One of the things we miss in our gangster movies is the sense of the time. We (Americans) came very, very close to a socialist state because of widespread frustration at the undeserving aristocracy. It had only been 15 years since a similar frustration in Russia exploded. In the depression, the rich got richer and everyone else suffered, some profoundly so. Robbing banks was simply a small payback and Dillinger was among several folk heroes.
The FBI then and to some extent now, were seen as thugs hired to protect the moneyed interests. They would be brutal, using intimidation, violence and extralegal means at will. The film captures little of this context, instead focuses on fine tailoring and reflections in perfectly polished getaway cars. I think Mann was constrained by the script and had only two ways of building a film. One was simply to apply style, which is done here well enough if in ordinary ways.
The other makes the experience worthwhile for me. For many filmmakers, it is not whether your film engages from beginning to end, because largely your audience is stuck. So long as you keep then busy, you can concentrate all your film-making in the end. Few films end competently anyway, so if you have your audience pleased as they walk out, you've won.
The last three scenes matter. They affected me.
The first has our hero sitting in a theater watching a gangster movie, pleased, using it to design and reinforce his own story. Previously, we had him and gang in a similar moviehouse where an on screen FBI spokesmen tells the audience that Dillinger and gang are likely in the audience. This was an very effective setup for this later scene. Depp, who has merely walked through the thing until this point, gives us a powerful internal dynamic.
The next scene is him leaving the theater and being killed. First he stares down a spineless FBI thug, who we had previous seen brutalize Dillingers girlfriend. Then, the killing. This one scene is cinematically perfect, I think. It will likely be something I will recall for a long time, everything effectively and unexpectedly choreographed — unexpectedly because all until then had been ordinary. The final scene is a sort of epilogue, the honorable FBI agent reporting to the now imprisoned girlfriend fictional words from the dying gangster that bore into her heart.
This also works. Quiet. Effective. Direct, with no apparent cinematic devices. It erases the flash we had seen only seconds before, carrying the emotion into something so human it hurts to even recall. And isn't that fine film-making?
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