-1984)

In the days when Americans still dreamed of embodying classy sophistication, before we all started hating elitists and shooting wolves from helicopters, Powell was as classy as you could get without actually turning English. Of all the homegrown American stars of his day, he may be the one who it's hardest to imagine doing time in a Western between trips to Manhattan. He was built to swill cocktails and trade wisecracks, but his eyelids, which he kept permanently at half-mast, signaled that he was dangerously close to becoming jaded. The only solution was for him to find the perfect woman and verbal sparring partner -- you didn't want him turning cold and becoming one of those rich rotters, but you also didn't want him coming after your girlfriend or sister. So when Powell met Myrna Loy for the first time on-screen, the nation must have breathed a collective sigh of relief. He had co-starred with other actresses, notably Carole Lombard in My Man Godfrey, and he also had a well-known off-screen connection to Jean Harlow before she died, but his partnership with Loy struck so many people as so ineffably perfect (like picking up the paper to see if your favorite wastrel buddy from college had been forced into rehab yet and discovering instead that he'd married the first duchess to be crowned Playmate of the Year) that they wound up doing fourteen pictures together, including six installments of the Thin Man series. (Their first co-starring gig, which was released the same year as The Thin Man, was Manhattan Melodrama, in which Powell, as a politically ambitious D.A., marries Loy after Clark Gable, who plays a gangster, has had his fun with her; at the end, Gable winds up happily going to the electric chair after whacking Powell's crooked rival, because he isn't about to stand by and see his beloved New York denied having such a handsome-looking couple make it to the Governor's mansion. Manhattan Melodrama now has its place in history as the movie that John Dillinger was watching just before G-men mowed him down as he was leaving the theater. I'll bet he had a good time.) After supporting Henry Fonda in the 1955 Mister Roberts, Powell retired and stayed that way, for almost thirty years, until his death at 91.

CHOW YUN-FAT (1955 - )

Chow was being called things like "the most photogenic man alive" and "the coolest actor in the world" when his movies were still available only to American movie fans who lived in cities with significant Chinatown districts. As it is, the pull of his image had a awful lot to do with the craze for Hong Kong movies that started among Western film geeks in the late 1980s and would lead to Hollywood trying to buy up most of the hottest Chinese directors. But John Woo, who made Chow a star with the 1986 A Better Tomorrow and then made him the sort of figure for whom words such as "star" seem inadequate with The Killer, Once a Thief, and Hard-Boiled, has yet to do anything as good in Hollywood as his early work, and while there are many factors that might help explain this, the failure of his American films to include footage of Chow's face is one that should not be underestimated. Chow himself has taken to focusing on the great dream of cracking the American market, haltingly and with some very strange results: his role in the third Pirates of the Caribbean movie was scissored by officials in his home country who felt that the characterization was "in line with Hollywood’s old tradition of demonizing the Chinese." At 55, Chow could probably benefit from finding a new stage to sustain his career a while longer. If he does, some of us won't care if it means that he's doing his acting while speaking phonetically-learned Portuguese.

MARCELLO MASTROIANNI (1924-1996)

For most of his long career, and even now, years after his death, Mastroianni was probably the best-known internationally of all Italian movie stars, and indeed, he did seem to have the field pretty well covered. He achieved great popular success in comedies such as Big Deal on Madonna Street and Divorce, Italian Style, but he also happened to arrive in time to embody the tortured-artist/modern man figure that was so important to such directors as Fellini (La Dolce Vita, 8 1/2), Antonioni (La Notte), and Visconti (The Stranger). Though he gave handsome bearing and weight to these iconic roles, he usually seemed happiest playing ordinary men cast into remarkable circumstances that throw their frailties and limitations into sharp relief. At the very end of his career, when he was in his seventies, he worked with such veteran avant-garde directors as Raul Ruiz (Three Lives and Only One Death) and the ninety-ish Manoel de Oliveira (Voyage to the Beginning of the World), as if he were still hoping to learn from those odder and even older than himself. His experiences in English-language pictures -- John Boorman's Leo the Last, Robert Altman's Ready to Wear -- were few and far between and not particularly successful, but he did once send a shout-out to his American fans by appearing on an episode of Laugh-In and giving the camera his best soulful, romantic look while ripping off his toupee.

