Here it is two years later, and Puttle-Butt-Gum is still flogging the same dead horse. "It's all about the legend! What about the legend!"
What legend, pray tell? That Dillinger talked like Humphrey Bogart, and he and Billie Frechette acted more or less exactly the same as Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway?
That Herbert Youngblood was, by turns, an amusing darky, and a "magic negro" who was sho' 'nuff happy to he'p out a nice white boy like Dillinger by chiming in with a gun-- and not a desperate but proud black man who he'ped out Dillinger in escaping from the Crown Point jail because, like, Dillinger and Nelson paid him to, and besides, Youngblood was doomed to die soon one way or the other, and he preferred to die outside of jail, on his feet like a man, and did so?
Of all the distortions of history in Milius' "Dillinger," this one is beyond the usual "Hollywood inane," it's either embarrassing or outright offensive, depending on how much you want to like or dislike this movie.
Which, BTW, I used to want to like more than I actually did. That was before I read post after post of utter stupidity from Puttle-Butt-Gum. Especially over on the "Public Enemies" boards, where he persists in invading one more-or-less sensible discourse after another with his hateful tripe. With the result for me, the more Mr. Mxyzptlk hates "Public Enemies," the more I feel like hating his pet gangster movie right back at him.
I used to actually like Milius' "Dillinger." But that was before I started seriously investigating the life and times of my famous homeboy, and well before I, um, "met" Puttle-Butt-Gum here on the IMDb boards. Hell, I even used to believe Pretty Boy Floyd was actually at Little Bohemia, 'cause, like, Milius told us he was.
Or is it the legend that Melvin Purvis bore an astounding resemblance, in appearance and manner, to actor Denver Pyle as Frank Hamer? 'Cause, like, I don't know a single soul on earth other than Puttle-Butt-Gum who believes that this is not only entertaining complete fiction, which it is, but also, um, "the" Dillinger legend.
Mr. Mxyzptlk also can't even seem to get the real Melvin Purvis right. Over on the Ben Johnson thread, he casually dismisses the real Purvis as "a pencil pushing geek," instead of the overly embattled and surprisingly skillful law enforcement officer (and later, World War II soldier) that Purvis really was. Hoover may have hired him in part because Purvis was young, kind of a pretty boy, and slightly built, and maybe Hoover wanted to get into his pants, who knows? But he was also an experienced hunter, and a pretty good shot when he had a gun in his hands and wasn't too nervous to draw and aim it properly, as happened in front of the Biograph.
The real Purvis was courageous, and also "in way over his head," as the saying goes. But he was far more than a "pencil pushing geek," except in the little boy's fantasy world where a "strong and manly" personality always goes with a tall and well-muscled body type, and anybody who ain't built that way is just another wimp.
If you want to talk about "the" Dillinger legend, as if there were only one, let's talk about the closest thing the big screen has ever seen to "the" Dillinger legend:
... the slick charming con man who could fool almost anybody into thinking he was a nice guy, and who was liked by just about everybody who ever met him, even if they did see through his jive, as most did eventually. That's the "Dillinger legend" that Morgan County, Indiana believed in, and we knew him best. You get some of that in "Public Enemies." Not enough, if you ask me, but in Milius' "Dillinger," you hardly get a single glimpse of the guy.
...The Indianapolis street punk who might have straightened out eventually and become a decent enough citizen of these United States, if Judge Williams hadn't played politics with his first serious offense, and sentenced him to ten-to-twenty for a bungled mugging that should have gotten him no more than a year behind bars. That's the "Dillinger legend" that Indiana governor Paul McNutt came to believe in, and announced to the public: the product of an overly draconian state prison system. Again, you get a hint or two of that in "Public Enemies," when Dillinger sums up his life story to Billie Frechette in one paragraph of, arguably, the best dialogue in the movie. You get a very good hint of it in the prison break scene that opens "Public Enemies." In Milius' "Dillinger," you don't get much of a hint that John Dillinger ever served a day behind bars before the Tucson cops put him there.
...The ladies' man who loved, loved, loved sex with women, Billie Frechette in particular, and whom the FBI correctly predicted would be taken down sooner or later because one or another of his lady friends would betray him. That's the "Dillinger legend" that Billie believed in, and that Polly Hamilton believed in, and the FBI believed in. (But that some fans of both movies in question somehow think doesn't belong in the story? Without ever giving a coherent reason why?) In "Public Enemies," we get a reasonably accurate enough glimpse of this aspect of "the" Dillinger legend that real people in 1933-34 believed in. Not quite accurate enough for a Dillinger purist's tastes, perhaps. As I've written before, for Billie, it was an affair of the heart to be sure. For Dillinger, I'm pretty well convinced, it was more an affair of the groin, which PE only vaguely hints at.
Meanwhile, in Milius' "Dillinger," John Dillinger hasn't the foggiest idea of how to charm the pants off of Billie Frechette. His idea is, you insult her, you kidnap her, you introduce her to your gang just before you take her into the bedroom, slap her around a bit, more or less rape her, and then somehow make up for all of that abuse by (charmingly?) telling her she shouldn't think of herself as a prostitute. Which the real Billie Frechette wasn't. She also wasn't a dead fish like Michelle Phillips, of course, but I guess if Puttle-Butt-Gum keeps repeating that this, too, is part of "the" Dillinger legend, why, it must be true.
...The one aspect of "the" Dillinger legend-- and the real man-- that both movies do a good job of getting down right: John Dillinger was an adrenalin junkie through and through.
Thing is, in real life-- and people in 1933-34 understood this pretty well, even the reporters who connived with Dillinger in romanticizing him-- Dillinger didn't much act like an adrenalin junkie. 90% of the time, he was cool as a cucumber. Nine years of hard time in some really tough prisons, and hanging out with students of students of the old Butch Cassidy/Sundance Kid/Et cetera "Wild Bunch," well, that'll do that to ya. Which "Public Enemies" touches upon with its glancing references to Walter Dietrich. Milius gives us a John Dillinger who is a student of Humphrey Bogart, James Cagney, Warren Beatty, and most of all, Milius himself. But God forbid that Dillinger should be shown as a student of a student of the legendary Baron Lamm, 'cause, like, in Puttle-Butt-Gum's little boy's fantasy world, "legend" and "history" are, like, 100% mutually exclusive. 'Cause Puttle-Butt-Gum says so, that's why. And if you disagree, why, you must be punished. With, almost 100% predictably, a crudely worded ad hominem attack. Now watch. If he responds to this post, that's what he's going to do. At the end of the day, that's all he's got.
"I don't deduce, I observe."
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