Dillinger **** (1945, Lawrence Tierney, Edmund Lowe, Anne Jeffreys, Elisha Cook Jr, Eduardo Ciannelli, Marc Lawrence) – Classic Movie Review 3234

Director Max Nosseck’s 1945 thriller is an excellent B-movie gangster film Dillinger, which uses imagination and skill to triumph over its low-budget cheapness and enjoys a claim to being humble poverty row Monogram Pictures’ best ever movie. It is produced by The King Brothers, who had a deal with Monogram Pictures, whose head of production Steve Broidy thought it would be too expensive unless they could hire a name actor like Chester Morris to play the lead. But emerging screen-writer Philip Yordan wanted Lawrence Tierney to play the role as ‘boy, he looked like Dillinger and he was mean’.

Eventually, Tierney was cast in Dillinger, and the film was given a reasonable if still low budget, estimated at $150,000 or $193,000, and not the $50,000 Monogram first hoped. Unlike Dillinger who died with $7.20 in his pocket, Monogram were going to be in the money, with the box office estimated at $4 million.

The admirable Lawrence Tierney makes his name as the FBI’s first-ever public enemy number one, John Dillinger, who was released after 10 years in jail, went on an armed bank-heist spree and was gunned down dead by the FBI in 1934 in an alley after leaving the Biograph movie theatre in Chicago.

The nifty, credible Oscar nominated screenplay by Philip Yordan is matched by the sterling performances of the strong cast of Tierney, Edmund Lowe, Anne Jeffreys, Elisha Cook Jr, Eduardo Ciannelli and Marc Lawrence.

Jackson Rose’s gritty black and white cinematography, Dimitri Tiomkin’s vibrant music and Nosseck’s taut, no-nonsense direction are further advantages. In the demonisation of Dillinger in a film approved by FBI boss J Edgar Hoover, the gangster is portrayed as a psychopathic killer who murders his mentor with an axe.

It is produced by Frank King and Maurice King, whose low budget meant that the smoke-bomb bank robbery heist sequence was taken from the 1937 film You Only Live Once – not to be confused with You Only Live Twice – so it’s true, films can live twice too! But, naturally, it’s none the worse for having a part filmed by Fritz Lang. Some sequences were shot at Big Bear Lake, California.

Also in the cast are Ralph Lewis, Elsa Janssen, Ludwig Stossel, Constance Worth, Selmer Jackson, Victor Kilian, Dewey Robinson, Hugh Prosser and Billy Nelson.

The story is most notably retold in Young Dillinger (1965), Dillinger (1973), Dillinger (1991) and Dillinger and Capone (1995).

Yordan claimed that MGM’s Louis B Mayer asked Frank King to destroy the negative, but King refused when Mayer did not offer any compensation. Yordan says the film made $4 million, of which he got a third. Yordan believed he should have won the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay, but that the Motion Picture Academy, led by Walter Wanger, deliberately overlooked it in favour of Marie Louise, ‘some picture made in Switzerland that nobody had ever seen’. Yordan said: ‘Dillinger was one of the early crime films of its type. Darryl Zanuck ran that picture again and again, and used it for the basis of many pictures at Fox. In other words, I had created a style.’

John Dillinger may have been public enemy number one in his day, but he’s been a number one on many actors’ and movie-makers’ lists. After Lawrence Tierney starred as Dillinger (1945), Leo Gordon played him in Baby Face Nelson, Myron Healey in Guns Don’t Argue (both 1957), Eric Sinclair in Ma Barker’s Killer Brood (1960) Nick Adams in Young Dillinger (1965), William Jordan in The Kansas City Massacre (1975), Warren Oates in Dillinger (1973) Robert Conrad in The Lady in Red (1979), Mark Harmon in Dillinger (1991), while Martin Kove played him in Baby Face Nelson and Martin Sheen in Dillinger and Capone, both in 1995. The Dillinger file is still open…

The main cast are Lawrence Tierney as John Dillinger, Edmund Lowe as Specs Green, Anne Jeffreys as Helen Rogers, Eduardo Ciannelli as Marco Minelli, Marc Lawrence as Doc Madison, Elisha Cook Jr as Kirk Otto, Ralph Lewis as Tony, Elsa Janssen as Mrs Otto, Ludwig Stössel as Mr Otto, Constance Worth as Blonde, Ralph Lewis, Selmer Jackson, Victor Kilian, Dewey Robinson, Hugh Prosser and Billy Nelson.

© Derek Winnert 2015 Classic Movie Review 3234

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