Click Here for Part One, Two, Three, Four, Five, Seven & Eight

Contributors: Scott Von Doviak, Hayden Childs, Andrew Osborne, Phil Nugent

Slate's New Holiday Classics

Peter Smith — Mon, 17 Dec 2007 19:00:00 GMT

Slate's writers offer a long and timely selection of "overlooked Christmas movies", including Yogi's First Christmas ("A surprisingly touching ode to ursine innocence"), Silent Night Deadly Night 3: Better Watch Out!, Harold Ramis's venture into hard-boiled nihilism The Ice Harvest, and Abel Ferrara's beyond-belief 'R Xmas (in which a crooked undercover cop played by Ice-T intereferes with a young drug-dealing couple's feverish attempt to obtain a much-desired "Party Girl" doll for their daughter's Christmas stocking). At this point, alert ScreenGrab readers may have noticed a family resemblance to our own beloved "New Holiday Classics" feature, except that most of the movies in Slate's round-up are a lot more fun to write about than they are to watch. But Timothy Noah is to be saluted for mentioning the best Christmas morning scene ever caught on film: the one in The Thin Man where Nick Charles (William Powell), lounging in his PJ's, shoots the ornaments off the tree with the handy little air-pistol that Santa brought him. (Not coal? Santa must have a lax policy towards creeping alcoholism.) That movie also has what may be the best Christmas party scene on film, with all the guys Nick once put in the joint streaming into the Charles's hotel room to show there's no hard feelings. The biggest, plug-ugliest one of all is found drunkenly sobbing because "I want to call my Ma and wish her a happy Christmas." "Well, why don't you?" asks Nick. "I. . . I haven't got a dime." — Phil Nugent

The Rep Report (November 20 - December 6)

Peter Smith — Tue, 20 Nov 2007 21:00:00 GMT

NEW YORK: For two days, the Brooklyn Academy of Music offers a smartly selected tribute to the late Ingmar Bergman. On November 20, Bibi Andersson will be on hand to introduce a film that boasts one of her most astonishing performances, the 1967 Persona; that will be followed by a too-rare screening of one of Bergman's greatest and most seldom-seen features, the richly textured anti-war lament Shame, introduced by the novelist Jonathan Lethem. On November 21, you can spend Thanksgiving Eve, appropriately enough, sinking deep into the epic family drama Fanny and Alexander.

BOSTON: From November 23 through December 6, the Brattle hosts Watching the Detectives, described as a chance "to fully explore the lighter or more colorful film that also feature some of the world's greatest detectives." I'm not sure what's so light about Klute, and "colorful" isn't the first word it brings to mind either, but part of the charm of the program is its random-mix quality. The first week is heavy on movies based on "classic" literary detectives, including double bills featuring William Powell as Nick Charles (The Thin Man) and as Philo Vance (The Kennel Murder Case) and Margaret Rutherford as Agatha Christie's Mrs. Marple (Murder She Says and Murder Most Foul), as well as Albert Finney as Hercule Poirot in Murder on the Orient Express and Alec Guinness as Father Brown in The Detective. There's also a rare chance to see a new 35 mm print of Stephen Frears' 1972 debut film, Gumshoe, starring Finney as an amateur sleuth with a midlife crisis and a Bogart fixation. And on December 3, celebrate David Lynch Day in Cambridge with Blue Velvet and the American broadcast version of the Twin Peaks pilot.

PORTLAND: The Clinton Street Theater's Fifth Annual Thanksgiving Kung Fu Marathon on November 22 offers twelve hours of martial arts flicks with all the trimmings for five dollars. Sounds like a public service to us.

— Phil Nugent